Medicine Philosophy

Feeling feverish, tired, or achy? Listening to Gina Kolata's engrossing account of the 1918 Influenza epidemic is sure to give you the chills. A gripping work of science writing, Flu addresses the prospects for a great epidemic recurring, and considers what can be done to prevent it.

Despite our best efforts, we usually find we’re unable to make the law of attraction work in the way we want. For most of us, there’s a huge gap between hearing good manifesting advice and actually making that advice work in our life. This audiobook is going to help bridge that gap for you.

In his thought-provoking and entertaining book, David Michie explains the nuts and bolts of meditation. As a busy professional, as well as long-term meditator, he also gives a first-hand account of how to integrate this transformational practice into everyday life. Combining leading edge science with timeless wisdom, Hurry Up and Meditate provides all the motivation and tools you need to achieve greater balance, better health and a more panoramic perspective on life.

Important and provocative, The Undead examines why even with the tools of advanced technology, what we think of as life and death, consciousness and nonconsciousness, is not exactly clear - and how this problem has been further complicated by the business of organ harvesting.

Yoga instructor, nutrition expert, and healthy-living blogger Elise Marie Collins has compiled a comprehensive look at what "Super Agers" are doing to live long and prosper. Learn about movement at any age, brain fitness and memory maintenance, foods, vitamin and mineral content cues and clues, and what they do to promote health, prevent disease, and decrease and reverse symptoms of illness. In this revolutionary book, Collins presents us with a bold new paradigm of aging, telling us how we can increase not only our lifespan but also our health span.

In "The Willow, the Tortoise, and the Wheel," renowned author and researcher W. Sumner Davis brings his academic rigor and personal journey to explore the disconcerting paradox of our times: the coexistence of unprecedented material prosperity with a pervasive sense of discontentment and despair. Born into a rural farming community in 1960, Davis' early years were fraught with hardship. As a child grappling with undiagnosed Dyslexia and High Functioning Autism, Davis navigated a world of rejection at home and school, which would result in Complex Posttraumatic stress.

Is stress a deadly disease on the rise in modern society? Can mind-body practices from the East help us become well? When it comes to healing, we believe we must look beyond doctors and drugs; we must look within ourselves. Faith, relationships, and attitude matter. But why do we believe such things? From psychoanalysis to the placebo effect to meditation, this vibrant cultural history describes mind-body healing as rooted in a patchwork of stories, allowing us to make new sense of our suffering and to rationalize new treatments and lifestyles.

Between Hope and Fear tells the remarkable story of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases and their social and political implications. While detailing the history of vaccine invention, Michael Kinch reveals the ominous reality that our victories against vaccine-preventable diseases are not permanent - and could easily be undone. Between Hope and Fear relates the remarkable intersection of science, technology, and disease that has helped eradicate many of the deadliest plagues known to man.

The West has taken to meditation with great enthusiasm. We contemplate. We concentrate. We embrace mindfulness techniques and a multitude of mantras. We have undertaken to “do” meditation. The Aspects of Meditation series is comprised of brief, precious texts in which Osho shows us the core of meditation is not about sitting silently or chanting a mantra. It is, instead, a question of understanding the subtle workings of the mind. In book one, Osho reintroduces us to our body, focusing on the “root” of the human, the soul.

Vitamin C begins with scurvy, which afflicted Europe for four hundred years and killed millions. The reasons that a disease whose cure was known from the outset persisted over that time are at once baffling and familiar, and these trials eventually lead to invention of the science of epidemiology. Author Stephen M. Sagar MD then chronicles the discovery of vitamins at the beginning of the twentieth century, a story that encapsulates the rise of a scientific approach to nutrition but with surprising twists and turns.

Ever since we started huddling together in communities, the story of human history has been inextricably entwined with the story of microbes. They have evolved and spread amongst us, shaping our culture through infection, disease, and pandemic. At the same time, our changing human culture has itself influenced the evolutionary path of microbes. Dorothy H. Crawford here shows that one cannot be truly understood without the other. Beginning with a dramatic account of the SARS pandemic at the start of the 21st century, she takes us back in time to follow the interlinked history of microbes and man....

Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses. In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using tissue extracted from an aborted fetus from Sweden, produced safe, clean cells that allowed the creation of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases.

El Tao Te King, de más de 2000 años de antigedad, es uno de los ejes referenciales del pensamiento oriental. Atribuido de Lao-Tsé, del cual se dice que estuvo meditando durante 80 años en el vientre de su madre virgen antes de decidirse a nacer, consta de 81 puntos compuestos de máximas breves en torno al "Tao", y de modo singular empieza la obra afirmando que 'Del Tao que se puede hablar, no es el Tao eterno'.

Detrás de cada fármaco se esconde una historia. Puede ser la de un investigador excéntrico que resultó ser un genio, un momento decisivo en la historia geopolítica, un nuevo avance tecnológico o un inesperado pero afortunado efecto secundario descubierto en un ensayo clínico. A través de datos curiosos, anécdotas poco conocidas y personajes un tanto extravagantes, Thomas Hager propone un recorrido por las diez drogas más significativas de la historia a la vez que muestra la evolución de nuestra cultura y práctica de la medicina.

The soul must be eternal. Why? In the first place we see that the soul is not matter. It is neither a gross body, nor a fine body, which we call mind or thought. It is neither a physical body, nor what in Christianity is called a spiritual body. It is the gross body and the spiritual body that are liable to change. The gross body is liable to change almost every minute and dies, but the spiritual body endures through long periods, until one becomes free, when it also falls away.

Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.

The Mindfulness of Breathing meditation has been practised in the Buddhist tradition for 2,500 years. It is now widely used not just among Buddhists but increasingly in the secular world as the basis of mindfulness training, and in other contexts such as yoga and, in recent times, stress and pain management. After all, as the author and teacher Vessantara observes: ‘The breath is always with us, necessary to our very existence, though it is often goes unnoticed. Yet giving it attention can transform our lives.' In The Breath, Vessantara, who has been meditating on the breath for over 40 years, writes engagingly for both newcomers and those with some experience.

Presented in the form of 365 inspirational daily reflections, Gates helps listeners - from experienced yogis to novices seeking a little tranquility - to fundamentally reconsider their relationships with their minds, their bodies, and the universe around them through self-reflection.

This introduction to the philosophy of medicine surveys the landscape of western philosophy as it pertains to healthcare in an accessible way. Written by a doctor for doctors and other health professionals, framing the "toolbox" of philosophy within the community of medicine, it encourages examination of the implicit assumptions made in the construction of medical knowledge and practice.

Ignác Semmelweis is remembered for the now-commonplace notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients. In mid-19th century Vienna, however, this was a subversive idea. With deaths from childbed fever exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors themselves were spreading the disease. While his simple reforms worked immediately - childbed fever in Vienna all but disappeared - they brought down upon Semmelweis the wrath of the establishment, and led to his tragic end.