Showing titles in Policy & Administration

In the spirit of Oliver Sacks Awakenings and the TV series House, Dr. Eric Manheimer's Twelve Patients is a memoir from the medical director of Bellevue Hospital that uses the plights of 12 very different patients - from dignitaries at the nearby UN, to supermax prisoners from Riker's Island, to illegal immigrants, and Wall Street tycoons - to illustrate larger societal issues.

Until very recently, if you were to ask most doctors, they would tell you there were only two kinds of medicine: the quack kind, and the evidence-based kind. The former is baseless, and the latter based on the best information human effort could buy. Well, Eric Topol isn't most doctors, and he suggests you entertain the notion of a third kind of medicine, one that will make the evidence-based state-of-the-art stuff look scarcely better than an alchemist trying to animate a homunculus in a jar.

For two decades, Dr. Danielle Ofri has cared for patients at Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in the country and a crossroads for the world's cultures. In Medicine in Translation she introduces us, in vivid, moving portraits, to her patients, who have braved language barriers, religious and racial divides, and the emotional and practical difficulties of exile in order to access quality health care.

This amazing tale is the story of one of America's oldest and most unusual urban hospitals. From it's inception as a "Poor House" dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago's Cook County Hospital has been both a renowned teaching hospital and the healthcare provider of last resort for the city's uninsured. County covers more than thirty years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship, to the "Final Rounds" when the enormous iconic Victorian hospital building was replaced and hundreds of former trainees gathered to bid it an emotional farewell.

Healthy! Healed! Happy! Jennifer Nicole Lee, best-selling author and lifestyle expert, reveals her complete program for weight loss and wellness! The Mind, Body & Soul Diet? It’s revolutionized the way people will lose weight and get fit forever.

In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect - a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well.

Dr. Oliver Sacks's books Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars and the best-selling The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat have been acclaimed for their compassion in the treatment of patients affected with profound disorders. In A Leg to Stand On, it is Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey.

A medical mistake during an IVF procedure.An unthinkable situation....you're pregnant with the wrong baby. You can terminate, but you can't keep him. What choice would you make?

In June 2009, Wendell Potter made national headlines with his scorching testimony before the Senate panel on health care reform. This former senior vice president of CIGNA explained how health insurers make promises they have no intention of keeping, how they flout regulations designed to protect consumers, and how they skew political debate with multibillion-dollar public relations campaigns designed to spread disinformation.

A nutritional whodunit that takes readers from Greenland to Africa to Israel, The Queen of Fats gives a fascinating account of how we have become deficient in a nutrient that is essential for good health: the fatty acids know as omega-3s.

A must-listen for every dog lover - a short, tender, and uplifting tale of a cancer survivor and the life lessons shared with him by his beloved family dog. Our dogs come into our lives as “just the family pet”, but before we know it they become drinking buddies and fuzzy shrinks, playmates, and Cheerios-munching vacuum cleaners, alarm clocks, and sleeping partners. And, in their mys­terious and muttish ways, our dogs become our teachers.

An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics laid the groundwork for today's food revolution and changed the way we respond to food industry marketing practices. Now, a new introduction and concluding chapter bring us up to date on the key events in that movement. This pathbreaking, prize-winning book helps us understand more clearly than ever before what we eat and why. This book is published by University of California Press.

In The Truth About Obamacare, Sally C. Pipes - president of the Pacific Research Institute and an acknowledged expert on health care reform - reveals what Democrats in Congress and President Barack Obama don't want you to know: Obamacare is even worse than most critics suspect. Debunking the myths that the current administration has touted, Pipes shows exactly what the new health care law will mean for you, your family, your doctor, and your wallet.

The media constantly bombard us with news of health hazards lurking in our everyday lives. But many of these hazards turn out to have been greatly overblown. According to author and epidemiologist Geoffrey C. Kabat, this hyping of low-level environmental hazards leads to needless anxiety and confusion on the part of the public as to which exposures have important effects on health and which are likely to have minimal or no effect.

A scientific and medical revolution has crept up on us, based on study after study, from hundreds of laboratories around the world. It is no longer just a theoretical shift: every one of us will be touched by it, and many of us already have been. The meaning of disease, our understanding of the human body, and crucial decisions about what we all need to know and what choices we make about our health are at stake. Welcome to the new world of personalized medicine.

We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies - neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist.

Technological innovation is deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, and is no less a basic feature of American health care. Medical technology saves lives and relieves suffering, and is enormously popular with the public, profitable for doctors, and a source of great wealth for industry. Yet its costs are rising at a dangerously unsustainable rate. The control of technology costs poses a terrible ethical and policy dilemma. How can we deny people what they may need to live and flourish?

The U.S. healthcare system is in critical condition--but this should come as a surprise to no one. Yet until now the solutions proposed have been unworkable, pie-in-the-sky plans that have had little chance of becoming law and even less of succeeding. In Code Red, David Dranove, one of the nation's leading experts on the economics of healthcare, proposes a set of feasible solutions that address access, efficiency, and quality.

"[E]veryone's health—including that of the next generation—may depend more on the health of society and the healing of nations than on the conquest of disease." Norman Cousins' experience with a massive heart attack is used as a case study in how to mobilize inner resources to overcome fear and panic. He also he generalizes from his experience with life-threatening illness to examine the experience of life-threatened humanity.

By the time Rock Hudson's death in 1985 alerted all America to the danger of the AIDS epidemic, the disease had spread across the nation, killing thousands of people and emerging as the greatest health crisis of the 20th century. America faced a troubling question: What happened? How was this epidemic allowed to spread so far before it was taken seriously?