Showing titles in Medical

Almost six million Americans―about one in every ten people over the age of sixty-five―have Alzheimer’s disease or related dementias, and this number is projected to more than double by 2050. What is it like to live with and amid this increasingly prevalent condition―an affliction that some fear more than death? In My Father’s Brain, the distinguished physician and author Sandeep Jauhar set his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s alongside his own journey toward understanding this disease and how it might best be coped with, if not cured.

Dr. Jean Marmoreo spent her career keeping people alive. But when the Supreme Court of Canada gave the green light to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in 2016, she became one of a small group of doctors who chose to immediately train themselves in this new field. Over the course of a single year, Marmoreo learns about end-of-life practices in bustling Toronto hospitals, in hospices, and in the facilities of smaller communities. She found that the needed services were often minimal—or non-existent.

When Miranda Ward and her husband decided to have a baby, they were young and optimistic. But five years, three miscarriages and one ectopic pregnancy later, she is still dealing with the ongoing aftermath of that decision and the shadow it's cast over her relationship to her partner, her body and her future. In this searing, lyrical and radically honest memoir, Ward charts her journey through the uncertain landscape of almost-motherhood, asking questions of geography on the most intimate scale.

From Mercy Ships surgeon Dr. Mark G. Shrime comes an inspiring memoir about finding the answer to life's biggest question - "Why?" - and about following that answer through remarkable, unlikely places on the road to fulfillment, purpose, and joy.

In this deeply personal audiobook, winner of the 2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, humanitarian doctor and activist James Maskalyk reflects upon his extensive experience in emergency medicine. Splitting his time between a trauma centre in Toronto's inner city and the largest teaching hospital in Addis Ababa, he discovers that though the cultures, resources and medical challenges of the hospitals may differ, they are linked indelibly by the ground floor: the location of their emergency rooms.

In an idyllic Los Angeles neighborhood, where generations enjoy deep roots in old homes, the O’Rourke family fits right in. Miriam and Craig are both artists and their four children carry on the legacy. When their teenage son, Nick, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, a tumultuous decade ensues in which the family careens off the conventional course. Like the 10 Biblical plagues, they are hit by one catastrophe after another: violence, evictions, arrests, a suicide attempt, a near-drowning - even cancer and a brain tumor - play against the backdrop of a wild teenage bacchanal.

A bioethicist’s eloquent and riveting memoir of opioid dependence and withdrawal - a harrowing personal reckoning and clarion call for change not only for government but medicine itself, revealing the lack of crucial resources and structures to handle this insidious nationwide epidemic.

The psychiatric emergency room, a fast-paced combat zone with pressure to match, thrusts its medical providers into the outland of human experience where they must respond rapidly and decisively in spite of uncertainty and, very often, danger. In this lively first-person narrative, Paul R. Linde takes listeners behind the scenes at an urban psychiatric emergency room, with all its chaos and pathos, where we witness mental health professionals doing their best to alleviate suffering.

As a palliative care nurse, it is Kelly Critcher's job to look death in the eye - to save a patient while the fight can still be won and confront death with grace and kindness when it can't. In early 2020, everything changed for nurses on the NHS frontline. Working on Covid wards and the High Dependency Unit, Kelly spent the height of the coronavirus crisis at Northwick Park Hospital - perhaps the UK hospital most deeply ravaged by the illness.

Robert McCrum was 42 when he suffered a massive stroke which left one side of his body paralysed, his speech drastically impaired and his sense of himself radically altered. My Year Off traces McCrum's gruelling recovery as he regains sensation and begins to come to terms, with the help of his family, with what can and cannot be recovered after a grave injury. It is a moving remonstrance against human frailty and a vital and insightful exploration of hope, despair, determination and, ultimately, love.

In 2017, Dr. Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by female physicians, including her own personal struggle with "imposter syndrome" - a long-held secret belief that she was not smart enough or good enough to be a "real" doctor. Accessed by thousands of listeners around the world, Koven's Letter to a Young Female Physician has evolved into a deeply felt reflection on her career in medicine.

Writer and political activist Mike Marqusee was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, in the summer of 2007. At first, disinclined to share his misery with others, he was reluctant to write about his illness. But he then came to realize that doing so provided a precious continuity with his life as a writer before contracting the disease, and a way of reaching out to a wider world that the illness made physically less accessible.

The Chopra brothers were among the most eager and ambitious of the new generation. In the 1970s, they each emigrated to the United States to make a new life. Both faced tough obstacles: while Deepak encountered resistance from Western-trained doctors over what he called the mind-body connection, Sanjiv struggled to reconcile the beliefs of his birthplace with those of his new home. Eventually, each brother became convinced that America was the right place to build a life, and the Chopras went on to great achievements.

Flight for Life is the heart-stopping account of one of the most gripping rescue missions in African history, told by a doctor involved in saving the lives of Nigerian workers who became victims of a tragic American chemical company explosion. Dr. Stewart and his colleague moved mountains and cut red tape to fly patients to one of the premiere burn centers in the United States.

Singular Intimacies is the story of becoming a doctor by immersion at Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the country—and perhaps the most legendary. It is both the classic inner-city hospital and a unique amalgam of history, insanity, beauty, and intellect. When Danielle Ofri enters these 250-year-old doors as a tentative medical student, she is immediately plunged into the teeming world of urban medicine: mysterious illnesses, life-and-death decisions, patients speaking any one of a dozen languages, and overworked interns.

A CT scan revealed Dr. James Chen, a Miami physician, had a cancerous, inoperable tumor behind his nose. The prognosis was bleak. Dr. Chen had eight weeks to live. Dr. Chen and his sons, Chris and Gordon, looked for a miracle. James and his sons were suddenly patients, forced to look at the healthcare system from the other end of the stethoscope. In The Calling, Chris and Gordon share how the family succeeded and turned what could have been a tragedy into an opportunity that will revolutionize healthcare delivery for years to come. The Calling will give you hope.

In the mid 1980s, Canada's worst public health disaster was unfolding. Catastrophic mismanagement of the country's blood supply allowed contaminated blood to be knowingly distributed, infecting close to two thousand Canadians with HIV. Among them was Melanie Brooks's surgeon father who, after receiving a blood transfusion during open-heart surgery in 1985, learned he was HIV positive. At a time when HIV/AIDS was misunderstood and public perception was shaped by fear, prejudice, and homophobia, victims of the disease faced ostracism and persecution. Wanting to protect his family from this stigma, Melanie's father decided his illness would be a secret they'd all keep.

When I graduated from medical school, a third of heart attack victims died at home or in the hospital. Heart rhythm disorders were killing or crippling hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. Severe heart failure was a death sentence. Preventive cardiology was practically unknown: the significance of high cholesterol was being debated, 50 percent of adults were smoking cigarettes, and high blood pressure was usually undetected and often poorly controlled. All of this changed for the better - much better - during the 47 years I practiced medicine and cardiology.

When Thomas Edison began wiring New York City with a direct current electricity distribution system in the 1880s, he gave humankind the magic of electric light, heat, and power; in the process, though, he inadvertently opened a Pandora's Box of unimaginable illness and death. Dirty Electricity tells the story of Dr. Samuel Milham, the scientist who first alerted the world about the frightening link between occupational exposure to electromagnetic fields and human disease.

Nine million Americans are touched by aneurysms during their lifetimes. This is one story of love. Brainstorm is the candid and powerful memoir of the author's harrowing experience of an aneurysm and his road to recovery. It is a journey of love and devotion and a clash of medical beliefs and countercultures.

In 2015, Barbara Lipska - a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness - was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, her frontal lobe, the seat of cognition, began shutting down. She descended into madness, exhibiting dementia- and schizophrenia-like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, the immunotherapy her doctors had prescribed worked quickly. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity.

In the fall of 2019, John Hendrickson wrote a groundbreaking story for The Atlantic about Joe Biden’s decades-long journey with stuttering, as well as his own. The article went viral, reaching listeners around the world and altering the course of Hendrickson’s life. Overnight, he was forced to publicly confront an element of himself that still caused him great pain.

The moving story of an Irish immigrant's life from a poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland to becoming a captain of industry, After the Roof Caved In is a powerful, poignant look at how hard work and education enabled one young man to change his life and circumstances completely.

Medicines are arguably the most highly regulated - and cost-inflated - products in the United States. The discovery, development, manufacturing, and distribution of medicines is carried out by an ever more complex and crowded set of industries, each playing a part in a larger “pharmaceutical enterprise” seeking to maximize profits. But this was not always the case. The Price of Health is the reveals the story of how the pharmaceutical enterprise took shape and led to the present crisis.

The first full-length biography of the Civil War surgeon who, over the course of the war’s bloodiest battles - from Antietam to Gettysburg - redefined military medicine.

Jonathan Letterman was an outpost medical officer serving in Indian country in the years before the Civil War, responsible for the care of just hundreds of men. But when he was appointed the chief medical officer for the Army of the Potomac, he revolutionized combat medicine over the course of four major battles - Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg - that produced unprecedented numbers of casualties.

At nineteen years old, Nicole C. Kear's biggest concern is choosing a major - until she walks into a doctor's office in midtown Manhattan and gets a life-changing diagnosis. She is going blind, courtesy of an eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa, and has only a decade or so before lights-out. Instead of making preparations as the doctor suggests, Kear decides to carpe diem and make the most of the vision she has left. She joins a circus school, tears through boyfriends, travels the world, and through all these high jinks, she keeps her vision loss a secret.

“Running casualty is really very simple: you have to love everybody, you have to listen to everybody, and when in doubt, you do just what Sister O'Hanlon tells you.” (Mr. William Rutherford, A & E consultant.) Kate O'Hanlon spent 16 years as sister in charge of A & E at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, working through the worst days of the Troubles. Told with her trademark blend of warmth, compassion and humour, this is her fascinating and extraordinary story of nursing on the front line.

In April of 2004, the long downward spiraling of Amy Bingaman's mental illness could no longer be hidden or ignored much less written off as a side-product of a colorful and quirky character. With no family able to help and no resources, she was involuntarily locked up in the draconian, archaic labyrinth that is the Wyoming Mental Health System. Armed with only a pocket dictionary and any paper she could find to write on, Amy wrote not only as a journal but at times as her only coping mechanism to salvage what was left of a breaking mind in a love/hate relationship with her alter-ego.

With The Careful Surgeon, Dr Shehan Hettiaratchy - London's Major Trauma Director - gives us an insight on how to cope with and be our best selves during crisis. Drawing on his experiences leading crisis response teams for some of London's biggest tragedies, as well as his active service with the Parachute Regiment, Dr Hettiaratchy teaches us how to remain positive and look forward beyond the hardest moments that we face.

Every parent's nightmare... It happens in an instant. A fall, a splash, a moment of inattention. 'Lessons from the Sky' shares gripping true stories from air medical transport, revealing the everyday dangers that threaten young children. Flight nurse practitioner David Kaniecki and his colleagues have witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of childhood accidents – the frantic calls, the desperate races against time, the mix of relief and heartbreak in the faces of parents. In this book, they share those stories, offering valuable insights to help you prevent these tragedies.

Based on the film by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, The Mayo Clinic: Faith, Hope, Science chronicles the history of this unique organization, from its roots as an unlikely partnership between a country doctor and a Franciscan order of nuns to its position today as a worldwide model for patient care, research, and education. The book demonstrates how the institution’s remarkable 150-year history continues to inspire the way medicine is practiced there today.

When a pet is sick, people—even the rich and famous—are at their most authentic and vulnerable. They could have a Monet on the wall and an Oscar on the shelf, but if their cat gets a cold, all they want to talk about are snotty noses and sneezing fits. That’s when they call premier in-home veterinarian Dr. Amy Attas. In Pets and the City, Dr. Amy shares all the funny, heartbreaking, and life-affirming experiences she’s faced throughout her thirty-year career treating the cats and dogs of New Yorkers from Park Avenue to the projects.