Showing titles in Medical

While his wife and two-year-old daughter watched TV in the living room, David Poses was in the kitchen, measuring the distance from his index finger to his armpit. He needed to be sure he could pull the trigger with a shotgun barrel in his mouth. Twenty-six inches. Thirty-two years old. More than a decade in a double life fueled by depression and heroin.

From the number one best-selling author of The Cause of Death comes an audiobook about the unlikely, extraordinary, obscure and often tragic ways humans meet their demise. A dead body without a trace of trauma; alien parasites; worms of the brain; crocodile attacks and bizarre eating disorders....In The Quick and the Dead, pathologist and self-confessed death-aficionado Dr. Cynric Temple-Camp takes listeners into a world of disease and death as he seeks answers for those who were unlucky, and those still alive to tell the tale.

A political journalist and activist, Cousins was also a professor of medical humanities at UCLA, where he studied the biochemistry of human emotions and their relationship to healing. When Cousins was hospitalized with a debilitating collagen illness, he decided to take his health into his own hands. Cousins and his doctor combated the disease together by creating a regimen of laughter and vitamin C specifically calibrated to his needs. Against all odds, the treatment worked, proving to Cousins that a positive attitude was key to his improvement.

A hysterical and sometimes tragic portrayal of a doctor’s interactions with a captivating array of patients contrasted against the frustrations and humdrum of being a junior doctor in the National Health Service. From being the savior of a man’s anus to being mistaken for the milkman, Tom describes the complexity and absurdity of today’s medical practice with humor and aplomb.

A young man has stopped breathing in a supermarket toilet. A pedestrian with a nasty head injury won't let the crew near him on a busy road. A newborn baby is worryingly silent. An addict urinates on the ambulance floor when denied a fix. This is the life of an ambulance paramedic. Jake Jones has worked in the UK ambulance service for 10 years: every day, he sees a dozen of the scenes we hope to see only once in a lifetime.

Psychotherapist Michael Pond is no stranger to the devastating consequences of alcoholism. He has helped hundreds of people conquer their addictions, but this knowledge did not prevent his own near-demise. In this riveting memoir, he recounts how he lost his practice, his home, and his family - all because of his drinking.

A mesmerizing and courageous memoir: the story of two sisters uncovering the depth of their love through the life-and-death experience of a bone marrow transplant. Throughout her life Elizabeth Lesser has sought understanding about what it means to be true to yourself and, at the same time, truly connected to the ones you love. But when her sister, Maggie, needs a bone marrow transplant to save her life, and Lesser learns that she is the perfect match, she faces a far more immediate and complex question about what it really means to love.

An impassioned, tender and joyous memoir by the author of Musicophilia and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far'. It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy.

With poignant insight and humor, Frank Vertosick, Jr., MD, describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick's patients and unsparing-yet-fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, When the Air Hits Your Brain illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.

In Tell Me the Planets, Ben Platts-Mills tells stories about his work with survivors of brain injury, offering a rare glimpse into the world as seen through their eyes: charismatic Danny, whose criminal past has left him paralysed down one side, but who now helps others worse off than himself; Sid, whose memory for the present lasts only moments; and Liah, who is caught in a battle with the care system threatening to make her homeless.

Picking up from where his first memoir left off, Dr Tom is back with more of his gloriously eccentric stories. Still based as a locum in his beloved Scotland, he now takes time out from the surgery for stints as a medical researcher, travelling wherever he is called, from Rio to Jerusalem, Vienna to Singapore.

Grim Reaper sits on the heart surgeon's shoulder. A slip of the hand and life ebbs away. The balance between life and death is so delicate, and the heart surgeon walks that rope between the two. In the operating room, there is no time for doubt. It is flesh, blood, rib retractors and pumping the vital organ with your bare hand to squeeze the life back into it. An off day can have dire consequences - this job has a steep learning curve, and the cost is measured in human life. Cardiac surgery is not for the faint of heart.

He's into his second year of medicine, but this time Max is out of the wards and onto the streets, working for the Phoenix Outreach Project. Fuelled by tea and more enthusiasm than experience, he attempts to locate and treat a wide and colourful range of patients that somehow his first year on the wards didn't prepare him for...from Molly the 80-year-old drugs mule and God in a Tesco car park to middle-class mums addicted to appearances and pain killers in equal measure.

Every weekend, in Holland’s most popular newspaper, de Volkskrant, renowned science-journalist Ellen de Visser asks a different medical professional to tell her about ‘that one patient’; the patient who changed everything for them. Every day, in every country, thousands of patients share their stories with their doctors: stories they may never have told anyone else; stories that are heartbreaking, sometimes funny and - just occasionally - unforgettable.

What Is a Doctor? is a vital contribution to the ongoing debate about how we maintain an NHS that is both fit for purpose and free. Using stories and case studies from across his thirty-year career as a GP, Dr Phil Whitaker offers insight into the medical movements, political interference and societal changes that have transformed the role of doctor over the past three decades.

Danger. Deportation. Death. These are just some of the fates facing the inmates at Huntercombe prison. Some have fled their homeland in fear of their lives. Others are being sent to a country they left decades ago. But Dr Amanda Brown is doing all she can for each patient stuck in no-man’s land. They have little or no idea of what awaits them outside, but she treats them with kindness and respect. Whatever their crime, and whatever their future holds, she is still their doctor.

Exploding the tired stereotypes of autism, Daniel Tammet - an autistic savant himself - reaches across the divides of age, gender, sexuality and nationality to draw out the inner worlds of his subjects. Portraying a range of experiences as richly diverse as the spectrum itself, this illuminating, life-affirming work of narrative nonfiction celebrates the power and beauty of the neurodivergent mind, and the daring freedom with which these people have built their lives.

Andy Thompson is back with another laugh-out-loud collection of stories that reveal the essential ingredient that paramedics and ambulance technicians call on as a coping mechanism - the ability to conjure humor from situations most others would find too stressful to even raise a smile.

What is paranoia? What makes us mistrustful? How can this be overcome? Daniel Freeman, Professor of Psychology at Oxford, has spent thirty years at the vanguard of paranoia research and treatment. This remarkable and moving book tells the story of that journey. For decades, conventional wisdom held that paranoia was only experienced by people with severe mental health problems and little could be done to rectify its disastrous effects.

Grief. Anger. Joy. Fear. Distraction. Disgust. Hope. All emotions we expect to encounter over our lifetime. But what if this was every day? And what if your ability to manage them was the difference between life and death? For a doctor in intensive care, this is part of the job. Fear in the eyes of a terminally ill patient who pleads with you to not let them die. Grief when you make a potentially fatal mistake. Disgust at caring for a convicted rapist.