Modern Medicine

For many of the 40 million Americans who undergo anesthesia each year, it is a source of great fear and fascination. In Counting Backwards, Dr. Henry Jay Przybylo - an anesthesiologist with more than 30 years of experience - has written an unforgettable account of the routine procedure's daily dramas and fundamental mysteries. Przybylo has administered anesthesia more than 30,000 times in his career - erasing consciousness, denying memory, and immobilizing the body before reversing all of these effects.

"I am a doctor." Every year, thousands of medical school graduates utter these four simple words. But as you will hear in Playing God, earning an MD is just the first step to becoming a real physician. In this thrilling and moving memoir, Dr. Anthony Youn reveals that the true metamorphosis from student to doctor occurs not in medical school but in the formative years of residency training and early practice. Here, you will take a journey through the world of surgery, hospitals, and the practice of medicine unlike any that you have traveled before.

Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru. A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor.

Cluster headache, a diagnosis sometimes referred to as a ‘suicide headache,’ is widely considered the most severe pain disorder that humans experience. There is no cure, and little funding available for research into developing treatments. When Joanna Kempner met Bob Wold in 2012, she was introduced to a world beyond most people's comprehension—a clandestine network determined to find relief using magic mushrooms. These ‘Clusterbusters,’ a group united only by the internet and a desire to survive, decided to do the research that medicine left unfinished.

Wondering whether eating powdered mummies might be just the thing to cure your ills? Tempted by those vintage ads suggesting you wear radioactive underpants for virility? Ever considered drilling a hole in your head to deal with those pesky headaches? Probably not. But for thousands of years, people have done things like this - and things that make radioactive underpants seem downright sensible! In their hit podcast, Sawbones, Sydnee and Justin McElroy breakdown the weird and wonderful way we got to modern healthcare. And some of the terrifying detours along the way.

In medicine, machines can be used to take detailed pictures of bones and even to save people’s lives. Listen to learn about the marvelous machines of modern medicine, like the defibrillator, the x-ray machine, and more!

In the late 1800s, a new disease arrived in North America from Europe and began to claim the lives of children everywhere. Though most today have never even heard of this illness, it would routinely kill over 10,000 children in a single year - more than the polio might take in an entire decade. After much trial and tribulation, a shot was developed that helped both those already afflicted with the illness, and those who might one day become infected. But the shot was dangerous, and many parents refused it for their children.

Long before the first pharmaceutical companies opened their doors in the 1850s, doctors treated people, not symptoms. And although we've become used to popping pills, Americans have finally had it with the dangerous side-effects, addiction and over-prescription - and they're looking for an alternative. Here's the good news: that alternative has been here all along in the form of ancient treatments that have been used for eons by cultures around the world.

At the start of 2020, Moderna was a waning biotech unicorn, still years away from delivering its first product despite a decade of development of a potentially breakthrough innovation: using RNA to combat disease. Investors were getting antsy or, worse, skeptical. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and Moderna became a central player. Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Loftus brings the inside story of how Moderna went all in on a single revolutionary idea.

The First Breath is the first popular science book about the pioneering fetal and neonatal medicine bringing a new generation into the world - a generation of babies without precedent, who would not have lived if they had been born only a few decades ago. Olivia Gordon explores the female experience of medicine through her own personal story and sensitive, intimate case histories of other mothers’ high-risk births. She details the relationship mothers develop with doctors who hold not only life and death in their hands but also the very possibility of birth.

In recent years there have been major outbreaks of whooping cough among children in California, mumps in New York, and measles in Ohio's Amish country - despite the fact that these are all vaccine-preventable diseases. Although America is the most medically advanced place in the world, many people disregard modern medicine in favor of using their faith to fight life-threatening illnesses. In 21st-century America, how could this be happening?

At the height of medical technology and civilization, America has become the fattest and sickest nation to ever grace the earth. There was a time when food was our medicine, and the farmer our physician. But now industrialization has converted farms into factories, replaced produce for processed foods, and meat comes with just as many warnings as the drugs we are prescribed. If we continue to embrace the Standard American Diet (SAD diet) and current health care system, this may be the first generation of parents to outlive their children.

Upon it's first publication 20 years ago, And The Band Played On was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigatve reporting. An international best seller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed movie, Shilts' expose revealed why AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked during the early 80's while the most trusted institutions ignored or denied the threat. One of the few true modern classics, it changed and framed how AIDS was discussed.

This comprehensive guide offers detailed and easy-to-follow instructions for making and using approximately 250 all-natural DIY herbal medicines. With advice on herbal preparations for 100+ illnesses and conditions and a comprehensive materia medica, The Modern Herbal Dispensatory is an enduring classic and beloved plant-medicine reference manual for herbalists, natural medicine practitioners, and anyone seeking safe, holistic, at-home care and inexpensive all-natural remedies.

Seamus O'Mahony charts the realities of work in the 'ministry of bodies', that huge complex where people come to be cured and to die. From unexpected deaths to moral quandaries and bureaucratic disasters, O'Mahony documents life in the halls and wards that all of us will visit at some point in our lives with his characteristic wit and dry and unsentimental intelligence.

Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States.

You have been breathing your whole life; now, learn how to breathe better to positively influence your mental and physical well-being. This book is exactly what it says it is - a practical guide. Nothing esoteric. Nothing “woo woo”. What you will find in this book can be applied today in a real way to improve your life. Learn how to use your breath to communicate to your physiology and psychology in predictable and replicable ways using nothing more than focused conscious breathing.

Originally written over 13 years ago, the teachings in this book have transformed the lives of people across the world, and, despite the passing of time, the advice has never been more pertinent. Having lived an extraordinary life spanning across Eastern and Western cultures, Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche, world-renowned meditation master and abbot of the oldest and largest Buddhist monastery in the UK, Kagyu Samye Ling, shares how simple Buddhist practices can help us all to train our minds so that we can find happiness and achieve our true potential.

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.

Rohan Gunatillake, creator of the best-selling buddhify app, argues that to lead more mindful, calm and happy lives, switching off is the last thing we need to do. Instead he gives you the ideas, principles and techniques to bring awareness, composure and kindness to wherever you are and whatever you are doing. Filled with over 60 practical exercises which you can plug into your life straight away, the mobile mindfulness approach of Modern Mindfulness presents a way to get the benefits from meditation however busy your life is.