Showing titles in Medical

Author Mark Plotkin, chief ethnobotanist for Conservation International, has spent much of the past 15 years tracking the shamans of the northeast Amazon. Their knowledge of healing plants may hold the cure to some of today's most devastating diseases. This book is a critically acclaimed account of his apprenticeship to these powerful wise men, a gripping journey into a wild and wonderful world seldom glimpsed by outsiders.

In Good Blood, best-selling writer Julian Guthrie tells the gripping tale of the race to cure a horrible affliction known as Rh disease that stalked families and caused a mother’s immune system to attack her own unborn child. The story is anchored by two very different men on two continents: Dr. John Gorman in New York, who would land on a brilliant yet contrarian idea, and the unassuming Australian whose almost magical blood - and his unyielding devotion to donating it - would save millions of lives.

In early 2011, Yolanda Hadid was struck by mysterious symptoms including brain fog, severe exhaustion, migraines, and more. Over the months and years that followed, she went from being an outspoken, multitasking, hands-on mother of three, reality TV star, and social butterfly to a woman who spent most of her time in bed. Yolanda was turned inside out by some of the country's top hospitals and doctors, but due to the lack of definitive diagnostic testing, she landed in a dark maze of conflicting medical opinions.

A 23-year veteran of emergency medical services, paramedic Matthew Sias took a detour in his career to pursue the death-care business and found a complementarity between two seemingly divergent careers. Silent Siren: Memoirs of a Life Saving Mortician is the record of some of the more memorable calls he has responded to through the years.

Michele Harper is a female African-American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, DC, in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn't move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.

For nearly three decades, Dr Colin Manock was in charge of South Australia's forensic pathology services. In cases of unexpected or unexplained death, it was his job to determine when a person took their final breath, and whether they had died naturally - or not. But Manock did not have the necessary training for such a specialist role, and made serious errors in several major cases. The full extent of his wrongdoing, and the exact number of cases impacted by it, remain a mystery more than twenty-five years after he retired.

One morning, while shaving, the comedian Mark Steel noticed that one side of his neck seemed larger than the other. After a whistlestop tour of assorted medical professionals, a consultant delivered the ominous words that would define the next months of his life: ‘I’m afraid it’s not good news, Mr Steel’. A frank and funny diary of one man’s rather trying year, this is an unforgettable and uplifting story of getting ill, getting on with it, and getting better.

In The Nurses, New York Times best-selling author and award-winning journalist Alexandra Robbins peers behind the staff-only door to write a lively, fast-paced story and a riveting work of investigative journalism. Robbins followed real-life nurses in four hospitals and interviewed hundreds of others in a captivating audiobook filled with joy and violence, miracles and heartbreak, dark humor and narrow victories, gripping drama and unsung heroism.

In 2017, David got what he thought was a mild touch of the flu. This book is the story of why David would make a lousy doctor. Contrary to the book’s title, David had lymphoma and it was terminal. But A Mild Touch of the Cancer isn’t your standard "how I survived" compendium. It is a hilarious tale, written while battling one of life’s greatest challenges. It’s a book about living with optimism and positivity, by a self-proclaimed Genetically Modified Organism.

One morning in late 2017, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni woke up with strangely blurred vision. He wondered at first if some goo or gunk had worked its way into his right eye. But this was no fleeting annoyance, no fixable inconvenience.

Sobering is the story of an insecure teenager turned Liverpudlian party girl, schoolteacher turned alcoholic and now recovering alcoholic turned award-winning podcaster. Melissa’s story is as dramatic as her unique voice, but her message is universal: mental health issues often drive vulnerable people to addiction, and working on mental health and personal development can help recovery.

magine a healthcare system that thrives and listens, instead of dismisses. Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan believes such a healthcare system can exist, and using her experience as doctor, researcher, and patient, she gives her prescription for change, showing what can happen if we just listen. In Unheard, Dr Dhairyawan takes us on a journey through history to show how not listening to patients has been ingrained in the story of medicine.

Over the course of 25 years in the ER, Dr. Reggie Duling has seen cases that have stuck with him for various reasons. Some are poignant, some tragic, and others hilarious. The ER is a bustling place filled with patients who seek expert emergency care while at their most vulnerable. From heart attacks to foreign bodies, Dr. Duling hasn't seen it all, but he has seen his share. ER Doc: Defining Moments of a Career in Emergency Medicine relays the humor and somber responsibility of being an emergency physician in the American healthcare system.

In this revelatory memoir, doctor Cynthia Li shares the truth other doctors don’t always understand and often won’t share if they do - that chronic illness is complicated, and that treatment is not just a matter of test results and prescriptions but requires a more comprehensive approach. By sharing her own struggle with a disabling autoimmune crisis, which forced her to question her own conventional medical training and embrace the integrative principles of functional medicine, Li reveals the insider knowledge sufferers need to truly begin healing - mind, body, and spirit.

When North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, Otto Apel was a surgical resident living in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife and three young children. A year later he was chief surgeon of the 8076th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, constantly near the front lines in Korea. Immediately upon arriving in camp, Apel performed 80 hours of surgery. His feet swelled so badly, he had to cut his boots off, and he saw more surgical cases in those three and a half days than he would have in a year back in Cleveland.

Playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body - how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body - a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.” But Ensler is shocked out of her distance.

Issa Ibrahim's memoir details in searing prose his development of severe mental illness leading to a horrific family tragedy, his acquittal by reason of insanity, and his subsequent commission to a mental hospital for nearly 20 years. Written with great verve and immediacy, The Hospital Always Wins paints a detailed picture of a broken mental-health system but also reveals the power of art, when nurtured in a benign environment, to provide a resource for recovery.

These are the extraordinary realities of the NHS frontline. From the historic junior doctor strikes to the 'humanitarian crisis' declared by the Red Cross, the overstretched health service is on the precipice. This is a powerful polemic on its systematic degradation, and a letter of optimism to that same health service and those who support it. It captures with tenderness, a new doctor's experiences of an NHS at breaking point.

With over 30 years of experience as a nurse, Anthea thought she had seen it all. But with Covid came the greatest trial, personally and professionally, of her life. Thrust into hourly challenges–many a matter of life and death–while on the Critical Care units of St George’s in south London, Anthea processed her shocking experiences through writing. It started with an email to request biscuits. But her appeal to help boost the morale of her fellow nurses soon turned into a series of astonishingly moving stories detailing the realities of being a front line worker.

James Barry was one of the most outstanding doctors of the 19th century – a brilliant surgeon, a tireless campaigner for medical reform, and a compassionate Inspector-General of the Army. But throughout a long and distinguished career an air of secrecy, even of scandal, always clung to Barry. The shrill voice, the diminutive build, the almost ostentatious humanity – all struck a discordant note in the stiff, conventional world of the officers’ mess. Only after the doctor’s death in 1865 did the incredible truth come to light: Dr. James Barry was a woman.