American Medicine

Drawing on the timeless wellsprings of Native American wisdom, this deeply practical audiobook shares powerful traditional remedies for naturally rejuvenating your body and treating a host of common ailments. With step-by-step lessons and easy-to-digest advice, you'll be taken on a fascinating journey into the art of herbalism, learning how to harness the innate power of everyday plants, cultivate a deep appreciation for the environment, and listen to the rhythms of nature.

At its core, American Disgust wrestles with how changing cultural notions of digestion-what goes into the body and what comes out of it-create and impose racial categories motivated by feelings of disgust rooted in American settler-colonial racism. It shows how disgust is a changing, yet fundamental, aspect of American subjectivity and that engaging with it-personally, politically, and theoretically-opens up possibilities for conceptualizing health at the individual, societal, and planetary levels.

Over the past three decades, the once-efficient American health care system has evolved into a complex maze of monopolies and a racket of bureaucratic checks, approvals, denials, roadblocks, and detours. This shift has created a massive and at times redundant workforce that frustrates patients, as well as physicians, nurses, and administrative staff. Health care costs the United States more than $11,000 for each person in the country each year - more than double what it costs in most Western European countries to deliver equal or even better care.

In medical charts, the term "N.A.D." (No Apparent Distress) is used for patients who appear stable. The phrase also aptly describes America's medical system when it comes to treating the underprivileged. Medical students learn on the bodies of the poor - and the poor suffer from their mistakes. Rachel Pearson confronted these harsh realities when she started medical school in Galveston, Texas.

With eloquent simplicity, one of the world's last Native American medicine men demonstrates how traditional tribal wisdom can help us maintain spiritual and physical health in today's world. 

A definitive history of mescaline that explores its mind-altering effects across cultures, from ancient America to Western modernity. Mescaline became a popular sensation in the mid-20th century through Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, after which the word "psychedelic" was coined to describe it. Its story, however, extends deep into prehistory: The earliest Andean cultures depicted mescaline-containing cacti in their temples.

In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white "ladies". Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. 

David Carson's personal story of his initiation into the mysterious healing rites of the Choctaw with medicine woman Mary Gardener. Through her teachings and his own mind-bending experiences, he gives us a glimpse into an alternate reality.

In 1932, the US Public Health Service recruited 623 African American men from Macon County, Alabama, for a study of "the effects of untreated syphilis in the Negro male". For the next 40 years - even after the development of penicillin, the cure for syphilis - these men were denied medical care for this potentially fatal disease. 

By the celebrated author of Canada Reads Finalist Indian Horse, a stunning new novel that has all the timeless qualities of a classic, as it tells the universal story of a father/son struggle in a fresh, utterly memorable way, set in dramatic landscape of the BC Interior. For male and female readers equally, for readers of Joseph Boyden, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas King, Russell Banks, and general literary.

This audiobook, Tomorrow's Medicine, looks at some of the more fascinating areas where technology that could transform health is being developed, including cybernetics, regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, and genetically tailored treatments. Although many of these advances may not be ready to treat humans for many years, some of them may someday profoundly change - and extend - our lives. As exciting as the possibilities are to extend both the length and quality of life, immortality - or at least agelessness - may be forever out of our reach.

Six decades ago, visionary doctors achieved the impossible: the humble kidney, acknowledged since ancient times to be as essential to life as the heart, became the first human organ to be successfully replaced with a machine. Yet huge dialysis corporations, ambitious doctor-entrepreneurs, and Beltway lobbyists soon turned this medical miracle into an early experiment in for-profit medicine—and one of the nation's worst healthcare catastrophes. With powerful insight and on-the-ground reporting, Tom Mueller introduces an unforgettable cast of characters.

Are dolphins highly intuitive beings with a unique duty in the oceans? Is plastic off-gassing into our food poisoning us? Can breathing steamed bamboo leaves treat asthma? Did the First Nations Peoples have the right philosophies for harmonious living all along? All this and more is answered in this extraordinary conversation. Author and journalist Penelope Jean Hayes poses questions to Pax, channeled by intuitive Carole Serene Borgens, about plant-based diets and medicines, the best-practices of indigenous and First Peoples, and the profound wisdom of animals.

Uwe Reinhardt was a towering figure and moral conscience of health care policy in the United States and beyond. Famously bipartisan, he advised presidents and Congress on health reform and originated central features of the Affordable Care Act. In Priced Out, Reinhardt offers an engaging and enlightening account of today's US health care system, explaining why it costs so much more and delivers so much less than the systems of every other advanced country, why this situation is morally indefensible, and how we might improve it.

Still Not Safe is the story of the rise of the patient - safety movement - and how an "epidemic" of medical errors was derived from a reality that didn't support such a characterization. Physician Robert Wears and organizational theorist Kathleen Sutcliffe trace the origins of patient safety to the emergence of market trends that challenged the place of doctors in the larger medical ecosystem.

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row - a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year - and they're still rising. Case and Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class.

It's no secret that American health care has become too costly and politicized to help everyone. So where do you turn if you can't afford doctors, or don't trust them? In this book, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling examines the growing universe of non-traditional treatments—including some that are really non-traditional. With costs skyrocketing and anti-science sentiment spreading, the so-called "medical freedom" movement has grown. Now it faces its greatest challenge: going mainstream.

Johns Hopkins University, one of the preeminent medical schools in the nation today, has played a unique role in the history of medicine. When it first opened its doors in 1893, medicine was a rough-and-ready trade. It would soon evolve into a rigorous science. In recent years, medical science has mapped the human genome, deployed robotic tools to perform delicate surgeries, and developed effective vaccines against a host of deadly pathogens. But this transformation could not have happened without the game-changing vision, talent, and dedication of a small cadre of individuals. 

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos.

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.