Smart Health Choices provides the tools for assessing health advice, whether it comes from a specialist, a general practitioner, a naturopath, the media, the internet of a friend. It shows you how to take an active role in your own healthcare, and how to make the best decisions for you and your loved ones, based on your personal preferences and the best available evidence.

Imagine an orchestra in your brain. It plays all kinds of harmonious melodies, then pain comes along and the different sections of the orchestra are reduced to a few pain tunes.All pain is real. And for many people it is a debilitating part of everyday life.It is now known that understanding more about why things hurt can actually help people to overcome their pain. Recent advances in fields such as neurophysiology, brain imaging, immunology, psychology and cellular biology...

You CAN take practical steps to avoid dementia -- and this book from an Australian expert shows you how.Within twenty years, dementia is set to overtake heart disease as the number one cause of death in Australia. Recent studies show that almost half our adult population already have a family member or friend with the illness. those statistics seem rather grim, but there is GOOD NEWS! We don't need to accept dementia as an inevitable part of ageing. the main forms of dementia affect...

A primary care doctor is skeptical of his patient’s concerns. A hospital nurse or intern is unaware of a drug’s potential side effects. A physician makes the most “common” diagnosis while overlooking the signs of a rarer and more serious illness, and the patient doesn’t see the necessary specialist until it’s too late. A pharmacist dispenses the wrong drug and a patient dies as a result.Sadly, these kinds of mistakes happen all the time. Each year, 6.1 million Amer...

"Alan Cassels strips layers of expectation, hype, jargon, false-starts, and conflicts of interest off the medical screening mantra." —Nortin M. Hadler, author of Worried SickWhy wouldn't you want to be screened to see if you're at risk for cancer, heart disease, or another potentially lethal condition? After all, better safe than sorry. Right?Not so fast, says Alan Cassels. His Seeking Sickness takes us inside the world of medical screening,...

A guide to coping with fibromyalgia, myofascial pain, and chronic fatigue syndrome• Reveals how to deal with each disorder and how treatments can interact or aggravate if more than one disorder is present• Offers techniques to dispel the side effects created by these illnessesFibromyalgia, chronic myofascial pain, and chronic fatigue syndrome are often seen as interchangeable conditions, a belief held even by many health care providers. Nothing could be further from...

Welcome to the world of sexed-up medicine, where patients have been turned into customers, and clinics and waiting rooms are jammed with healthy people, lured in to have their blood pressure taken and cholesterol, smear test, bowel or breast screening done. In the world of sexed-up medicine pharmaceutical companies gloss over research they don't like and charities often use dubious science and dodgy PR to 'raise awareness' of their disease, leaving a legacy of misinformation in their wake....

For those fortunate enough to reside in the developed world, death before reaching a ripe old age is a tragedy, not a fact of life. Although aging and dying are not diseases, older Americans are subject to the most egregious marketing in the name of “successful aging” and “long life,” as if both are commodities. In Rethinking Aging, Nortin M. Hadler examines health-care choices offered to aging Americans and argues that too often the choices serve to profit the provider rather tha...

This book has been written for those newly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It is a guide to learning about the disease, its potential impact on your life, and the medical treatments now available for managing it successfully. This is a time of great excitement in research and advances in clinical management, such that most people who have multiple sclerosis can lead full and productive lives.This fourth edition is current and updated throughout, and includes a review of the cont...

Why medicine adopts ineffective or harmful medical practices only to abandon them—sometimes too late.Medications such as Vioxx and procedures such as vertebroplasty for back pain are among the medical "advances" that turned out to be dangerous or useless. What Dr. Vinayak K. Prasad and Dr. Adam S. Cifu call medical reversal happens when doctors start using a medication, procedure, or diagnostic tool without a robust evidence base—and then stop using it when it is f...

We live in an ageing world. The average life expectancy in Australia is now far beyond the allotted three-score years and ten . Age-related conditions are increasingly impacting on our community, with enormous personal, social and economic costs.Around 165 000 people in Australia are now suffering from dementia and the prospect of becoming senile is one that genuinely terrifies people contemplating a lengthy old age.It is important to remember, however, that while most deme...

'Postnatal' is the fourth title in the Midwifery Essentials series and explores contemporary postnatal care for women and their families, exploring the role of the midwife as a member of the multi-professional team. This book thoroughly prepares the reader to provide safe, evidence-based, woman-centred postnatal care for mothers and their babies. - The postnatal examination of the woman, and the baby check - Care of the baby in the immediate postnatal period - The features of the normal ne...