When Dr. David Cundiff called me with a proposal to help research and write The Right Medicine I was intrigued but skep tical. His ideas for reform of the US health care system were visionary, radical, and highly original-but would they work? As a Wall Street analyst and long-time student of the health care system, I had my doubts. had read David's book on hospice care, Euthanasia Is Not the I Answer, and was impressed. And I had recently witnessed the slow death of my grandmother from the...

Instances of euthanasia or mercy killing date back to antiquity. However, it is only recently that the unprecedented grassroots efforts to legalize euthana sia have begun building. "Terminal Illness, Assistance with Dying," a California ballot initiative for the No vember 1992 election, might for the first time in modem history legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide by physicians. Similar initiatives are planned in other states. To vote intelligently, citizens in California and throughou...

Close Encounters With Addiction is an ebook adaptation of a lecture Dr. Gabor Maté gave in Los Angeles about his experience as a physician treating patients with addiction, trauma, and mental illness.

In today’s world, there are many hot-button topics that generate equal parts debate and confusion. At the top of that list is healthcare. For most Americans, finding out “the truth” about current problems or possible fixes is virtually impossible amidst all the emotionally charged rhetoric. Dr. Tim Johnson has been reporting on health matters for ABC since the mid-seventies, but in recent years he has spent an increasing amount of time studying our system of healthcare—or lack thereof. Man...

The health-sciences equivalent of Thomas Friedman's bestseller The World is Flat, this inspiring and revelatory book by two of today's finest scientists shows how advances in global health will transform lives -- particularly in the developing world -- over the next decade.The Grandest Challenge begins with a simple premise: that every person's life is of equal value, regardless of where in the world he or she lives. It also begins with a simple, a...

This is an exceptual book with sections that honestly discuss the effects that pain has on relationships, dealing with the medical community, the realities of access to adequate care, understanding the medications and how they are safely used, the medical nature of pain, suffering, sleep problems, and so on. Patients and families benefit from it's real life origins as they become more realistic and better equipped to deal with the pain.

The exploding cost of health care in the United States is a source of widespread alarm. Similarly, the upward spiral of college tuition fees is cause for serious concern. In this concise and illuminating book, well-known economist William J. Baumol explores the causes of these seemingly intractable problems and offers a surprisingly simple explanation. Baumol identifies the "cost disease" as a major source of rapidly rising costs in service sectors of the economy. Once we understand that d...

A World without Cancer: The Making of a New Cure and the Real Promise of Prevention is a provocative and surprising investigation into the ways that profit, personalities, and politics obstruct real progress in the war on cancer—and one doctor's passionate call to action for changeAs a diagnostic radiologist who has watched patients, friends, and family suffer with and die from cancer and who was deeply affected by the enraged husband of one patient, Dr. M...

"Doubt is our product," a cigarette executive once observed, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." In this eye-opening expose, David Michaels reveals how the tobacco industry's duplicitous tactics spawned a multimillion dollar industry that is dismantling public health safeguards. Product defense consultants, he argues, have increasingly skewed the scientific lite...

Death is inevitable. But what happens to the body after death? This book sheds a little light into the darker recesses of the morgue, answering--in exquisite detail--the questions we're often afraid to ask: How and on whom are autopsies performed? What special techniques do pathologists and medical examiners use? When are bodies exhumed? Can the pathologist really determine an accurate time of death? How do I get a copy of--and decipher--an autopsy report?Drawn from and expanding up...

If you believe that the latest blockbuster medication is worth a premium price over your generic brand, or that doctors have access to all the information they need about a drug’s safety and effectiveness each time they write a prescription, Dr. Jerry Avorn has some sobering news. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of patient care, teaching, and research at Harvard Medical School, he shares his firsthand experience of the wide gap in our knowledge of the effectiveness of one medication...

Award-winning journalists expose the horrific practices within America’s health care system, profiling patients and doctors and offering startling personal stories to illuminate what’s gone wrong.“Every American ought to read this book.”—The Plain DealerTens of millions of people with inadequate or no medical coverage . . . dirty examination and operating rooms in doctors’ offices and hospitals . . . more people killed by mistakes ...