Critical illness is a fact of life. Even those of us who enjoy decades of good health are touched by it eventually, either in our own lives or in those of our loved ones. And when this happens, we grapple with serious and often confusing choices about how best to live with our afflictions.A Life Worth Living is a book for people facing these difficult decisions. Robert Martensen, a physician, historian, and ethicist, draws on decades of experience with patients and friends ...

**#1 New York Times BestsellerIn Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending**Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the huma...

In The Night Shift, Dr. Brian Goldman shares his experiences in the witching hours at Mount Sinai Hospital in downtown Toronto. We meet the kinds of patients who walk into an E.R. after midnight: late-night revellers injured on their way home after last call, teens assaulted in the streets by other teens and a woman who punches another woman out of jealousy over a man. But Goldman also reveals the emotional, heartbreaking side of everyday E.R. visits: adult children forced to make...

"Must reading for every physician who cares for patients and every patient who wishes to get the best care." —Time magazineFrom Dr. Jerome Groopman, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and one of the world’s leading researchers in cancer and AIDS, a groundbreaking, profound view of twenty-first-century medical decision-making, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to ...

A riveting exploration of the most difficult and important part of what doctors do, by Yale School of Medicine physician Dr. Lisa Sanders, author of the monthly New York Times Magazine column "Diagnosis," the inspiration for the hit Fox TV series House, M.D."The experience of being ill can be like waking up in a foreign country. Life, as you formerly knew it, is on hold while you travel through this other world as unknown as it is unexpected. When...

A look at the emotional side of medicine—the shame, fear, anger, anxiety, empathy, and even love that affect patient carePhysicians are assumed to be objective, rational beings, easily able to detach as they guide patients and families through some of life’s most challenging moments. But doctors’ emotional responses to the life-and-death dramas of everyday practice have a profound impact on medical care. And while much has been written about the minds and methods o...

The acclaimed author of Carved in Sand—a veteran investigative journalist who endured persistent back pain for decades—delivers the definitive book on the subject: an essential examination of all facets of the back pain industry, exploring what works, what doesn't, what may cause harm, and how to get on the road to recovery.In her effort to manage her chronic back pain, investigative reporter Cathryn Jakobson Ramin spent years and a small fortune on a panoply of treatments...

An inspiring and profoundly enlightening exploration of one doctor’s discovery of how hope can changethe course of illnessSince the time of the ancient Greeks, human beings have believed that hope is essential to life. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Harvard Medical School professor and New Yorker staff writer Jerome Groopman shows us why.The search for hope is most urgent at the patient’s bedside. The Anatomy of Hope takes us there, bring...

Medical errors kill 24,000 Canadians each year, adversely affect hundreds of thousands, and cost close to two billion dollars. Victims of medical errors and their families who speak out often do so at considerable emotional, psychological, and financial expense. But their willingness to share their harrowing stories has helped to lay the foundation for numerous patient safety programs and continues to identify problems, provide solutions, and raise awareness.After the Error

Important and provocative, The Undead examines why even with the tools of advanced technology, what we think of as life and death, consciousness and nonconsciousness, is not exactly clear and how this problem has been further complicated by the business of organ harvesting.Dick Teresi, a science writer with a dark sense of humor, manages to make this story entertaining, informative, and accessible as he shows how death determination has become more complicated than ever. T...

**A brilliant transplant surgeon brings compassion and narrative drama to the fearful reality that every doctor must face: the inevitability of mortality.“Uncommonly moving ... A revealing and heartfelt book." —Atul Gawande, #1 New York bestselling author of Being Mortal**When Pauline Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives. What she could not predict was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, she found herself wrest...

How Patients ThinkAt age twenty-one, Chloë Atkins began suffering from a mysterious illness, the symptoms of which rapidly worsened. Paralyzed for months at a time, she frequently required intubation and life support. She eventually became quadriplegic, dependent both on a wheelchair and on health professionals who refused to believe there was anything physically wrong with her. When test after test returned inconclusive results, Atkins's doctors pronounced her sym...