"Hatch packs a wealth of knowledge into the book...poignant." - Associated PressDr. Steven Hatch, an infectious disease specialist, first came to Liberia in November 2013 to work at a hospital in Monrovia. Six months later, several of the physicians he had served with were dead or unable to work, and Ebola had become a world health emergency. Inferno is his account of the epidemic that nearly consumed a nation, as well as its deeper origins....

There's a running joke among radiologists: finding a tumor in a mammogram is akin to finding a snowball in a blizzard. A bit of medical gallows humor, this simile illustrates the difficulties of finding signals (the snowball) against a background of noise (the blizzard). Doctors are faced with similar difficulties every day when sifting through piles of data from blood tests to X-rays to endless lists of patient symptoms.Diagnoses are often just educated guesses, and prognoses less...

A first-hand account of the Ebola epidemic by an American doctor who has been featured on the front page of the New York Times.Dr. Steven Hatch first came to Liberia in November 2013, to work at a hospital in Monrovia. Six months later, several of the physicians Dr. Hatch had mentored and served with were dead or barely clinging to life, and Ebola had become a world health emergency. Hundreds of victims perished each week; whole families were destroyed in a matter of days;...

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From renowned mental health expert and speaker Dr. Gabor Maté, this acclaimed, bestselling guide provides insight into the mind-body link between illness and health, and the critical role that stress and our emotional makeup play in an array of common diseases.In this accessible and groundbreaking book—filled with the moving stories of real people—medical doctor and bestselling author Gabor Maté shows that emotion and psy...

Have you ever wondered how one day the media can assert that alcohol is bad for us and the next unashamedly run a story touting the benefits of daily alcohol consumption? Or how a drug that is pulled off the market for causing heart attacks ever got approved in the first place? How can average readers, who aren't medical doctors or Ph.D.s in biochemistry, tell what they should be paying attention to and what's, well, just more bullshit?Ben Goldacre has made a point of exposing quack...

"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 ...

From a nationally recognized expert, an exposé of the worst excesses of our zeal for medical testingGoing against the conventional wisdom reinforced by the medical establishment and Big Pharma that more screening is the best preventative medicine, Dr. Gilbert Welch builds a compelling counterargument that what we need are fewer, not more, diagnoses. Documenting the excesses of American medical practice that labels far too many of us as sick, Welch examines the soci...

For many complaints and conditions, the benefits from surgery are lower, and the risks higher, than you or your surgeon think. In this book you will see how commonly performed operations can be found to be useless or even harmful when properly evaluated. That these claims come from an experienced, practising orthopaedic surgeon who performs many of these operations himself, makes the unsettling argument particularly compelling.Of course no surgeon is recommending invasive surgery i...

"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,...

I want to provide the best care possible. The suffering has gone on for a long time, and I want to be sure the end stage is as comfortable as possible. This common sentiment is expressed by both health care professionals responsible for caring for frail elders experiencing the later stages of dementia and family members trying to ensure the most compassionate care for their loved ones. Health care providers and family members often struggle with painful decisions when confronting the inevi...

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...

How can a teenager adopted at birth nearly die because his real mother didn’t get a measles shot?How can a husband’s faith in his wife’s fidelity determine whether radical treatment will cure her or kill her?How can a missed eye doctor appointment reveal a genetic disease?How can doctors choose the right course for a pregnant woman when one may kill her and the other would abort her fetus?Answers to these questions and more are pursued eve...