One adventure.A world of magic.And you decide how the story unfolds.One day, an ordinary boy suddenly finds himself in a mysterious, magical world where a strange kingdom needs help with a very unusual problem. To assist, he embarks on a journey filled with adventure, passing by magical lakes, floating castles, mysterious swamps, and paths that lead to the unknown.Along the way, he meets wondrous creatures and new friends, and each decision leads him to a diffe...

Supporting Children and Families gathers together the lessons learned from perhaps the largest scale social experiment ever undertaken in England - Sure Start, the programme designed to improve the emotional development, health and education of children.It boils down the huge amount of knowledge and experience generated by the Sure Start programmes and local evaluation studies, with chapters encompassing child development and healthcare, partnership working with existing local serv...

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...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama in March 2010 is a landmark in U.S. social legislation, and the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding the Act has ensured that it will remain the law of the land. The new law extends health insurance to nearly all Americans, fulfilling a century-long quest and bringing the United States to parity with other industrial nations. Affordable Care aims to control rapidly rising health care costs and promises to make th...

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...

A palliative care doctor on the front lines of hospital care illuminates one of the most important and controversial ethical issues of our time on his quest to transform care through the end of life.It is harder to die in this country than ever before. Statistics show that the vast majority of Americans would prefer to die at home, yet many of us spend our last days fearful and in pain in a healthcare system ruled by high-tech procedures and a philosophy to "fight ...

On July 12, 1966, the Medical Care Insurance Act was passed by the federal House of Commons after a ferocious public debate that pitted the vast majority of Canadians against a powerful alliance of business, insurance companies, and doctors.More than thirty years later, the same battle is being fought all over again. Only now, the forces opposed to medicare are more ideologically unified, more richly endowed, and tied to transnational corporations whose power exceeds that of entire...

A primer in plain English that explains how health insurance will work under the new legislation and how it will affect your care and your choices going forward.Now that "Obamacare" (as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is popularly known) has become the law of the land, millions of Americans will need help figuring out exactly how the new system will work and how it might affect their lives.This guide will teach people how the new health care ex...

The widespread condemnation of drastic price increases on life-saving drugs highlights our growing dependency on and vulnerability to international pharmaceutical conglomerates. However, aren’t the interests of the public supposed to supersede the pursuit of private profit?In his new work, Private Profits versus Public Policy, Joel Lexchin addresses this question as he examines how public policy with respect to the pharmaceutical industry has evolved in Canada over the pas...

A rapidly ageing population is the most significant demographic issue confronting Singapore in our lifetime. This has created new and increasing demands on Singapore's healthcare system and on the families of the older adults. The challenge is in providing a system of care that is humane, effective and sustainable financially. This requires coordination between state funded providers, the family and the community.This book offers a multi-disciplinary perspective by researchers from...

The U.S. healthcare system is in critical condition--but this should come as a surprise to no one. Yet until now the solutions proposed have been unworkable, pie-in-the-sky plans that have had little chance of becoming law and even less of succeeding. In Code Red, David Dranove, one of the nation's leading experts on the economics of healthcare, proposes a set of feasible solutions that address access, efficiency, and quality.Dranove offers pragmatic remedies, some of them...

The need for informed analyses of health policy is now greater than ever. The twelve essays in this volume show that public debates routinely bypass complex ethical, sociocultural, historical, and political questions about how we should address ideals of justice and equality in health care. Integrating perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, medicine, and public health, this volume illuminates the relationships between justice and health inequalities to enrich debates.