American Medicine

Six decades ago, visionary doctors achieved the impossible: the humble kidney, acknowledged since ancient times to be as essential to life as the heart, became the first human organ to be successfully replaced with a machine. Yet huge dialysis corporations, ambitious doctor-entrepreneurs, and Beltway lobbyists soon turned this medical miracle into an early experiment in for-profit medicine—and one of the nation's worst healthcare catastrophes. With powerful insight and on-the-ground reporting, Tom Mueller introduces an unforgettable cast of characters.

World-renowned Attorney Alexandra Phillips has a knack for turning open and shut cases for the prosecution into wins for the defense. In the third installment of the Behind Closed Doors Series, Attorney Phillips defends another victim who is accused of murdering her abuser. With the world still reeling from the effects of COVID-19, Protagonist Attorney Alexandra Phillips is determined to uncover the truth behind the mysterious HIV strain that is discovered as she searches for a key piece of evidence to exonerate her client. Her client, an adulterous Dallas housewife is accused of murder. ...

In this novel of family and redemption, a mother struggles to save her eighteen-year-old daughter from the devastating consequences of mental illness by forcing her to deal with her bipolar disorder. New York Times best-selling author Bebe Moore Campbell draws on her own powerful emotions and African-American roots, showcasing her best writing yet.

The explosion of Internet commerce, coupled with globalization and increased pharmaceutical use, has led to an unprecedented vulnerability in the US drug supply. Today, an estimated 80 percent of our drugs are manufactured overseas, mostly in India and China. Every link along this supply chain offers an opportunity for counterfeiters, and increasingly, they are breaking in. Even when the US system works, consumers are increasingly circumventing the safeguards. Skyrocketing health care costs in the US have forced more Americans to become "medical tourists" seeking drugs, life-saving treatments, and transplants abroad, sometimes in countries with rampant counterfeit drug problems and no FDA. Bitter Pills will heighten the public's awareness about counterfeit drugs, critically examine possible solutions, and help people protect themselves.

Every catastrophe has a beginning. For the opioid crisis in America, the seed was a drug called OxyContin. First hailed as a miracle drug for severe pain in the early 1990s, OxyContin went on to ignite a plague of addiction and death across America. Equal parts crime thriller, medical detective story and business exposé, Pain Killer is the origin story of the opioid crisis, a hard-hitting look at how a supposed wonder drug became the trigger for a national tragedy.

In 1984 triplet girls born three months prematurely received life-saving blood transfusions. A year later their parents learned that their donor had the AIDS virus. After years of suffering, all three sisters died. It has been discovered that six more children have received infected blood from the same Red Cross donor. Bad Blood is the story of gross mismanagement and shocking neglect within the American Red Cross.

In Dying to Save You, Dr. William Queale takes you behind the scenes of our sickcare system. He uses deeply personal stories to explain how we got here and how systems thinking can get us out. But Dying to Save You isn’t just about medicine, science, and healthcare policy. This book is about you—and how you can stay out of the sickcare system altogether.

During the 20th century, modern births in America came to involve mostly male physicians, hospitals, technological interventions, and quick, routine procedures. In a unique and detailed historical study, Nurse-Midwifery: The Birth of a New American Profession, Laura E. Ettinger fills a void with the first book-length documentation of the emergence of American nurse-midwifery.

Up to 100,000 Americans die each year as a result of some form of medical mistake. And this is just the reported number of deaths. The total number of deaths and other disabilities is estimated to be triple (or more) of what's actually reported. This book takes you behind the scenes to expose heartbreaking stories of medical malpractice, careless misdiagnosis, and downright neglect on the part of health-care personnel across the country.

Vital research is starting to challenge long-standing assumptions about gender identity and biological sex, such as work that indicates the brain is a “mosaic” of traits rather than a “male” and “female” brain. Growing knowledge of the genetic complexities of sexual determination is changing the way the medical community treats intersex individuals, and in this audiobook, The New Science of Sex and Gender, we not only examine the latest studies in biology, medicine, and psychology but also, more importantly, their bearing on healthcare, identity, and access.

Jeremiah Camp, a.k.a. the Forecaster, can look into the heart of humanity and see the patterns that create opportunities and profits for the rich and powerful. Problem is, Camp has looked one too many times, has seen what he hadn’t expected to see and has come away from the abyss with no hope for himself or for the future.

Andy Lazris, MD, is a practicing primary care physician who experiences the effects of Medicare policy on a daily basis. As a result, he believes that the way we care for our elderly has taken a wrong turn and that Medicare is complicit in creating the very problems it seeks to solve. Aging is not a disease to be cured; it is a life stage to be lived. Lazris argues that aggressive treatments cannot change that fact but only get in the way and decrease quality of life.

Burning. Shooting. Stabbing. Sometimes the cause is unknown. Sometimes it begins as the result of an injury. Whatever form it takes, chronic pain often resists treatment. In this audiobook, we examine the latest advances in understanding the pathology of chronic pain and the efforts to find better, non-opioid treatment options, including electrical stimulation of nerves, venom from spiders and other creatures, and psychological interventions including virtual-reality therapy and acupuncture.

Healthcare is no longer just a public issue; for millions of Americans it is now a crisis on their own doorstep. Cost of medical care today are a leading cause of personal bankruptcy. Although policy makers have weighed in on all sides, in this book, best-selling author Andrew Weil, M.D., identifies the root of the problem.

Navigating the complexities of the American healthcare system can be a daunting task for any medical professional, but it presents unique challenges for foreign medical graduates. "Guide to the American Healthcare System for the Foreign Medical Graduate" is an essential resource designed to demystify these challenges and provide a comprehensive roadmap to success.

During allergy season, sufferers know the drill: runny nose, watery eyes, sneezing up a storm. For the unlucky with asthma, symptoms might also include coughing and wheezing. However, asthma is not always caused by allergens like pollen and dust - nonallergenic asthma is brought on by a number of possible environmental or genetic triggers. Then there’s the common cold, which also presents with similar symptoms. So what’s causing your runny nose?

Savage Will brings to life a remarkable story of perseverance, heroism, and survival: the true tale of the American medics and nurses who endured two months in Nazi-occupied Albania - and the fearless citizens and Allied intelligence officers who risked all to save them. On a cold morning in war-ravaged Sicily in 1943, men and women of the 807th Medical Air Evacuation Squadron boarded a routine flight to the Italian mainland to care for wounded soldiers.

Mysterious and misunderstood, distorted by biblical imagery of disfigurement and uncleanness, Hansen's disease or leprosy has all but disappeared from America's consciousness. In Carville, Louisiana, the closed doors of the nation's last center for the treatment of leprosy open to reveal stories of sadness, separation, and even strength in the face of what was once a life-wrenching diagnosis. Drawn from interviews with living patients and extensive research in the leprosarium's archives, Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America tells the stories of former patients.

In Unhealthy: Corruption and Malpractice in the American Health System, Dr. Richard Kradin, a professor at Harvard Medical School and expert in pulmonary infectious diseases, explores the history of the corporate and ideological transformation of America’s medical profession and how it has diminished the quality of health care. He describes how progressive medical education has produced a generation of physicians as concerned with political activism as they are with medical science.

William F. Cody was an iconic showman whose “Wild West” thrilled audiences throughout North America and Europe from 1883 into the early 20th Century. Tall and handsome, legends of Cody the scout, Pony Express rider, and hunter populate his popular history chronicled in pulp fiction, biographies, autobiographies, and even in cinema. But in a series of letters between Cody and his Denver, Colorado doctor, emerges another side of Cody. In a fictionalized account catalyzed by a series of letter written between 1899 and Cody’s death in 1917, Scoggin crafts a relationship that becomes a ...