Health Care Industry

In World War II, 59,000 women voluntarily risked their lives for their country as US Army nurses. For more than half a century these women's experiences remained untold, almost without reference in books, historical societies, or military archives. After years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews, Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee have created a dramatic narrative that at last brings to light the critical role that women played throughout the war.

It is 1919 and Elizabeth Hughes, the 11-year-old daughter of America's most-distinguished jurist and politician, Charles Evans Hughes, has been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. It is essentially a death sentence. The only accepted form of treatment - starvation - whittles her down to 45 pounds, skin and bones. Miles away, Canadian researchers Frederick Banting and Charles Best manage to identify and purify insulin from animal pancreases - a miracle soon marred by scientific jealousy, intense business competition, and fistfights.

When Michael Collins decided to become a surgeon, he was totally unprepared for the chaotic life of a resident at a major hospital. A natural overachiever, Collins' success in college and medical school led to a surgical residency at one of the most respected medical centers in the world, the famed Mayo Clinic. But compared to his fellow residents, Collins felt inadequate and unprepared.

Most people believe that they were either benefited or at least not harmed by being brought into existence. Thus, if they ever do reflect on whether they should bring others into existence—rather than having children without even thinking about whether they should—they presume that they do them no harm. Better Never to Have Been challenges these assumptions. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm.

Tired of the pace and noise of life near London and longing for a better place to raise their young children, Mary J. MacLeod and her husband, George, encountered their dream while vacationing on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides. Enthralled by its windswept beauty, they soon were the proud and startled owners of a near-derelict croft house - a farmer’s stone cottage - on “a small acre” of land. Mary assumed duties as the island’s district nurse.

Since the mid-1950s, the psychoactive compound DMT has attracted the attention of experimentalists, prohibitionists, scientists, artists, alchemists, and hyperspace emissaries. Mystery School in Hyperspace is the first book to delve into the history of this substance, the discovery of its properties, and the impact it has had on poets, artists, and musicians.

In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, one of the nation's top physicians, examines what he calls medicine's "Gutenberg moment". Much as the printing press liberated knowledge from the control of an elite class, new technology is poised to democratize medicine. In this new era, patients will control their data and be emancipated from a paternalistic medical regime in which "the doctor knows best."

The health-care system in the United States has been called the best in the world. Yet wide disparities persist between social groups, and many Americans suffer from poorer health than people in other developed countries. In this revised edition of Health Disparities in the United States, Donald A. Barr provides extensive new data about the ways low socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity interact to create and perpetuate these health disparities.

In this groundbreaking book, Anita Hannig brings us into the lives of ordinary Americans who go to extraordinary lengths to set the terms of their own death. Faced with a terminal diagnosis and unbearable suffering, they decide to seek medical assistance in dying—a legal option now available to one in five Americans. The Day I Die tackles one of the most urgent social issues of our time: how to restore dignity and meaning to the dying process in the age of high-tech medicine.

The Real Anthony Fauci details how Fauci, Gates, and their cohorts use their control of media outlets, scientific journals, key government and quasi-governmental agencies, global intelligence agencies, and influential scientists and physicians to flood the public with fearful propaganda about COVID-19 virulence and pathogenesis, and to muzzle debate and ruthlessly censor dissent.

In Being Mortal, best-selling 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 human spirit.

Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. He takes listeners from Rome's pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted.

Over the past 70 years, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, has evolved from a virtually unknown and little-used pamphlet to an imposing and comprehensive compendium of mental disorder. Its nearly 300 conditions have become the touchstones for the diagnoses that patients receive, students are taught, researchers study, insurers reimburse, and drug companies promote.

In Anti-Vaxxers, Jonathan Berman explores the phenomenon of the anti-vaccination movement, recounting its history from its 19th-century antecedents to today's activism, examining its claims, and suggesting a strategy for countering them.

As revelatory as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson’s Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. For more than 5,000 years, 'old' has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we’ve made old age into a disease.

In Blind Spots, Dr. Makary explores the latest research on critical topics ranging from the microbiome to childbirth to nutrition and longevity and more, revealing the biggest blind spots of modern medicine and tackling the most urgent yet unsung issues in our $4.5 trillion health care ecosystem. The path to medical mishaps can be absurd, entertaining, and jaw-dropping—but the truth is essential to our health.

One day in 2004, Gardiner Harris, a pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times, was early for a flight and sat down at an airport bar. He struck up a conversation with the woman on the barstool next to him, who happened to be a drug sales rep for Johnson & Johnson. Her horrific story about unethical sales practices and the devastating impact they’d had on her family fundamentally changed the nature of how Harris would cover the company—and the entire pharmaceutical industry—for the Times.

Over the past three decades, the once-efficient American health care system has evolved into a complex maze of monopolies and a racket of bureaucratic checks, approvals, denials, roadblocks, and detours. This shift has created a massive and at times redundant workforce that frustrates patients, as well as physicians, nurses, and administrative staff. Health care costs the United States more than $11,000 for each person in the country each year - more than double what it costs in most Western European countries to deliver equal or even better care.

In Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a predetermined limit.

The New York Times best-selling author of Fat Chance explains the eight pathologies that underlie all chronic disease, documents how processed food has impacted them to ruin our health, economy, and environment over the past 50 years, and proposes an urgent manifesto and strategy to cure both us and the planet.