Suddenly, he suffered such bizarre medical symptoms, doctors suspected he'd been poisoned by the Mafia. Bell's rapidly declining health forced him to flee his glamorous Miami life to a sterile "bubble" unit in the remote Arizona desert. As his career and marriage dissolved, Bell pursued medical treatments in a race against time, hoping to stay alive and raise his young daughter. He eventually discovered he wasn’t poisoned by a criminal, but by his office building. His search for a cure led him to discover the horrifying truth: his plight was just the tip of the iceberg. Millions of people fall ill and die each year because of toxic chemical exposures—without knowing they're at risk.Bell chose to fight back. Despite his precarious health, he began collaborating with top scientists dedicated to raising awareness about this issue and finding treatments for victims. Meanwhile, his daughter miraculously found the one doctor who helped him. As Bell's health improved, he teamed up with other lawyers to avenge other victims in court.This riveting book puts a human face on the hidden truths behind toxic dangers assaulting us in our everyday environments—and offers practical ways to protect ourselves and our children.

    Personal stories combine with staff experiences to reveal hidden truths about the operating room and illustrate the quirky, strange, and bizarre occurrences that shape a regular hospital day. Answering questions such as What do doctors talk about during surgery? If a surgical instrument falls to the floor, is the five-second rule observed? and Is real life just like ER, Grey’s Anatomy, and House?, this is a must-read for the curiosity seeker and anyone who has or will be on the operating-room table.

    David Snowdon, one of the world’s leading experts on Alzheimer’s disease, embarked on a revolutionary scientific study that would forever change the way we view aging—and ultimately living. Dubbed the “Nun Study” because it involves a unique population of 678 Catholic sisters, this remarkable long-term research project has made headlines worldwide with its provocative discoveries.Yet Aging with Grace is more than a groundbreaking health and science book. It is the inspiring human story of these remarkable women—ranging in age from 74 to 106—whose dedication to serving others may help all of us live longer and healthier lives.Totally accessible, with fascinating portraits of the nuns and the scientists who study them, Aging with Grace also offers a wealth of practical findings:• Why building linguistic ability in childhood may protect against Alzheimer’s• Which ordinary foods promote longevity and healthy brain function• Why preventing strokes and depression is key to avoiding Alzheimer’s• What role heredity plays, and why it’s never too late to start an exercise program • How attitude, faith, and community can add years to our livesA prescription for hope, Aging with Grace shows that old age doesn’t have to mean an inevitable slide into illness and disability; rather it can be a time of promise and productivity, intellectual and spiritual vigor—a time of true grace.

    Written by medical students and reviewed by top faculty, this unique book provides practical, tested advice for acing the USMLE Step 2 CK.

    Through a lifetime of research, he has developed key scientific concepts in sport that have not only redefined the way elite athletes and teams approach their professions, but challenged conventional global thinking in these areas.In this new and updated edition of Challenging Beliefs, Noakes gives his views on everything from overtraining, banned substances and the dangers of rugby to the sports-drink industry, and children and sport, debunking a few sporting myths in the process. Stories and case studies of the teams and athletes with whom he has worked are also included. In providing an intimate look at the golden threads running through Noakes's life and career, this truly fascinating book reveals the groundbreaking theories and principles generated by one of the greatest minds in the history of sports science.

    Improper use of antibiotics. Local warfare. Massive refugee migration. Changing social and environmental conditions around the world have fostered the spread of new and potentially devastating viruses and diseases—HIV, Lassa, Ebola, and others. Laurie Garrett takes you on a fifty-year journey through the world's battles with microbes and examines the worldwide conditions that have culminated in recurrent outbreaks of newly discovered diseases, epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas, and mutated old diseases that are no longer curable. She argues that it is not too late to take action to prevent the further onslaught of viruses and microbes, and offers possible solutions for a healthier future.

    Geoffrey Kurland was a busy man. His work as a Pediatric Pulmonologist, caring for children with lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis and asthma, led to long hours on the wards at the University of California, Davis Medical Center. At the same time, he was in the midst of training for the Western States Endurance Run, a grueling 100-mile long footrace across the wilderness of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. His long training runs, the responsibilities of patient care and teaching, and relationships attempting to replace his departed girlfriend occupied most of his life. Dr. Kurland’s ordered world is suddenly turned upside-down when he is diagnosed with Hairy Cell Leukemia, a rare blood cancer with a low survival rate. His work, his running, and his friendships are altered by his struggle to survive. He finds he must undergo many of the procedures he performed on his patients, must endure surgery and chemotherapy, and must relinquish control of his life to his physicians, surgeons, and his disease. He learns first-hand what cannot be taught in medical school about the consuming power of a chronic illness and its treatment.Confronting his own mortality, Dr. Kurland is now the patient while remaining a physician and runner. With the support of his physicians at the Mayo Clinic, the University of California, and the University of Pittsburgh, he resolves to continue to live his life despite his potentially fatal disease. He discovers his personal inner strengths as well as weaknesses as he struggles to confront his illness and regain some of the control he lost to it. Along his nearly two and a half year journey, we follow Dr. Kurland as he endures surgical procedures, chemotherapy, and life-threatening complications of his illness. He emerges into remission with new inner strength and understanding of what it means to be a doctor. He also finds that he is still a runner, with the same goal, to run the 100 miles across the Sierra Mountains.REVIEWS: “Taut, dramatic, and intensely real…Very well written.” --Oliver Sacks, the best selling author of SEEING VOICES and HALLUCINATIONS"[MY OWN MEDICINE] should be required reading for every medical professional. Kurland never asks for sympathy or pity. [...] What comes through powerfully is his humanity, which his own bout with illnesses has clearly enhanced, and from which both his patients and his readers will benefit." --THE NEW YORK TIMES"While training as a pediatric pulmonologist, Kurland told a patient, 'I know how you feel'; years later, when he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia, he discovered just how untrue this was. [...] The way in which serious illness alters one's sense of self and of life is compellingly expressed in this energetic, nervy narrative, as Kurland's illness and eventual recovery collide with a host of profound shifts—a big career move, the death of a colleague, an unravelling relationship with his girlfriend, and a deepening one with his parents." --THE NEW YORKER"MY OWN MEDICINE is rich in detail, enhanced by the author's skillful handling of the narrative...The book depicts a man who, faced with the painful reality of his own mortality, acknowledges his condition and gears himself to face the challenge." --PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
“The story of Kurland’s battle with a disease that almost took his life is compelling and poignant. Unlike other chroniclers of illness, however, Kurland is a physician caring for critically ill children. Perhaps it is inevitable that his observations on life, death, and suffering should be so informed by his work. The result is a narrative that is both unique and deeply insightful.

    Brent Russell shares true-life stories of his early days as an Emergency Room doctor. Contemplative and oftentimes hilarious, Dr. Russell leads the reader through the glass doors and down the narrow halls of the ER where desperate patients, young and old, come to get well. Occasionally heart wrenching and always fast-paced, Miracles and Mayhem in the ER will have readers holding their breath one second and celebrating the next. Through his night shifts at a renowned Portland, WA hospital, Russell discovers his role, and his confidence as he treats people from all walks of life including humanity's most bizarre in the ER. Each shift brings a new, bracing story to tell.

    Julie Devaney takes us on a journey through the health care system as she is diagnosed and treated for ulcerative colitis. In and out of emergency rooms in Vancouver and Toronto, she’s poked, prodded, and abandoned to a closet at one point, bearing the helplessness and indignities of a system that at best confuses a patient into silence.Raw, harrowing, and darkly funny, Julie Devaney argues convincingly for fixes to the system and better training for all medical personnel. As she recovers, she sets out to do just that: setting up a gurney on stage at workshops and conferences across the country to teach Bedside Manners 101 and to advocate for repairs to the system.Part memoir, part love story, part revolutionary manifesto, My Leaky Body is politically astute, gooey like cake batter, and raw like ulcerated bowels. Devaney writes the book that will heal her aching heart and relax her strictured rectum as she weaves stories from professional and public interactions with tales from her gurney.

    Her marriage of more than thirty years was suffering, and she was virtually immobilized by fear and anxiety. As the daughter of parents who both died before she was thirty, Stern was terrified of illness and death, and despite the fact that her acclaimed career as a food and travel writer required her to spend a great deal of time on airplanes, she suffered from a persistent fear of flying and severe claustrophobia. But a strange thing happened one day on a plane that was grounded at the Minneapolis airport for six horrible, foodless, airless hours. A young man on a trip with his classmates suddenly became dizzy and pale because he hadn’t eaten in many hours, and there was no food left on the plane. Without thinking about it, Jane gave him the candy bar that she had in her purse. A short time later the color had returned to his cheeks, the boy was laughing again with his friends, and Jane realized that this one small act of kindness—helping another person who was suffering—had provided her with comfort and a sense of well-being.It was shortly thereafter that this fifty-two-year-old writer decided to become an emergency medical technician, eventually coming to be known as Ambulance Girl. Stern tells her story with great humor and poignancy, creating a wonderful portrait of a middle-aged, Woody Allen–ish woman who was “deeply and neurotically terrified of sick and dead people,” but who went out into the world to save other people’s lives as a way of saving her own. Her story begins with the boot camp of EMT training: 140 hours at the hands of a dour ex-marine who took delight in presenting a veritable parade of amputations, hideous deformities, and gross disasters. Jane—overweight and badly out of shape—had to surmount physical challenges like carrying a 250-pound man seated in a chair down a dark flight of stairs. After class she did rounds in the emergency room of a local hospital, where she attended to a schizophrenic kickboxer who had tried to kill his mother that morning and a stockbroker who was taken off the commuter train to Manhattan with delirium tremens so bad it killed him.Each call Stern describes is a vignette of human nature, often with a life in the balance. From an AIDS hospice to town drunks, yuppie wife beaters to psychopaths, Jane comes to see the true nature and underlying mysteries of a town she had called home for twenty years. Throughout the book we follow her as she gets her sea legs and finally bonds with the burly, handsome firefighters who become her colleagues. At the end, she is named the first woman officer of the department—a triumph we joyously share with her.Ambulance Girl is an inspiring story by a woman who found, somewhat late in life, that “in helping others I learned to help myself.” It is a book to be treasured and shared.

    Meghan Weir first dons her scrubs and steps onto the floor of Children’s Hospital Boston as a newly minted resident, her head is packed with medical-school-textbook learning. She knows the ins and outs of the human body, has memorized the correct way to perform hundreds of complicated procedures, and can recite the symptoms of any number of diseases by rote. But none of that has truly prepared her for what she is about to experience. From the premature infants Dr. Weir is expected to care for on her very first day of residency to the frustrating teenagers who visit the ER at three in the morning for head colds, each day brings with it new challenges and new lessons. Dr. Weir learns that messiness, fear, and uncertainty live beneath the professional exterior of the doctor’s white coat. Yet, in addition to the hardships, the practice of medicine comes with enormous rewards of joy, camaraderie, and the triumph of healing. The three years of residency—when young doctors who have just graduated from medical school take on their own patients for the first time—are grueling in any specialty. But there is a unique challenge to dealing with patients too young to describe where it hurts, and it is not just having to handle their parents. In Between Expectations: Lessons from a Pediatric Residency, Dr. Weir takes readers into the nurseries, ICUs, and inpatient rooms of one of the country’s busiest hospitals for children, revealing a world many of us never get to see. With candor and humility, she explores the many humbling lessons that all residents must learn: that restraint is sometimes the right treatment option, no matter how much you want to act; that some patients, even young teenagers, aren’t interested in listening to the good advice that will make their lives easier; that parents ultimately know their own children far better than their doctors ever will. Dr. Weir’s thoughtful prose reveals how exhaustion and doubt define the residency experience just as much as confidence and action do. Yet the most important lesson that she learns through the months and years of residency is that having a good day on the floor does not always mean that a patient goes home miraculously healed—more often than not, success is about a steady, gradual discovery of strength. By observing the children, the parents, and other hospital staff who painstakingly provide care each day, Dr. Weir finds herself finally developing into the physician (and the parent) she hopes to become. These stories—sometimes funny, sometimes haunting—expose the humanity that is so often obscured by the doctor’s white coat.

    Conventional wisdom may be wrong. In this controversial book, the eminent biologist Paul W. Ewald offers some startling arguments:-Germs appear to be at the root of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, many forms of cancer, and other chronic diseases.-The greatest threats to our health come not from sensational killers such as Ebola, West Nile virus, and super-virulent strains of influenza, but from agents that are already here causing long-term infections, which eventually lead to debilitation and death. -The medical establishment has largely ignored the evidence that implicates these germs, to the detriment of our public health.-New evolutionary theories are available, which explain how germs function and offer opportunities for controlling these modern plagues — if we are willing to listen to them.Plague Time is an eye-opening exploration of the revolutionary new understanding of disease that may set the course of medical research for the twenty-first century.

    Diligently researching how to restore his quality of life, she discovered Vet-Stem, a service that provides cutting-edge regeneration therapy for pets, using stem cells harvested from animals' own tissue. Just hours after receiving IV and intra-joint injections, Sam began aging backward--which left Julia wondering why this simple, effective treatment was not available for humans.            Julia suffered from chronic inflammatory bowel disease, and after witnessing Sam's astonishing recovery, she set out on a curious quest: to be treated like a dog by a doctor as competent as her vet! After a four-year wait, Julia became the first American to be successfully cured of a perirectal fistula with stem cells derived from her own fat. With this amazing true story of how a pack of shelter dogs she rescued from death row came to save her life, Julia hopes to inspire and inform readers about exciting healthcare options available to them and their cherished animal companions.

    "Bold and often brilliant.”—Science "It is no exaggeration to state that Szasz's work raises major social issues which deserve the attention of policy makers and indeed of all informed and socially conscious Americans...Quite probably he has done more than any other man to alert the American public to the potential dangers of an excessively psychiatrized society.”—Edwin M. Schur, Atlantic

    We like to imagine that it’s based on evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature surrounding a drug, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by industry. We like to imagine that regulators let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve hopeless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients.All these problems have been protected from public scrutiny because they’re too complex to capture in a sound bite. But Dr. Ben Goldacre shows that the true scale of this murderous disaster fully reveals itself only when the details are untangled. He believes we should all be able to understand precisely how data manipulation works and how research misconduct on a global scale affects us. In his own words, “the tricks and distortions documented in these pages are beautiful, intricate, and fascinating in their details.” With Goldacre’s characteristic flair and a forensic attention to detail, Bad Pharma reveals a shockingly broken system and calls for something to be done. This is the pharmaceutical industry as it has never been seen before.