The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients


Sonia Shah - 2006
    . . meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence (Publishers Weekly), Sonia Shah's riveting journalistic account shines a much-needed spotlight on a disturbing new global trend. Drawing on years of original research and reporting in Africa and Asia, Shah examines how the multinational pharmaceutical industry, in its quest to develop lucrative drugs, has begun exporting its clinical research trials to the developing world, where ethical oversight is minimal and desperate patients abound. As the New England Journal of Medicine notes, it is critical that those engaged in drug development, clinical research and its oversight, research ethics, and policy know about these stories, which tell of an impossible choice being faced by many of the world's poorest patients--be experimented upon or die for lack of medicine.

Irving vs Irving


Jacques Poitras - 2014
    They have a monopoly on New Brunswick’s English-language print media and billions of dollars in offshore accounts.They are the Irvings. And they have always placed a premium on discretion and family unity. They built their empire—which includes Canada’s largest refinery, soon to be linked by pipeline to Alberta’s oil fields—by remaining private. Irving vs Irving tells the story of how these ambitious, often ruthless entrepreneurs came to dominate the economic and political affairs of Atlantic Canada, and how they learned to love the property that perplexed them most: their media monopoly.The Irvings’ control of all of New Brunswick’s daily newspapers often allowed the family’s business pursuits to escape journalistic scrutiny. Readers frequently wondered what wasn’t in the newspaper, such as the Irving’s lobbying for their logging interests and the sinking of their tanker loaded with PCBs.In Irving vs Irving, veteran reporter Jacques Poitras uses the empire’s media holdings to examine previously untold episodes of this family epic from patriarch K.C. Irving’s manipulation of his mother’s affections to a Shakespearean confrontation between generations.

Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America


Gerald Posner - 2020
    Pharmaceutical breakthroughs such as anti­biotics and vaccines rank among some of the greatest advancements in human history. Yet exorbitant prices for life-saving drugs, safety recalls affecting tens of millions of Americans, and soaring rates of addiction and overdose on pre­scription opioids have caused many to lose faith in drug companies. Now, Americans are demanding a national reckoning with a monolithic industry. Pharma introduces brilliant scientists, in-corruptible government regulators, and brave whistleblowers facing off against company exec­utives often blinded by greed. A business that profits from treating ills can create far deadlier problems than it cures. Addictive products are part of the industry’s DNA, from the days when corner drugstores sold morphine, heroin, and cocaine, to the past two decades of dangerously overprescribed opioids. Pharma also uncovers the real story of the Sacklers, the family that became one of America’s wealthiest from the success of OxyContin, their blockbuster narcotic painkiller at the center of the opioid crisis. Relying on thousands of pages of government and corporate archives, dozens of hours of interviews with insiders, and previously classified FBI files, Posner exposes the secrets of the Sacklers’ rise to power—revelations that have long been buried under a byzantine web of interlocking companies with ever-changing names and hidden owners. The unexpected twists and turns of the Sackler family saga are told against the startling chronicle of a powerful industry that sits at the intersection of public health and profits. Pharma reveals how and why American drug com­panies have put earnings ahead of patients.

Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them


Randy Christensen - 2011
    Randy Christensen. Trained as a pediatrician, he works not in a typical hospital setting but, rather, in a 38-foot Winnebago that has been refitted as a doctor’s office on wheels. His patients are the city’s homeless adolescents and children. In the shadow of one affluent American city, Dr. Christensen has dedicated his life to caring for society's throwaway kids—the often-abused, unloved children who live on the streets without access to proper health care, all the while fending off constant threats from thugs, gangs, pimps, and other predators. With the Winnebago as his moveable medical center, Christensen and his team travel around the outskirts of Phoenix, attending to the children and teens who need him most. With tenderness and humor, Dr. Christensen chronicles everything from the struggles of the van’s early beginnings, to the support system it became for the kids, and the ultimate recognition it has achieved over the years. Along with his immense professional challenges, he also describes the trials and joys he faces while raising a growing family with his wife Amy. By turns poignant, heartbreaking, and charming, Dr. Christensen's story is a gripping and rich memoir of his work and family, one of those rare books that stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care


T.R. Reid - 2009
    R. Reid shows how all the other industrialized democracies have achieved something the United States can’t seem to do: provide health care for everybody at a reasonable cost. In his global quest to find a possible prescription, Reid visits wealthy, free market, industrialized democracies like our own—including France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and Canada—where he finds inspiration in example. Reid sees problems too: He finds poorly paid doctors in Japan, endless lines in Canada, mistreated patients in Britain, spartan facilities in France. In addition to long-established systems, Reid also studies countries that have carried out major health care reform. The first question facing these countries—and the United States, for that matter—is an ethical issue: Is health care a human right?The Healing of America lays bare the moral question at the heart of our troubled system, dissecting the misleading rhetoric surrounding the health care debate: Is health care a human right?

Before the Lights Go Out: A Season Inside a Game on the Brink


Sean Fitz-Gerald - 2019
    It's become more expensive, more exclusive, and effectively off-limits to huge swaths of the potential sports-loving population. Youth registration numbers are stagnant; efforts to appeal to new Canadians are often grim at best; the game, increasingly, does not resemble the country of which it's for so long been an integral part. These signs worried Sean Fitz-Gerald. As a lifelong hockey fan and father of a young mixed-race son falling headlong in love with the game, he wanted to get to the roots of these issues. His entry point: a season with the Peterborough Petes, a storied OHL team far from its former glory in a once-emblematic Canadian city that is finding itself on the wrong side of the country's changing demographics. Fitz-Gerald profiles the players, coaches and front office staff, a mix of world-class talents with NHL aspirations and Peterborough natives happy with more modest dreams. Through their experiences, their widely varied motivations and expectations, we get a rich, colourful understanding of who ends up playing hockey in Canada and why. Fitz-Gerald interweaves the action of the season with portraits of public figures who've shaped and been shaped by the game: authors who captured its spirit, politicians who exploited it, and broadcasters who try to embody and sell it. He finds his way into community meetings full of angry season ticket holders, as well as into sterile boardrooms full of the sport's institutional brain trust, unable to break away from the inertia of tradition and hopelessly at war with itself. Before the Lights Go Out is a moving, funny, yet unsettling picture of a sport at a crossroads. Fitz-Gerald's warm but rigorous journalistic approach reads, in the end, like a letter to a troubled friend: it's not too late to save hockey in this country, but who has the will to do it?

A Number of Things: Stories of Canada Told Through Fifty Objects


Jane Urquhart - 2016
    Jane Urquhart chooses 50 Canadian objects and weaves a rich and surprising narrative that speaks to our collective experience as a nation.Each object is beautifully illustrated by the noted artist Scott McKowen, with Jane Urquhart conjuring and distilling meaning and magic from these unexpected facets of our history.The fifty artifacts range from a Nobel Peace Prize medal, a literary cherry tree, a royal cowcatcher, a Beothuk legging, a famous skull and an iconic artist’s shoe, as well as an Innu tea doll, a Sikh RCMP turban, a Cree basket, a Massey-Harris tractor and a hanging rope, among an array of unexpected and intriguing objects.Bringing the curiosity of the novelist and the eloquence of the poet to her task, Jane Urquhart composes a symphonic memory bank with objects that resonate with symbolic significance. In this compelling portrait of a completely original country called Canada, a master novelist has given all of us a national birthday bouquet like no other.

Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality


Pauline W. Chen - 2006
    What she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, Chen found herself wrestling with medicine’s most profound paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically depersonalizes dying. Final Exam follows Chen over the course of her education, training, and practice as she grapples at strikingly close range with the problem of mortality, and struggles to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate knowledge of shared humanity, and to separate her ideas about healing from her fierce desire to cure.From her first dissection of a cadaver in gross anatomy to the moment she first puts a scalpel to a living person; from the first time she witnesses someone flatlining in the emergency room to the first time she pronounces a patient dead, Chen is struck by her own mortal fears: there was a dying friend she could not call; a young patient’s tortured death she could not forget; even the sense of shared kinship with a corpse she could not cast aside when asked to saw its pelvis in two. Gradually, as she confronts the ways in which her fears have incapacitated her, she begins to reject what she has been taught about suppressing her feelings for her patients, and she begins to carve out a new role for herself as a physician and as human being. Chen’s transfixing and beautiful rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a brilliant questioning of how we should live.Moving and provocative, motored equally by clinical expertise and extraordinary personal grace, this is a piercing and compassionate journey into the heart of a world that is hidden and yet touches all of our lives. A superb addition to the best medical literature of our time.

The Malaria Capers : More Tales of Parasites and People, Research and Reality


Robert S. Desowitz - 1991
    Desowitz asks, has biotechnical research on malaria produced so little when it had promised so much? An expert in tropical diseases, Desowtiz searches for answers in this provocative book.

Stem Cell Therapy: A Rising Tide: How Stem Cells Are Disrupting Medicine and Transforming Lives


Neil H. Riordan - 2017
    When there aren’t enough of them, or they aren’t working properly, chronic diseases can manifest and persist. From industry leaders, sport stars, and Hollywood icons to thousands of everyday, ordinary people, stem cell therapy has helped when standard medicine failed. Many of them had lost hope. These are their stories. Neil H Riordan, author of MSC: Clinical Evidence Leading Medicine’s Next Frontier, the definitive textbook on clinical stem cell therapy, brings you an easy-to-read book about how and why stem cells work, and why they’re the wave of the future. “Neil takes readers on a riveting journey through the past, present and future of stem cell therapy. His well-researched, educational and entertaining book could change your life. I highly recommend it.” Tony Robbins, NY Times #1 Bestselling Author 100 years old will soon become the new 60. Stem cells are a key therapeutic to enable this future. Dr. Riordan’s book is your guide to why this is true and how you will benefit. A must read for anyone who cares about extending their healthy lifespan.” Peter H. Diamandis, MD; Founder, XPRIZE & Singularity University; Co-Founder, Human Longevity, Inc.; Author of NY Times Best Sellers Abundance and Bold

Motherhood


Sheila Heti - 2018
    In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home.Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.

Unlocking Lyme: Myths, Truths, and Practical Solutions for Chronic Lyme Disease


William Rawls - 2017
    Bill Rawls understands Lyme disease sufferers seeking clarity and relief because, like myself, he has experienced the pain and frustration firsthand. Through this ground-breaking book, he shares everything he has discovered on his journey to reclaiming his health... it may just be the answer you've been waiting for." – Neil Spector, MD, Author of Gone in a Heartbeat Lyme disease is one of the most puzzling illnesses on the planet. Anyone who has suffered from its debilitating symptoms knows the frustrations of trying to find a cure. Many sufferers drag themselves from one doctor or alternative practitioner to the next, getting lost in a maze of lab tests, prescription drugs, and treatments. Thousands of dollars and months (or years) later, they realize they are no better off than where they started. Unlocking Lyme puts an end to this desperate quest. Written by Dr. Bill Rawls, a physician who overcame Lyme disease himself, this book is a comprehensive, practical resource full of solutions that work. What took Dr. Rawls 10 years to learn through intense research and personal experience, you can now learn and implement in a matter of months. DR. RAWLS’ STORY Dr. Rawls was in the middle of a successful OB/GYN career when Lyme disease interrupted his life. In his struggle to overcome it, he explored every treatment option – from conventional medicine to the full range of alternative therapies. Ultimately, he embraced modern herbal therapy as his preferred solution, but he recognizes that the path may be different for each person. INSIDE THE BOOK Unlocking Lyme is the sum of Dr. Rawls’ experience, research, and practical solutions to date. The book is divided into four parts, each part addressing a critical aspect of recovery: PART 1 - Provides an overview of common misconceptions about what Lyme disease is (hint: it’s more than just a tick bite and Borrelia infection) PART 2 - Provides information on how to obtain a diagnosis, despite current limitations in diagnostic testing for Lyme PART 3 - Discusses limitations of long-term antibiotic use, and offers an overview of holistic and non-toxic therapies for healing and symptom control (including pain, depression, insomnia) PART 4 - Explains how to embrace a healthier lifestyle so you can stay well; learn how to strengthen your immune system, microbiome, and balance in your body In the years since his recovery, Dr. Rawls has helped thousands of patients find their path to healing from Lyme disease. Unlocking Lyme brings together Dr. Rawls’ accumulated knowledge and is the key you need to get your life back. TESTIMONIALS “Dr. Rawls understands the misery of chronic Lyme disease firsthand. Unlocking Lyme shares the approaches that he used to successfully recover his own health, and helps the reader understand that there is so much that can be done to regain a state of wellness and optimal health.” – Scott Forsgren Editor & Founder, BetterHealthGuy.com “Dr. Rawls has spoken on his approach to Lyme disease for the past several years; his comprehensive approach and lifestyle guidance has helped many of our members. We heartily endorse his approach to helping deal with the symptoms of Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses.” – John Dorney, President NC Lyme Disease Foundation "Unlocking Lyme delves into the science behind Lyme disease, explaining what it is, but more importantly how it can be overcome. Dr. Rawls carefully explains the various treatments for Lyme, leaving the reader feeling informed and empowered.

Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them


Seema Yasmin - 2021
    A long history of unethical medical experiments and medical mistakes, along with a host of celebrities spewing anti-science beliefs, has left many wary of science and the scientists who say they should be trusted. How do we stay sane while unraveling the knots of fact and fiction to find out what we should really be concerned about, and what we can laugh off?In Viral BS, journalist, doctor, professor, and CDC-trained disease detective Seema Yasmin, driven by a need to set the record straight, dissects some of the most widely circulating medical myths and pseudoscience. Exploring how epidemics of misinformation can spread faster than microbes, Dr. Yasmin asks why bad science is sometimes more believable and contagious than the facts. Each easy-to-read chapter covers a specific myth, whether it has endured for many years or hit the headlines more recently. Dr. Yasmin explores such pressing questions as- Do cell phones, Nutella, or bacon cause cancer?- Are we running out of antibiotics?- Does playing football cause brain disease?- Is the CDC banned from studying guns?- Do patients cared for by female doctors live longer? - Is trauma inherited?- Is suicide contagious?and much more.Taking a deep dive into the health and science questions you have always wanted answered, this authoritative and entertaining book empowers readers to reach their own conclusions. Viral BS even comes with Dr. Yasmin's handy pull-out-and-keep Bulls*%t Detection Kit.

The Female Brain


Louann Brizendine - 2006
    Though referenced like a work of research, Brizedine's writing style is fully accessible. Brizendine provides a fascinating look at the life cycle of the female brain from birth ("baby girls will connect emotionally in ways that baby boys don't") to birthing ("Motherhood changes you because it literally alters a woman's brain-structurally, functionally, and in many ways, irreversibly") to menopause (when "the female brain is nowhere near ready to retire") and beyond. At the same time, Brizedine is not above reviewing the basics: "We may think we're a lot more sophisticated than Fred or Wilma Flintstone, but our basic mental outlook and equipment are the same." While this book will be of interest to anyone who wonders why men and women are so different, it will be particularly useful for women and parents of girls.

Ron MacLean's Hockey Towns


Ron MacLean - 2015
    A new book by the co-author of the national bestseller Cornered.When you first meet Ron MacLean, he asks where you’re from, and he always comes back with a story. No one has crossed this country more than MacLean. In his 28 years on Hockey Night in Canada and now as host of Rogers’ Hometown Hockey, Ron has met fascinating people from coast to coast and has great stories to tell. Now, in this new book, MacLean is back, with brand new tales from across the country.These are stories you’ve never heard before. From London to Castlegar, Yellowknife to Cole Harbour, Medicine Hat to Trois Rivieres, from Bantam to Junior B to the NHL, our country is full of great characters: Players, coaches, hockey moms and hockey dads; rivalries, practical jokes, careers that grew out of nothing and "can’t lose" prospects who flamed out too soon; spectacular triumphs, heart-breaking tragedies and tales of friendship, betrayal, love and loyalty—all compelling, entertaining and inspiring.Once again working with Kirstie McLellan Day, co-author of the blockbuster bestsellers Playing With Fire, Tough Guy and Cornered, this is MacLean at his finest.