The Maker's Diet Revolution: The 10 Day Diet to Lose Weight and Detoxify Your Body, Mind and Spirit


Jordan S. Rubin - 2013
    Jordan will share everything he has learned in the years since he wrote The Maker's Diet, including: Health and Diet Tips Why our nation's food supply is compromised  The importance of organic foods Choosing the best water sources Raising healthy children, healing chronic illnesses and much more! His Popular Health Myths and TruthsJordan Rubin is a renowned natural health expert and NYTBest-selling author of The Maker's Diet.

An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives


Matt Richtel - 2019
    An epic, first-of-its-kind book, entwining leading-edge scientific discovery with the intimate stories of four individual lives, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist.A terminal cancer patient rises from the grave. A medical marvel defies HIV. Two women with autoimmunity discover their own bodies have turned against them. Matt Richtel's An Elegant Defense uniquely entwines these intimate stories with science’s centuries-long quest to unlock the mysteries of sickness and health, and illuminates the immune system as never before.The immune system is our body’s essential defense network, a guardian vigilantly fighting illness, healing wounds, maintaining order and balance, and keeping us alive. Its legion of microscopic foot soldiers—from T cells to “natural killers”—patrols our body, linked by a nearly instantaneous communications grid. It has been honed by evolution over millennia to face an almost infinite array of threats.For all its astonishing complexity, however, the immune system can be easily compromised by fatigue, stress, toxins, advanced age, and poor nutrition—hallmarks of modern life—and even by excessive hygiene. Paradoxically, it is a fragile wonder weapon that can turn on our own bodies with startling results, leading today to epidemic levels of autoimmune disorders.Richtel effortlessly guides readers on a scientific detective tale winding from the Black Plague to twentieth-century breakthroughs in vaccination and antibiotics, to the cutting-edge laboratories that are revolutionizing immunology—perhaps the most extraordinary and consequential medical story of our time. The foundation that Richtel builds makes accessible revelations about cancer immunotherapy, the microbiome, and autoimmune treatments that are changing millions of lives. An Elegant Defense also captures in vivid detail how these powerful therapies, along with our behavior and environment, interact with the immune system, often for the good but always on a razor’s edge that can throw this remarkable system out of balance.Drawing on his groundbreaking reporting for the New York Times and based on extensive new interviews with dozens of world-renowned scientists, Matt Richtel has produced a landmark book, equally an investigation into the deepest riddles of survival and a profoundly human tale that is movingly brought to life through the eyes of his four main characters, each of whom illuminates an essential facet of our “elegant defense.”

Another Alice: An Inspiring True Story Of A Young Woman's Battle To Overcome Rheumatoid Arthritis


Alice Peterson - 2008
    In the midst of shock and denial, and the enduring question, 'Isn't it old people who get arthritis?', Alice had to learn to live with what quickly turned from the odd ache and pain to a very aggressive form of the illness, and rediscover a new path in life. "Another Alice" is at times utterly heart-breaking, and at others laugh-out-loud. Here is her story of how, armed with humour and courage, she left behind a world she loved to overcome the pain of a degenerative illness. Told with wit, charm and frankness, "Another Alice" is also a story of friendship, family, growing up and the desire to be 'normal'. But, above all, it celebrates the power of the human spirit.

Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine


Thomas Hager - 2019
    It could be an oddball researcher’s genius insight, a catalyzing moment in geopolitical history, a new breakthrough technology, or an unexpected but welcome side effect discovered during clinical trials. Piece together these stories, as Thomas Hager does in this remarkable, century-spanning history, and you can trace the evolution of our culture and the practice of medicine.  ​Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book.

Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours


Phillip Longman - 2007
    This encouraging change not only has benefited veterans but also provides a blueprint for salvaging America's own deeply troubled healthcare system. "Best Care Anywhere" shows how a government bureaucracy, working with little notice, is setting the standard for best practices and cost reduction while the private sector is lagging in both areas. Author Phillip Longman challenges conventional wisdom by explaining exactly how market forces work to lower quality and raise prices in the healthcare sector, and how U.S. medical practices have a weak basis in science. The book, expanded from a widely praised article in the "Washington Monthly," mixes hard facts with author Philip Longmans' compelling human story of the loss of his wife to cancer. Part manifesto, part moving memoir, "Best Care Anywhere" offers new hope for addressing a major problem of contemporary society that affects all of us.

Awakenings


Oliver Sacks - 1973
    It recounts the life histories of those who had been victims of the 1920s encephalitis lethargica epidemic. Sacks chronicles his efforts in the late 1960s to help these patients at the Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, New York.

Make America Healthy Again: How Bad Behavior and Big Government Caused a Trillion-Dollar Crisis


Nicole Saphier - 2020
    The truth is, this isn’t a government problem. It’s our own fault. In this thought-provoking book, board certified medical doctor Nicole Saphier calls on all Americans to take responsibility for their individual health. Americans are notoriously unhealthy—we eat too much, drink too much, and sit too much. When roughly 80% of cardiovascular disease and 40% of all cancer cases could be prevented by simple lifestyle changes, it is time to take a deeper look at the problem and ask who truly is responsible. Saphier contends that by getting healthier, we can reduce the astronomical cost of treatment and improve overall care. We don’t need socialized medicine—we need to take better care of ourselves.In Make America Healthy Again, Saphier combines historical events, economic trends, essential lifestyle advice, and her own perspective to offer concrete solutions to address this massive problem. As she examines a wide range of topics, including the leading causes of death, mental health stigma, social media, physician burnout, and the opioid crisis, Saphier offers a much-needed alternative perspective on the healthcare debate.The only way to lower health care costs for everyone is to stop incentivizing bad health decisions. Plans like “Medicare for all” would allow Americans to continue to eat poorly and lead sedentary lives. We can’t keep expecting doctors to fix behaviors that we have in our power to prevent, she argues. It’s only going to get worse unless we take action. It’s up to the American people to make America healthy again.

The Naked Surgeon: the power and peril of transparency in medicine


Samer Nashef - 2015
    We all have one, but most of us will never see one. The heart surgeon now has that privilege but, for centuries, the heart was out of reach even for surgeons. So when a surgeon nowadays opens up a ribcage and mends a heart, it remains something of a miracle, even if, to some, it is merely plumbing. As with plumbers, the quality of surgeons’ work varies. As with plumbers, surgeons’ opinion of their own prowess and their own attitude to risk are not always reliable. Measurement is key. We’ve had a century of effective evidence-based medicine. We’ve had barely a decade of thorough monitoring of clinical outcomes. Thanks to the ground-breaking risk modelling of pioneering surgeons like Samer Nashef, we at last know how to judge whether an operation is in a patient’s best interest, which hospital and surgeon would be best for that operation, when it might best be performed and what the exact level of risk is. We have at last made what is important in surgery measurable. But how should surgeons, and their patients, use these newfound insights? Ever since his days as a medical student, Samer Nashef has challenged the medical profession to be more open and more accurate about the success of surgical procedures, for the sake of the patients. In The Naked Surgeon, he unclothes his own profession to demonstrate to his reader (and prospective patient) many revelations, such as the paradox at the heart of the cardiac surgeon’s craft: the more an operation is likely to kill you, the better it is for you. And he does so with absolute clarity, fluency and not a little wit.

Things That Matter: Stories of Life & Death


David Galler - 2016
    This book will equally deepen the awareness of clinicians and enlighten the lay reader. It is a gift to both.' Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPPIn this highly articulate, down-to-earth, generous book, Dr David Galler tells stories of life and death from his position as Intensive Care specialist at Middlemore Hospital. Written lyrically and warmly, these stories are based on real life events describing the everyday dilemmas and challenges that doctors and patients commonly face.It aims to explain and demystify much of the work doctors do, cast light on the workings of the medical establishment and how medicine operates, in the hope that it will encourage patients to seek to be better informed and play a greater role in the decisions that will affect them and their loved ones.It speaks to the resilience of individuals and families and their extraordinary generosity and dignity under the most extreme pressure. This book is about realistic optimism and is a celebration of life.It is also a very personal story about David Galler's life, his family and about his own slow coming of age as a doctor, from the sadness and helplessness he felt about his father's death to at last feeling that he was of some use to his most important patient, his mother.

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution


Jonathan Eig - 2014
    Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid.Spanning the years from Sanger’s heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.

The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town


Brian Alexander - 2021
    Americans are dying sooner, and living in poorer health. Alexander argues that no plan will solve America’s health crisis until the deeper causes of that crisis are addressed. Bryan, Ohio's hospital, is losing money, making it vulnerable to big health systems seeking domination and Phil Ennen, CEO, has been fighting to preserve its independence. Meanwhile, Bryan, a town of 8,500 people in Ohio’s northwest corner, is still trying to recover from the Great Recession. As local leaders struggle to address the town’s problems, and the hospital fights for its life amid a rapidly consolidating medical and hospital industry, a 39-year-old diabetic literally fights for his limbs, and a 55-year-old contractor lies dying in the emergency room. With these and other stories, Alexander strips away the wonkiness of policy to reveal Americans’ struggle for health against a powerful system that’s stacked against them, but yet so fragile it blows apart when the pandemic hits. Culminating with COVID-19, this book offers a blueprint for how we created the crisis we're in.

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood


Rose George - 2018
    It is a waste product and a commodity pricier than oil. It can save lives and transmit deadly infections. Each one of us has roughly nine pints of it, yet many don’t even know their own blood type. And for all its ubiquity, the few tablespoons of blood discharged by 800 million women are still regarded as taboo; menstruation is perhaps the single most demonized biological event.Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, is renowned for her intrepid work on topics that are invisible but vitally important. In Nine Pints, she takes us from ancient practices of bloodletting to modern “hemovigilance” teams that track blood-borne diseases. She introduces Janet Vaughan, who set up the world’s first system of mass blood donation during the Blitz, and Arunachalam Muruganantham, known as “Menstrual Man” for his work on sanitary pads for developing countries. She probes the lucrative business of plasma transfusions, in which the U.S. is known as the “OPEC of plasma.” And she looks to the future, as researchers seek to bring synthetic blood to a hospital near you.Spanning science and politics, stories and global epidemics, Nine Pints reveals our life's blood in an entirely new light.

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease


Allan H. Ropper - 2014
    What is it like to try to heal the body when the mind is under attack? In this book, Dr. Allan Ropper and Brian Burrell take the reader behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School's neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces down bizarre, life-altering afflictions. Like Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Ropper inhabits a world where absurdities abound:• A figure skater whose body has become a ticking time-bomb • A salesman who drives around and around a traffic rotary, unable to get off • A college quarterback who can't stop calling the same play • A child molester who, after falling on the ice, is left with a brain that is very much dead inside a body that is very much alive • A mother of two young girls, diagnosed with ALS, who has to decide whether a life locked inside her own head is worth livingHow does one begin to treat such cases, to counsel people whose lives may be changed forever? How does one train the next generation of clinicians to deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease? Dr. Ropper and his colleague answer these questions by taking the reader into a rarified world where lives and minds hang in the balance.

Into the Gray Zone: A Neuroscientist Explores the Border Between Life and Death


Adrian Owen - 2017
    People in this middle place have sustained traumatic brain injuries or are the victims of stroke or degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Many are oblivious to the outside world, and their doctors believe they are incapable of thought. But a sizeable number are experiencing something different: intact minds adrift deep within damaged brains and bodies. Following Owen’s journey of exciting medical discovery, Into the Gray Zone asks some tough and terrifying questions, such as: What is life like for these patients? What can their families and friends do to help them? What are the ethical implications for religious organizations, politicians, the Right to Die movement, and even insurers? And perhaps most intriguing of all: in defining what a life worth living is, are we too concerned with the physical and not giving enough emphasis to the power of thought? What, truly, defines a satisfying life?

More for Mom: Living Your Whole and Holy Life


Kristin Funston - 2019
    The pieces of each mom's life-the work life, mom life, social life, etc.-are mended together through Christ to complete her one whole life, set apart because of Him.This book is a stepping stone to help working mothers reset their spiritual and emotional health, habits, and relationship with God. There are performance pressures at work, home, and mind-sets that affect a mom's ability to feel complete and live more closely aligned with God. This book includes the beginning steps for moms to walk in wholeness and holiness by asking God for more.