Book picks similar to
Behind the Curtain: A Peek at Life from within the ER by Jeffrey E. Sterling
medical
nonfiction
med
medical-books
Clinical Anatomy
Richard S. Snell - 1978
Known for its clear and consistent organization and concise writing, this text focuses on presenting anatomical information that is clinically relevant. The book's unified structure includes the following components in each chapter: Outline, Objectives, Basic Anatomy, Radiographic Anatomy, Surface Anatomy, Clinical Notes, Clinical Problem-Solving, and National Board-Type Questions.
Do No Harm: The People Who Amputate Their Perfectly Healthy Limbs, and the Doctors Who Help Them
Anil Ananthaswamy - 2012
Sufferers have been ridiculed and labelled perverts. Yet the compulsion to be free of a limb is no imaginary illness. The feelings the condition generates are extraordinarily powerful — so strong that sufferers often seek out the most radical of treatments, and a few unorthodox surgeons risk their reputations to assist.Now we may know why: the condition's deep neurological roots are being unearthed, with startling implications for sufferers, the medical profession and our own understanding of ourselves.In this disturbing story from new science and technology publisher MATTER, acclaimed writer Anil Ananthaswamy delves into the science and accompanies an underground group of sufferers who travel across the world to get the illicit surgery they crave. Join him on a journey that reveals what it's like to be at war with your own body.
One Doctor: Close Calls, Cold Cases and the Mystery of Medicine
Brendan Reilly - 2013
In riveting first-person prose, Dr. Brendan Reilly takes us to the front lines of medicine today. Whipsawed by daily crises and frustrations, Reilly must deal with several daunting challenges simultaneously: the extraordinary patients under his care on the teeming wards of a renowned teaching hospital; the life-threatening illnesses of both of his ninety-year-old parents; and the tragic memory of a cold case from long ago that haunts him still. As Reilly’s patients and their families survive close calls, struggle with heartrending decisions, and confront the limits of medicine’s power to cure, One Doctor lays bare a fragmented, depersonalized, business-driven health-care system where real caring is hard to find. Every day, Reilly sees patients who fall through the cracks and suffer harm because they lack one doctor who knows them well and relentlessly advocates for their best interests.Filled with fascinating characters in New York City and rural New England — people with dark secrets, mysterious illnesses, impossible dreams, and many kinds of courage — One Doctor tells their stories with sensitivity and empathy, reminding us of professional values once held dear by all physicians. But medicine has changed enormously during Reilly’s career, for both better and worse, and One Doctor is a cautionary tale about those changes. It is also a hopeful, inspiring account of medicine’s potential to improve people’s lives, Reilly’s quest to understand the "truth" about doctoring, and a moving testament to the difference one doctor can make.
Lights and Sirens
Kevin Grange - 2015
Blending months of classroom instruction with ER rotations and a grueling field internship with the Los Angeles Fire Department, UCLA’s paramedic program is like a mix of boot camp and med school. It would turn out to be the hardest thing Grange had ever done—but also the most transformational and inspiring.An in-depth look at the trials and tragedies that paramedic students experience daily, Lights and Sirens is ultimately about the best part of humanity—people working together to help save a human life.
Trauma Room Two
Philip Allen Green - 2015
It is a place where life and death meet. A place where some families celebrate the most improbable of victories while others face the most devastating of losses. A place where what matters the most in this life is revealed. Trauma Room Two is just such a place. In this collection of short stories, Dr. Green takes the reader inside the hidden emotional landscape of emergency medicine. Based on fifteen years of experience as an ER physician, he reveals the profound moments that often occur in emergency rooms for patients, their families, and the staff that work there.
Sexy Liberal!: Of Me I Sing
Stephanie Miller - 2015
With Arbitron ratings clocking over 3+ million listeners a week and simulcast daily in 37 million homes on Free Speech TV, where she is also the number one show, her strongest numbers are in the grand prize demographic of highly educated males 25-54, despite, or maybe because of , her status as an out gay woman. It probably explains the sublime effectiveness of her national billboard slogan: "Stephanie Miller...making men rise in the morning". Stephanie also headlined the country’s number one comedy tour, “Stephanie Miller’s Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour", as well as the number one comedy album, "Stephanie Miller's Sexy Liberal Comedy Album". She has recently had her second #1 comedy album in the country with her "Stephanie Miller's Happy Hour, Volume One". She frequents the Holy Trinity of cable news: CNN, MSNBC, and FOX, where she bursts the infallibility balloons of right wingers, often with one well-aimed pinpoint punchline. Here is SEXY LIBERAL!, which you can see as Al Franken rewritten by Sarah Silverman, Chelsea Handler horizontal on the desk of The Daily Show. Steph is the youngest child of Congressman William Miller of NY, Barry Goldwater’s running mate in 1964. We all know how that turned out. Though Steph was only 3, she shows here how that defeat affected her as much as it changed the Republican Party. It made her who she is. SEXY LIBERAL! is the book her 3,000,000 fans have been begging her to write. it’s both deeply personal and hilariously political. But most of all it is Stephanie’s unique voice, her jokes, her happy clappy optimism, and her truth that they tune in to day after day, that they download as a subscription podcast, that they buy tickets for, to see her unbleeped and in person. That’s what SEXY LIBERAL! delivers. Like an uncensored comedy drone right to your door!“Stephanie Miller is like ice cream for breakfast, or box-wine through a Krazy Straw: pure pleasure that some people say is bad for you, but you know better. Sexy Liberal! is deeply, deeply profane, big-hearted, surprising, and it might make you pee your pants a little. Just what you need! Read this book. Stephanie Miller for Everything, 2016!”--Rachel Maddow, host of The Rachel Maddow and author of Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power “Sexy Liberal! is a great book with mind-expanding astuteness and side-splitting humor. Stephanie Miller is so wondrously witty and wise you will want to quote her. But, first, you must read her. Buy this book and help Amazon at last turn a profit. --Lily Tomlin “Sexy Liberal! is inspired reading. It is laugh-enhancing and beyond thought-provoking! A must read. --Jane Wagner Reading Stephanie's book is like being on the best kind of dinner date. The conversation is smart, funny and politically insightful. And Stephanie's contribution bad either. Seriously, what a fun read. Stephanie, in her wonderfully self-deprecating way, lets you into her brilliant mind, her no BS take on the political scene, and life itself. Enter at your own risk.--Rob Reiner
How Not to be a Doctor: And Other Essays
John Launer - 2007
Taken together, they set out an argument that being a doctor - a real doctor - should mean being able to draw on every aspect of yourself, your interests, and your experiences, however remote these may seem from the medical task of the moment. Originating from the popular columns Launer has written for medical journals over his career, the more than fifty essays cover a range of topics including music, poetry, literature, and psychoanalysis, as well as contemporary medical politics and the personal experiences of being a doctor. From lessons on what they don't teach you in medical school, to a story of the imagined conversation between two prehistoric medical men, to the author's poignant account of being a patient himself as he received treatment for a life-threatening illness, the essays in How Not to Be a Doctor combine erudition with humour, candour, and the human touch. They show how, in medicine, you cannot separate personal experiences from professional ones, in short stories and reflections that will inform and entertain readers on both ends of the stethoscope.
Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych E.R.
Julie Holland - 2009
Recounts stories from her vast case files that are alternately terrifying, tragically comic, and profoundly moving, all while she deals with her best friend and fellow doctor's fight with cancer.
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
Atul Gawande - 2002
Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is--uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human.Complications is a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.
When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery
Frank T. Vertosick Jr. - 1996
In other words, by all of us."--Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of Love, Medicine and MiraclesRule One for the neurologist in residence: "You ain't never the same when the air hits your brain." In this fascinating book, Dr. Frank Vertosick brings that fact to life through intimate portraits of patients and unsparing yet gripping descriptions of brain surgery.With insight, humor, and poignancy, Dr. Vertosick chronicles his remarkable evolution from naive young intern to world-class neurosurgeon, where he faced, among other challenges, a six week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22 caliber bullet lodged in his skull. In candid detail, WHEN THE AIR HITS YOUR BRAIN illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room."Riveting."--Publishers Weekly
The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health
David B. Agus - 2015
In this book, he builds on that theme by showing why this is the luckiest time yet to be alive, giving you the keys to the new kingdom of wellness.Medicine is undergoing rapid change. In the old world, you followed general principles and doctors treated you based on broad, one-size-fits all solutions. In this new golden age, you’ll be able to take full advantage of the latest scientific findings and leverage the power of technology to customize your care. Only those who know how to access and adapt to these breakthroughs—without being distracted by hyped ideas and bad medicine—will benefit. Imagine being able to get fit and lose weight without dieting, train your immune system to fight cancer, edit your DNA to avoid a certain fate, erase the risk of a heart attack, reverse aging, and know exactly which drugs to take to optimize health with zero side effects.That’s the picture of the future that you can enter starting today. Welcome to The Lucky Years.
Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind
Sue Black - 2020
Our stories are marbled into their marrow.Drawing upon her years of research and a wealth of remarkable experience, the world-renowned forensic anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black takes us on a journey of revelation. From skull to feet, via the face, spine, chest, arms, hands, pelvis and legs, she shows that each part of us has a tale to tell. What we eat, where we go, everything we do leaves a trace, a message that waits patiently for months, years, sometimes centuries, until a forensic anthropologist is called upon to decipher it.Some of this information is easily understood, some holds its secrets tight and needs scientific cajoling to be released. But by carefully piecing together the evidence, the facts of a life can be rebuilt. Limb by limb, case by case – some criminal, some historical, some unaccountably bizarre – Sue Black reconstructs with intimate sensitivity and compassion the hidden stories in what we leave behind.
Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon's First Years
Michael J. Collins - 2005
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 feels inadequate and unprepared. All too soon, the euphoria of beginning his career as an orthopedic resident gives way to the feeling he is a counterfeit, an imposter who has infiltrated a society of brilliant surgeons.This story of Collins' four-year surgical residency traces his rise from an eager but clueless first-year resident to accomplished Chief Resident in his final year. With unparalleled humor, he recounts the disparity between people's perceptions of a doctor's glamorous life and the real thing: a succession of run down cars that are towed to the junk yard, long weekends moonlighting at rural hospitals, a family that grows larger every year, and a laughable income.Collins' good nature helps him over some of the rough spots but cannot spare him the harsh reality of a doctor's life. Every day he is confronted with decisions that will change people's lives-or end them-forever. A young boy's leg is mangled by a tractor: risk the boy's life to save his leg, or amputate immediately? A woman diagnosed with bone cancer injures her hip: go through a painful hip operation even though she has only months to live? Like a jolt to the system, he is faced with the reality of suffering and death as he struggles to reconcile his idealism and aspiration to heal with the recognition of his own limitations and imperfections.Unflinching and deeply engaging, Hot Lights, Cold Steel is a humane and passionate reminder that doctors are people too. This is a gripping memoir, at times devastating, others triumphant, but always compulsively readable.
Patients I Will Never Forget
Sally Willard Burbank - 2014
Sally Burbank has seen everything---lunatics, criminals, hypochondriacs, and even a Cocker spaniel! By popular demand, she has penned a collection of humorous and inspiring true stories to forever capture these memorable encounters. The antics of a demented octogenarian and a dimwitted patient named "Bob" will leave you laughing out loud. Her disastrous attempts to combine medicine with motherhood will reveal a new side to ladies in lab coats. The inane ICD-10 codes and decisions of insurance companies will leave you shaking your head in disgust. Stir in a wheelchair-bound, legally blind dialysis patient who insists on serving others until her last dying breath, a comatose leukemia patient miraculously healed, and an unfortunate soul doomed to chopping onions forty-hours a week, and you are guaranteed to laugh, cry, and tell your friends about this amazing new book. Hilarious cartoons and quotations relevant to each story add icing to the cake, and make Patients I Will Never Forget a must-read for anyone who enjoyed All Creatures Great and Small.
Eye of the Storm: Experiencing God When You Can't See Him
Ryan Stevenson - 2020
Here, Stevenson shares about the turmoil of his early life, the rejection and pain faced in his initial attempts to launch his music career, the grief experienced during his mother’s long battle with cancer, the stress and burnout of his days working as a paramedic, and how an unexpected lightning storm gave him a front-row seat to a miracle that would turn his life around. When the dark clouds roll in, Stevenson has learned to listen to that still, small voice he hears—the voice of a trustworthy God who holds on to him even during the fiercest storms.