Book picks similar to
Genetic Engineering: Progress and Controversy by Scientific American
science
ab
genetic-engineering
medical-emergencies
Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All
Paul A. Offit - 2010
On one side are parents, bombarded with stories about the dangers of vaccines, now wary of immunizing their sons and daughters. On the other side are doctors, scared to send kids out of their offices vulnerable to illnesses like whooping cough and measles--the diseases of their grandparents.How did anyone come to view vaccines with horror? The answer is rooted in one of the most powerful citizen activist movements in our nation's history. In Deadly Choices, infectious disease expert Paul Offit relates the shocking story of anti-vaccine America--its origins, leaders, influences, and impact. Offering strategies to keep us from returning to an era when children routinely died from infections, Deadly Choices is a vigorous and definitive rebuttal of the powerful anti-vaccine movement.
Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America
Nortin M. Hadler - 2008
Although necessary health care should be available to all who need it, he says, the current health-care debate assumes that everyone requires massive amounts of expensive care to stay healthy. Hadler urges that before we commit to paying for whatever pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment tell us we need, American consumers need to adopt an attitude of skepticism and arm themselves with enough information to make some of their own decisions about what care is truly necessary. Each chapter of Worried Sick is an object lesson regarding the uses and abuses of a particular type of treatment, such as mammography, colorectal screening, statin drugs, or coronary stents. For consumers and medical professionals interested in understanding the scientific basis for Hadler's arguments, each topical chapter has an accompanying source chapter in which Hadler discusses the medical literature and studies that inform his critique. According to Hadler, a major stumbling block to rational health-care policy in the United States is contention over the very concept of what constitutes good health. By learning to distinguish good medical advice from persuasive medical marketing, consumers can make better decisions about their personal health and use that wisdom to inform their perspectives on health-policy issues.
BRS Pathology
Arthur S. Schneider - 1992
Chapters parallel most standard pathology texts and each chapter ends with a review test. Topics covered include general and basic pathology, major concepts of disease processes, and systemic pathology surveying principal disorders of each organ system. A comprehensive examination at the end of the book contains 500 USMLE-format questions. USMLE questions have all been updated to current USMLE format.The text is written in outline format for effective review. Icons indicate high-yield information that correlates with key pathology concepts.
Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors
Leah Kaminsky - 2010
Writer, M.D. celebrates this rich tradition with a collection of fiction and nonfiction by today’s most beloved physician-writers, including,• Abraham Verghese, on the lost art of the physical exam• Pauline Chen, on the bond between a med student and her first cadaver• Atul Gawande, on the ethical dilemmas of a young surgical intern• Danielle Ofri, on the devastation of losing a patient• Ethan Canin, on love, poetry, and growing oldThese essays and stories illuminate the inner lives of men and women who deal with trauma, illness, mortality, and grief on a daily basis. Read together, they provide a candid, moving, one-of-a-kind glimpse behind the doctor’s mask.
The Odd Body: Mysteries of Our Weird and Wonderful Bodies Explained
Stephen Juan - 1995
Things like why we yawn, why skin wrinkles after a bath, or even whether it's possible to keep a severed head alive: The Odd Body explains these and many other silly, weird, bizarre, and fascinating body mysteries. Dr. Stephen Juan entertains and rivets readers with his detailed answers.Reading The Odd Body is like having your doctor patiently answer all your random questions, one by one. But Dr. Juan goes well beyond the usual and ordinary things people wonder about bodies, like why most individuals are right-handed or why you get chills when chalk screeches across a blackboard. He also tells readers how a dead body is made into a mummy, the success rate of those who bore holes in their own heads to relieve headaches, and much, much more.The Odd Body is a unique combination of fun and fascinating material that's delivered by an expert who happens to be a great storyteller. The book's question-and-answer format makes it easy to pick up, turn to any page, and immediately become drawn into the intricacies of anatomy and physiology while gaining a better understanding of the human need to know more about ourselves.
Shoulder Pain? The Solution & Prevention
John M. Kirsch - 2010
Kirsch, M.D., an Orthopedic Surgeon for the common man. It is the result of 25 years of research into a new and simple exercise to prevent rotator cuff tears and impingement syndrome in the shoulder, as well as treating these conditions and frozen shoulder. Testimonials and research CT scan images are included as well as images of the exercises performed by models and patients.
Karl, the Universe and Everything
Karl Kruszelnicki - 2017
Learn about Dr Karl, the universe and everything, and discover how air-conditioning is sexist, how you can kill a spinning hard drive by shouting at it and how space junk is threatening our future capabilities for space travel.Could there be life on one of Saturn's moons? How much power could you collect from all the lightning on Earth? Why do books have book-smell? Why is 10 per cent of the Earth's land area prone to sinkholes?Why are some people chronically late? What would happen if the Earth stopped spinning? Why do most people hardly remember anything from the first half-a-dozen years of their life?How close are we to the Artificial Uterus? Why do some songs turn into "earworms" and stick inside your brain? Why does your hotel room access card get wiped so easily?And is your home WiFi really spying on you?
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
Lewis Thomas - 1978
The First Survivors of Alzheimer's: How Patients Recovered Life and Hope in Their Own Words
Dale E. Bredesen - 2021
In his first two books, Dr. Dale Bredesen outlined the revolutionary treatments that are changing what had previously seemed like the inevitable outcome of cognitive decline and dementia. And in these moving narratives, you can hear directly from the first survivors of Alzheimer's themselves--their own amazing stories of hope told in their own words. These first person accounts honestly detail the fear, struggle, and ultimate victory of each patient's journey. They vividly describe what it is like to have Alzheimer's. They also drill down on how each of these patients made the program work for them--the challenges, the workarounds, the encouraging results that are so motivating. Dr. Bredesen includes commentary following each story to help point readers to the tips and tricks that might help them as well.Dr. Bredesen's patients have not just survived; they have thrived to rediscover fulfilling lives, rewarding relationships, and meaningful work. This book will give unprecedented hope to patients and their families.
The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It
Ricki Lewis - 2012
Like something from a science fiction novel, doctors carefully injected viruses bearing healing genes into the DNA of Corey's eyes a few days later, Corey could see, his sight restored by gene therapy.THE FOREVER FIX is the first book to tell the fascinating story of gene therapy: how it works, the science behind it, how patients (mostly children) have been helped and harmed, and how scientists learned from each trial to get one step closer to its immense promise, the promise of a "forever fix," - a cure that, by fixing problems at their genetic root, does not need further surgery or medication.Told through the voices of the children and families who have been the inspiration, experimental subjects, and successes of genetic science, THE FOREVER FIX is compelling and engaging narrative science that tells explores the future of medicine as well as the families and scientists who are breaking new ground every day."
Fitzpatrick's Color Atlas and Synopsis of Clinical Dermatology
Klaus Wolff - 2005
The illustrations provide some of the best quality and most varied examples of skin conditions important to any health care pforessional dealing with skin problems.
Extreme Medicine: How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century
Kevin Fong - 2014
Within a few short decades the most hostile of the world’s environments had all been conquered. Likewise, in the twentieth century, medicine transformed human life. Doctors took what was routinely fatal and made it survivable. As modernity brought us ever more into different kinds of extremis, doctors pushed the bounds of medical advances and human endurance. Extreme exploration challenged the body in ways that only the vanguard of science could answer. Doctors, scientists, and explorers all share a defining trait: they push on in the face of grim odds. Because of their extreme exploration we not only understand our physiology better; we have also made enormous strides in the science of healing.Drawing on his own experience as an anesthesiologist, intensive care expert, and NASA adviser, Dr. Kevin Fong examines how cuttingedge medicine pushes the envelope of human survival by studying the human body’s response when tested by physical extremes. Extreme Medicine explores different limits of endurance and the lens each offers on one of the systems of the body. The challenges of Arctic exploration created opportunities for breakthroughs in open heart surgery; battlefield doctors pioneered techniques for skin grafts, heart surgery, and trauma care; underwater and outer space exploration have revolutionized our understanding of breathing, gravity, and much more. Avant-garde medicine is fundamentally changing our ideas about the nature of life and death.Through astonishing accounts of extraordinary events and pioneering medicine, Fong illustrates the sheer audacity of medical practice at extreme limits, where human life is balanced on a knife’s edge. Extreme Medicine is a gripping debut about the science of healing, but also about exploration in its broadest sense—and about how, by probing the very limits of our biology, we may ultimately return with a better appreciation of how our bodies work, of what life is, and what it means to be human.
Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal
Erik Vance - 2016
Could the secrets to personal health lie within our own brains? Journalist Erik Vance explores the surprising ways our expectations and beliefs influence our bodily responses to pain, disease, and everyday events. Drawing on centuries of research and interviews with leading experts in the field, Vance takes us on a fascinating adventure from Harvard’s research labs to a witch doctor’s office in Catemaco, Mexico, to an alternative medicine school near Beijing (often called “China’s Hogwarts”). Vance’s firsthand dispatches will change the way you think—and feel. Continuing the success of National Geographic’s brain books and rounding out our pop science category, this book shows how expectations, beliefs, and self-deception can actively change our bodies and minds. Vance builds a case for our “internal pharmacy”—the very real chemical reactions our brains produce when we think we are experiencing pain or healing, actual or perceived. Supporting this idea is centuries of placebo research in a range of forms, from sugar pills to shock waves; studies of alternative medicine techniques heralded and condemned in different parts of the world (think crystals and chakras); and most recently, major advances in brain mapping technology. Thanks to this technology, we're learning how we might leverage our suggestibility (or lack thereof) for personalized medicine, and Vance brings us to the front lines of such study.From the Hardcover edition.
I Do Not Consent: My Fight Against Medical Cancel Culture
Simone Gold - 2020
Microbe Hunters
Paul de Kruif - 1926
Gonzalez-Crussi, from the Introduction An international bestseller, translated into eighteen languages, Paul de Kruif’s classic account of the first scientists to see and learn about the microscopic world continues to fascinate new readers. This is a timeless dramatization of the scientists, bacteriologists, doctors, and medical technicians who discovered the microbes and invented the vaccines to counter them. De Kruif writes about how seemingly simple but really fundamental discovers of science—for instance, how a microbe was first viewed in a clear drop of rain water, and when, for the first time, Louis Pasteur discovered that a simple vaccine could save a man from the ravages of rabies by attacking the microbes that cause it.