"I mean, YOUR life isn't over. Beyond the kids. You'll go on living, doing things. This isn't it."I know, I assure him. I have the kids. They need me. They're my life now."OK," he replies, then grunts—more of a brief hum. He only hums when he thinks I'm full of shit.Shockingly single. Amy Biancolli's life went off script more dramatically than most after her husband of twenty years jumped off the roof of a parking garage. Left with three children, a three-story house, and a pile of knotty psychological complications, Amy realizes the flooding dishwasher, dead car battery, rapidly growing lawn, basement sump pump, and broken doorknob aren't going to fix themselves. She also realizes that "figuring shit out" means accepting the horrors that came her way, rolling with them, slogging through them, helping others through theirs, and working her way through life with love and laughter.Amy Biancolli is an author and journalist whose column appears in the Albany Times Union. Before that, Amy served as film critic for the Houston Chronicle where her reviews, published around the country, won her the 2007 Comment and Criticism Award from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Association. Biancolli is the author of House of Holy Fools: A Family Portrait in Six Cracked Parts, which earned her Albany Author of the Year. Amy lives in Albany, New York, with her three children.

    But work takes a strange turn when she is promoted onto the Pfizer account and suddenly finds herself on the other side of the curtain, developing ads for an anti-depressant drug. Overwhelmed by her professional life and the self-scrutiny it inspires, her mania takes hold. She quits her job to become an artist, only to be hospitalized by her parents against her will. Over the course of her two weeks in the ward, she tries to find a path out of the hospital and this cycle of treatment. One where she can live the life she wants, finding freedom and autonomy, without sacrificing her dreams in order to stay well.

    But I was getting there. I wanted the world to know that all of this pain I had been feeling…that it was related to my vagina. Thus, Vagina Problems was born. It was a cutesy name. It was my way of taking this pain and saying, “Whatever. I’m here. I have it. It sucks. Let’s talk about it.”In April 2014, Deputy Editorial Director at BuzzFeed Lara Parker opened up to the world in an article on the website: she suffers from endometriosis. And beyond that? She let the whole world know that she wasn’t having any sex, as sex was excruciatingly painful. Less than a year before, she received not only the diagnosis of endometriosis, but also a diagnosis of pelvic floor dysfunction, vulvodynia, vaginismus, and vulvar vestibulitis. Combined, these debilitating conditions have wreaked havoc on her life, causing excruciating pain throughout her body since she was fourteen years old. These are her Vagina Problems. It was five years before Lara learned what was happening to her body. Five years of doctors insisting she just had “bad period cramps,” or implying her pain was psychological. Shamed and stigmatized, Lara fought back against a medical community biased against women and discovered that the ignorance of many doctors about women’s anatomy was damaging more than just her own life. One in ten women have endometriosis and it takes an average of seven years before they receive an accurate diagnosis—or any relief from this incurable illness’ chronic pain. With candid revelations about her vaginal physical therapy, dating as a straight woman without penetrative sex, coping with painful seizures while at the office, diet and wardrobe malfunctions when your vagina hurts all the time, and the depression and anxiety of feeling unloved, Lara tackles it all in Vagina Problems: Endometriosis, Painful Sex, and Other Taboo Topics with courage, wit, love, and a determination to live her best life."

    PCOS is by far the most common hormone imbalance in women of this age group, yet few women understand the threat it poses to their health—or how to prevent it. In A Patient's Guide to PCOS, Dr. Walter Futterweit, a foremost authority on PCOS in America, tells women everything they need to know about this condition and how to treat it. Drawing on his twenty-five years researching and treating the condition and his ongoing long-term study of more than a thousand women with PCOS, Futterweit discusses• what PCOS is and how it affects your body• what to eat and how to exercise to control PCOS• all the treatment options, including the latest drug therapies• how to reverse PCOS-induced infertility and restore healthy skin and hair• resources for preventing, diagnosing, and treating PCOSThis comprehensive guide contains everything women need to know about PCOS—from identifying warning signs and seeking a diagnosis to finding emotional support in recovery—to regain their health and resume their lives.

    If you’re like most people moving into the phase of life where protecting—as well as growing-- assets is paramount, you’re faced with a number of financial puzzles.  Maybe you’re struggling to get your kids through college without drawing down your life’s savings. Perhaps you sense your nest egg is at risk and want to move into safer investments. Maybe you’re contemplating downsizing to a smaller home, but aren’t sure of the financial implications. Possibly, medical expenses have become a bigger drain than you expected and you need help assessing options.  Perhaps you’ll shortly be eligible for social security but want to optimize when and how to take it.Whatever your specific financial issue, one thing is certain—your range of choices is vast. As the financial world becomes increasingly complex, what you need is deeply researched advice from professionals whose credentials are impeccable and who prize clarity and straightforwardness over financial mumbo-jumbo.Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz and the Schwab team have been helping clients tackle their toughest money issues for decades.  Through Carrie’s popular “Ask Carrie” columns, her leadership of the Charles Schwab Foundation, and her work across party lines through two White House administrations and with the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability, she has become one of America’s most trusted sources for financial advice. Here, Carrie will not only answer all the questions that keep you up at night, she’ll provide answers to many questions you haven’t considered but should.

    But by this point in her startling book, Dangerous Doses, readers are already on a first-name basis with the five investigators involved in breaking the case. These five -- drug inspectors, Miami detectives, and a former cop -- had marshaled their forces to protect Floridians from adulterated, expired, or mishandled prescription drugs, and Eban spent two and a half years with them, weaving together her story of drug supply corruption, not merely in Florida but throughout the nation.Americans spend nearly $216 billion to fill over 3 billion prescriptions a year, and most believe that what they ingest, inject, or apply topically travels from the drug maker to their pharmacy through pristine labs and warehouses filled with men in white coats. But Eban discovered a different route, one driven by middlemen: wholesalers who sell diverted, degraded, and expired medicine traded by felons and accompanied by falsified paperwork. The truth is chilling and complex, but Eban's intelligent writing, careful plotting, and dogged reporting make for a suspenseful and shocking read, and she offers a battle-ready road map for combating the problem, including excellent practical advice for consumers. (Fall 2005 Selection)

    But some tests and therapies are discontinued because they are found to be worse, or at least no better, than what they replaced. Medications like Vioxx and procedures such as vertebroplasty for back pain caused by compression fractures are among the medical "advances" that turned out to be dangerous or useless. What Dr. Vinayak K. Prasad and Dr. Adam S. Cifu call medical reversal happens when doctors start using a medication, procedure, or diagnostic tool without a robust evidence base—and then stop using it when it is found not to help, or even to harm, patients.Drs. Prasad and Cifu narrate fascinating stories from every corner of medicine to explore why medical reversals occur, how they are harmful, and what can be done to avoid them. They explore the difference between medical innovations that improve care and those that only appear to be promising. They also outline a comprehensive plan to reform medical education, research funding and protocols, and the process for approving new drugs that will ensure that more of what gets done in doctors’ offices and hospitals is truly effective.

    In this extraordinary memoir, she opens a window into the experience of wordlessness—the language paralysis called aphasia. In narrating the recovery of her husband, Paul West, from a stroke that reduced his vast vocabulary to a single syllable, she evokes the joy and mystery of the brain’s ability to find and connect words. Deeply rewarding to readers of all kinds, Ackerman has given us a literary love story, accessible insight into the science and medicine of brain injury,and invaluable spiritual sustenance in the face of life’s myriad physical sufferings.

    This book encourages musicians to develop a broader understanding of the involvement of the entire body in playing—and the strains playing places on the body—by focusing on body mapping to increase awareness of the body’s function, size, and structure. Ways in which piano, organ, harpsichord, clavichord, and digital keyboard players can eliminate or prevent carpal tunnel syndrome and other debilitating conditions without traditional medical treatments are also explored.

    I also wrote it from the viewpoint of someone who has discovered many silver linings in the long, windy, bumpy road of recovering from Cptsd. I felt encouraged to write this book because of thousands of e-mail responses to the articles on my website that repeatedly expressed gratitude for the helpfulness of my work. An often echoed comment sounded like this: At last someone gets it. I can see now that I am not bad, defective or crazy…or alone! The causes of Cptsd range from severe neglect to monstrous abuse. Many survivors grow up in houses that are not homes – in families that are as loveless as orphanages and sometimes as dangerous. If you felt unwanted, unliked, rejected, hated and/or despised for a lengthy portion of your childhood, trauma may be deeply engrained in your mind, soul and body. This book is a practical, user-friendly self-help guide to recovering from the lingering effects of childhood trauma, and to achieving a rich and fulfilling life. It is copiously illustrated with examples of my own and my clients’ journeys of recovering. This book is also for those who do not have Cptsd but want to understand and help a loved one who does. This book also contains an overview of the tasks of recovering and a great many practical tools and techniques for recovering from childhood trauma. It extensively elaborates on all the recovery concepts explained on my website, and many more. However, unlike the articles on my website, it is oriented toward the layperson. As such, much of the psychological jargon and dense concentration of concepts in the website articles has been replaced with expanded and easier to follow explanations. Moreover, many principles that were only sketched out in the articles are explained in much greater detail. A great deal of new material is also explored. Key concepts of the book include managing emotional flashbacks, understanding the four different types of trauma survivors, differentiating the outer critic from the inner critic, healing the abandonment depression that come from emotional abandonment and self-abandonment, self-reparenting and reparenting by committee, and deconstructing the hierarchy of self-injuring responses that childhood trauma forces survivors to adopt. The book also functions as a map to help you understand the somewhat linear progression of recovery, to help you identify what you have already accomplished, and to help you figure out what is best to work on and prioritize now. This in turn also serves to help you identify the signs of your recovery and to develop reasonable expectations about the rate of your recovery. I hope this map will guide you to heal in a way that helps you to become an unflinching source of kindness and self-compassion for yourself, and that out of that journey you will find at least one other human being who will reciprocally love you well enough in that way.

    With great compassion and erudition, Gabor Maté demystifies medical science and, as he did in Scattered Minds, invites us all to be our own health advocates.

    Margaret I. Cuomo is inspired to seek out new strategies for waging a smarter war on cancer.This year, about 1.6 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed and more than 1,500 people will die "per day." We've been asked to accept the disappointing strategy to "manage cancer as a chronic disease." We've allowed pharmaceutical companies to position cancer drugs that extend life by just weeks and may cost $100,000 for a single course of treatment as breakthroughs. Where is the bold leadership that will transform our system from treatment to prevention? Have we forgotten the mission of the National Cancer Act of 1971 to "conquer cancer"?Through an analysis of more than 40 years of medical evidence and interviews with the top cancer researchers, drug company executives, and health policy advisers, Dr. Cuomo reveals intriguing answers to these questions. She shows us how all cancer stakeholders--the pharmaceutical industry, the government, physicians, and concerned Americans--can change the way we view and fight cancer in this country.

    William Sears was diagnosed with cancer. He, like so many people, wanted-and needed-to take control of his health. Dr. Sears created a comprehensive, science based, head-to-toe program for living a long, fit life-and it worked. Now at the peak of health, Dr. Sears shares his program in PRIME-TIME HEALTH. This engaging and deeply informative book will motivate readers to make crucial behavior and lifestyle changes. Dr. Sears explores how to keep each body system healthy and delay those usual age-related changes. Written in Dr. Sears's wise, accessible, and entertaining voice, PRIME-TIME HEALTH is a practical program to help you live your best life possible-pain-free, disease-free, stress-free, and medication-free.

    . . all of the time.Plagued with some sort of cold or fever or bizarre aches and pains for much of her life, Emily thought the dizziness and stomachaches at the start of her senior year were just another bout of "Emily flu." But when they didn't go away, she knew something was seriously wrong. Eventually diagnosed with the rare and incurable West Nile virus, Emily watched her senior year and the future she had planned for go up in smoke."I want a normal life for a teenager. I want to ache from a long day at work. I want to be so busy that I don't have time to post on my blog. I want to run the race of life instead of being pushed along it in a wheelchair. I want to be on the ride of my life, you know?"Because Truth Is More Fascinating Than Fiction

    As a registered nurse, Wendy Cohan has provided health information and treatments for patients with a number of bladder conditions. She begins with a description of the anatomy and function of the urological system and the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of typical bladder problems. She lists frequently prescribed medications, explains how they work, and identifies their side effects. The bulk of the book picks up where medical treatment leaves off: the use of diet and herbs, regular exercise, stress and pain reduction techniques, and methods for better sleep are discussed. Cohan includes self-assessments, meal plans, herbal recipes, and a week-by-week recovery plan to create a complete holistic approach to bladder wellness. Information on specific diets, a review of the range of conditions that can cause pelvic pain, and a thorough guide to additional resources complete the book.