In The Violinist's Thumb, he explores the wonders of the magical building block of life: DNA.There are genes to explain crazy cat ladies, why other people have no fingerprints, and why some people survive nuclear bombs. Genes illuminate everything from JFK's bronze skin (it wasn't a tan) to Einstein's genius. They prove that Neanderthals and humans bred thousands of years more recently than any of us would feel comfortable thinking. They can even allow some people, because of the exceptional flexibility of their thumbs and fingers, to become truly singular violinists. Kean's vibrant storytelling makes science entertaining, explaining human history and whimsy while showing how DNA will influence our species' future.

    Holistic health coach and recovery expert, Joe Baldizzone, knows first-hand what it's like to live with depression and how to recover from debilitating panic, as well as addiction. In this book you will find simple strategies to help you get started on your own path to recovery. Do you feel anxious most of the time? Are you overwhelmed with persistent worries? Is depression keeping you in the house? Have you reached for drugs and alcohol to cope? Are you considering going to see a psychiatrist, but scared of being put on medication? If you're looking to change your life and find happiness without doctors and medications, try the proven methods Joe has to offer. Learn about Joe's recovery and how to use the 50 tools that have helped him as well as countless other people.

    But if we are supposedly evolution’s greatest creation, why do we have such bad knees? Why do we catch head colds so often—two hundred times more often than a dog does? How come our wrists have so many useless bones? Why is the vast majority of our genetic code pointless? And are we really supposed to swallow and breathe through the same narrow tube? Surely there’s been some kind of mistake. As professor of biology Nathan H. Lents explains in Human Errors, our evolutionary history is nothing if not a litany of mistakes, each more entertaining and enlightening than the last. The human body is one big pile of compromises. But that is also a testament to our greatness: as Lents shows, humans have so many design flaws precisely because we are very, very good at getting around them.   A rollicking, deeply informative tour of humans’ four billion year long evolutionary saga, Human Errors both celebrates our imperfections and offers an unconventional accounting of the cost of our success.

    Highlights of this edition include a brief glossary of key neuroanatomical structures and disease states; addition of an icon to more clearly identify the Clinical Correlations sections; an appendicized table of common neurological lesions; expanded figure legends that identify clinically relevant anatomical relationships; an improved, expanded index; and modified text and figure legends to comply with Terminologia Anatomica.A companion Website will offer bonus USMLE-style questions.

    Dr. William Owens explains, in clear language, the basics of respiratory failure and mechanical ventilation. This is a guide to keep in your jacket pocket, call room, or in the ICU. The second edition includes new chapters on capnography and acid-base problem solving, ventilator weaning protocols, and is updated to reflect current medical evidence. Conventional and unconventional modes of ventilation are examined and explained. PEEP, flow, ventilator liberation, and the care of the patient with prolonged respiratory failure are also covered. The goal of "The Ventilator Book" is to make difficult concepts easy to understand. Conventional medical textbooks are great references, but they are heavy and can't be easily carried around by clinicians who are busy taking care of patients. They also are written to be an exhaustive, authoritative reference, which means that they often contain far more information than what you need at the bedside to help with a difficult case. "The Ventilator Book" has enough information to teach anyone about mechanical ventilation, but not so much that reading it becomes intimidating.

    It intersects with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds – from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history – the story of Mukherjee’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to “read” and “write” the human genome – unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity – and a vision of both humanity’s past and future.

    The Haywire Heart is the first book to examine heart conditions in athletes. Intended for anyone who competes in endurance sports like cycling, triathlon, running races of all distances, and cross-country skiing, The Haywire Heart presents the evidence that going too hard or too long can damage your heart forever. You’ll find what to watch out for, what to do about it, and how to protect your heart so you can enjoy the sports you love for years to come. The Haywire Heart shares the developing research into a group of conditions known as “athlete’s heart”, starting with a wide-ranging look at the warning signs, symptoms, and how to recognize your potential risk. Leading cardiac electrophysiologist and masters athlete Dr. John Mandrola explores the prevention and treatment of heart conditions in athletes like arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation and flutter, tachycardia, hypertrophy, and coronary artery disease. He reviews new research about exercise intensity and duration, recovery, inflammation and calcification, and the ways athletes inflict lasting harm. These heart problems are appearing with alarming frequency among masters athletes who are pushing their bodies harder than ever in the hope that exercise will keep them healthy and strong into their senior years. The book is complete with gripping case studies of elite and age-group athletes from journalist Chris Case—like the scary condition that nearly killed cyclist and coauthor Lennard Zinn—and includes a frank discussion of exercise addiction and the mental habits that prevent athletes from seeking medical help when they need it.Dr. Mandrola explains why many doctors misdiagnose heart conditions in athletes and offers an invaluable guide on how to talk with your doctor about your condition and its proven treatments. He covers known heart irritants, training and rest modifications, effective medicines, and safe supplements that can reduce the likelihood of heart damage from exercise. Heart conditions affect hardcore athletes as well as those who take up sports seeking better health and weight loss. The Haywire Heart is a groundbreaking and critically important guide to heart care for athletes. By protecting your heart now and watching for the warning signs, you can avoid crippling heart conditions and continue to exercise and compete for years to come.

    Jerry Avorn has some sobering news. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of patient care, teaching, and research at Harvard Medical School, he shares his firsthand experience of the wide gap in our knowledge of the effectiveness of one medication as compared to another. In Powerful Medicines, he reminds us that every pill we take represents a delicate compromise between the promise of healing, the risk of side effects, and an increasingly daunting price. The stakes on each front grow higher every year as new drugs with impressive power, worrisome side effects, and troubling costs are introduced.This is a comprehensive behind-the-scenes look at issues that affect everyone: our shortage of data comparing the worth of similar drugs for the same condition; alarming lapses in the detection of lethal side effects; the underuse of life-saving medications; lavish marketing campaigns that influence what doctors prescribe; and the resulting upward spiral of costs that places vital drugs beyond the reach of many Americans.In this engagingly written book, Dr. Avorn asks questions that will interest every consumer: How can a product judged safe by the Food and Drug Administration turn out to have unexpectedly lethal side effects? Why has the nation’s drug bill been growing at nearly 20 percent per year? How can physicians and patients pick the best medication in its class? How do doctors actually make their prescribing decisions, and why do those decisions sometimes go wrong? Why do so many Americans suffer preventable illnesses and deaths that proper drug use could have averted? How can the nation gain control over its escalating drug budget without resorting to rationing or draconian governmental controls?Using clinical case histories taken from his own work as a practitioner, researcher, and advocate, Dr. Avorn demonstrates the impressive power of the well-conceived prescription as well as the debacles that can result when medications are misused. He describes an innovative program that employs the pharmaceutical industry’s own marketing techniques to reduce use of some of the most overprescribed and overpriced products. Powerful Medicines offers timely and practical advice on how the nation can improve its drug-approval process, and how patients can work with doctors to make sure their prescriptions are safe, effective, and as affordable as possible. This is a passionate and provocative call for action as well as a compelling work of clear-headed science.From the Hardcover edition.

    Sherry was terrified of her thoughts about stabbing her baby daughter.... Jeff couldn't silence a mental voice urging him to have sex with men and animals....Howard Hughes had it. So did historical figures Martin Luther and Ignatius of Loyola. They all suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)--as do over five million Americans who need to know that there is now hope and help. Ian Osborn, M.D., a specialist in OCD and a sufferer himself, has written the first comprehensive book on the experience, diagnosis, and treatment of OCD. He reveals recent discoveries about the disease as a biological disorder--a physical, not a psychological abnormality--and the exciting new therapies that have dramatically changed the future for OCD sufferers.His wise, compassionate book includes: Pencil-and-paper tests for self-diagnosis Six steps to conquering OCD Medication that works Early signs that show OCD in children Guidelines for family members A comprehensive listing of where to find organizations and support groups--and more

    I shall always be grateful for her protection . . .'Millions have fallen in love with Jennifer Worth and her experiences in the East End as chronicled in Call the Midwife but little is known about her life outside this period. Now, in this moving and evocative memoir, Jennifer's sister, Christine, takes us from their early idyllic years to the cruelty and neglect they suffered after their parents divorced, from Jennifer being forced to leave home at fourteen to their training as nurses.After leaving nursing Jennifer took up a career in music, her first love, and Christine became a sculptor, but through marriages and children, joy and heartbreak, their lives remained intertwined. Absorbing and emotional, The Midwife's Sister is testimony to an enduring bond between two extraordinary women.

    Braided with that history is the moving story of Powers's beloved son Kevin--spirited, endearing, and gifted--who triumphed even while suffering from schizophrenia until finally he did not, and the story of his courageous surviving son Dean, who is also schizophrenic.A blend of history, biography, memoir, and current affairs ending with a consideration of where we might go from here, this is a thought-provoking look at a dreaded illness that has long been misunderstood.

    It is the story of two nurses who witnessed the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the frontline. It focuses on their lives and their experiences. Some of the story is raw, sometimes graphic, but familiar for people with HIV infection, family members, friends, and other nurses and medical professionals such as Ellen and Valery. There were hundreds of nurses who went through what Ellen and Valery experienced. They want to tell this story to give a voice to a generation lost, encouraging the world to remember one simple thing: this history cannot be repeated.

    Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood. Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it. My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.

    A perfect fit for a lab coat pocket, this book is commonly used as a quick review prior to surgical rounds as well as for board review.Purchasers of this edition will get both the print book and access to MP3 audio files of the entire text. All Q&A material will also be posted online in the form of electronic flashcards for self-quizzing.

    Suzanne O'Sullivan's THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES, an exploration of different aspects of psychosomatic disorders, mass hysteria, culture bound syndromes (a set of symptoms that exist only within a particular society), using as its starting point a particular case of more than 400 migrant children in Sweden who have fallen into a "waking coma", to Dan Frank at Pantheon, in a pre-empt.