But he was alive and trapped inside his own body for ten years.In January 1988 Martin Pistorius, aged twelve, fell inexplicably sick. First he lost his voice and stopped eating. Then he slept constantly and shunned human contact. Doctors were mystified. Within eighteen months he was mute and wheelchair-bound. Martin's parents were told an unknown degenerative disease left him with the mind of a baby and less than two years to live.Martin was moved to care centers for severely disabled children. The stress and heartache shook his parents’ marriage and their family to the core. Their boy was gone. Or so they thought.Ghost Boy is the heart-wrenching story of one boy’s return to life through the power of love and faith. In these pages, readers see a parent’s resilience, the consequences of misdiagnosis, abuse at the hands of cruel caretakers, and the unthinkable duration of Martin’s mental alertness betrayed by his lifeless body.We also see a life reclaimed—a business created, a new love kindled—all from a wheelchair. Martin's emergence from his own darkness invites us to celebrate our own lives and fight for a better life for others.

    It is all here: the joy and pain, the death and drama, the mistakes, successes, and secrets. Nurse reads like a novel, but sticks in the memory like real experience-because it is.

    She and her husban, Carlen, feel as though they've been shoved out of a plane 10,000 feet up, with nothing to grab but themselves. But A Path Revealed is not about the fallout from an insidious disease that extended nearly seventeen years. It is in Carlen's words, "The story of a path emerging during our darkest hours, a path that we neither planned, nor foresaw." Carlen traveled with Martha to the backwoods of Kentucky, where the quiet presence of a Catholic nun revealed a hidden path. He was forced to slow down as he traced this path halfway around the world to Australia, retreated weekends to a monastery, embraced meditation, and landed all alone in Thomas Merton's cabin. A Path Revealed echoes accents heard in Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies, Richard Rohr's Falling Upward, and John Bunyan's 17th-century classic, The Pilgrim's Progress.

    Michelle Harrison kept throughout her months of residency in OB/GYN--draws us into the serious and thrilling work of delivering new life into the world...and into Dr. Harrison's own struggle to reconcile the often startling difference between patient care and hospital convenience. She writes about her patients, for whom she never had quite enough time; about her colleagues, with whom she did not always agree; about the excitement of learning new procedures; about the pressures that never let up. She brings us as close as most of us are likely to come to the intense inner life of a big hospital."

    Michael Crichton created the series from his own experiences as a medical doctor in the emergency rooms, operating rooms and wards of Massachusetts General Hospital. Five Patients is Michael Crichton's true account of the real life dramas so vividly portrayed in ER. A construction worker is seriously injured in a scaffold collapse: a middle-aged dispatcher is brought in suffering from a fever that has reduced him to a delirious wreck; a young man nearly severs his hand in an accident; an airline traveller suffers chest pains; a mother of three is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease.

    They both have a God-given talent and skill...' - Ray Martin'If I've done one thing in life I'm proud of, it's launching Ruit into the world'. - Fred Hollows'One of the greatest people I've ever met.' - Joel Edgerton'I've known Dr Sanduk Ruit for over thirty years. He is one of our greatest living eye surgeons and humanitarians... Watching him give the gift of sight is like watching someone give a second life.' - Richard GereInspiring and uplifting, this is the extraordinary story of Dr Sanduk Ruit who, like his mentor Fred Hollows, took on the world's medical establishment to give the life-changing gift of sight to hundreds and thousands of the world's poorest and most isolated people. It is the story of a boy from the lowest tiers of a rigid caste system who grew up in a tiny, remote Himalayan village with no school to become one of the most respected ophthalmologists in the world and a medical giant of Asia.Compelling and compassionate, it is also the story of a young doctor who became Fred Hollows' medical soul mate and who chose to defy the world's medical establishment and the lure of riches to make the world a better place.

    Sharon Moalem turns our current understanding of illness on its head and challenges us to fundamentally change the way we think about our bodies, our health, and our relationship to just about every other living thing on earth, from plants and animals to insects and bacteria.Through a fresh and engaging examination of our evolutionary history, Dr. Moalem reveals how many of the conditions that are diseases today actually gave our ancestors a leg up in the survival sweepstakes. When the option is a long life with a disease or a short one without it, evolution opts for disease almost every time.Everything from the climate our ancestors lived in to the crops they planted and ate to their beverage of choice can be seen in our genetic inheritance. But Survival of the Sickest doesn't stop there. It goes on to demonstrate just how little modern medicine really understands about human health, and offers a new way of thinking that can help all of us live longer, healthier lives..

    This edition incorporates current research methodology—including molecular and genetic clinical research—and offers an updated syllabus for conducting a clinical research workshop.Emphasis is on common sense as the main ingredient of good science. The book explains how to choose well-focused research questions and details the steps through all the elements of study design, data collection, quality assurance, and basic grant-writing. All chapters have been thoroughly revised, updated, and made more user-friendly.

    With more than one in every five people over the age of fourteen addicted, drug abuse has been called the most formidable health problem worldwide. If we are not victims ourselves, we all know someone struggling with the merciless compulsion to alter their experience by changing how their brain functions.Drawing on years of research--as well as personal experience as a recovered addict--researcher and professor Judy Grisel has reached a fundamental conclusion: for the addict, there will never be enough drugs. The brain's capacity to learn and adapt is seemingly infinite, allowing it to counteract any regular disruption, including that caused by drugs. What begins as a normal state punctuated by periods of being high transforms over time into a state of desperate craving that is only temporarily subdued by a fix, explaining why addicts are unable to live either with or without their drug. One by one, Grisel shows how different drugs act on the brain, the kind of experiential effects they generate, and the specific reasons why each is so hard to kick.Grisel's insights lead to a better understanding of the brain's critical contributions to addictive behavior, and will help inform a more rational, coherent, and compassionate response to the epidemic in our homes and communities.

    In 2001, Virginia Mason Medical Center, an integrated healthcare delivery system in Seattle, Washington set out to achieve its compelling vision to become The Quality Leader and to fulfill that vision, adopted the Toyota Production System as its management method.Transforming Health Care: Virginia Mason Medical Center's Pursuit of the Perfect Patient Experience takes you on the journey of of Virginia Mason Medical Center's pursuit of the perfect patient experience through the application of lean principles, tools, and methodology. Over the last several years Virginia Mason has become internationally known for its journey towards perfection by applying the Toyota Production System to healthcare. The book takes readers step by step through Virginia Mason's journey as it seeks to provide perfection to its customer - the patient. This book shows you how you use this system to transform your own organization.

    Born with the rare genetic condition progeria, she ages eight times faster than the average person. In medical terms her body is like that of a 100-year-old woman. Yet she faces her condition with immense courage and a refreshing lack of self-pity. In Old Before My Time, Hayley and her mum Kerry reflect on her unusual life. Share Hayley's excitement as she travels the world meeting her pop heroes Kylie, Girls Aloud and Justin Bieber and her sadness as she loses her best friend to the disease at the age of 11. Now as she passes the age of 13 -- the average life expectancy for a child with progeria -- Hayley talks frankly about her hopes for the future and her pioneering drug trials in America which could unlock the secrets of ageing for everyone...

    Amy chronicles her harrowing medical journey from the first misdiagnosis to her astonishing recovery after her heart transplant, which is made all the more dramatic by the romantic bedside courtship with her future husband, and her uncompromising desire to become a mother. She presents a patient's perspective of life after a heart transplant with honesty.

    R. Reid shows how all the other industrialized democracies have achieved something the United States can’t seem to do: provide health care for everybody at a reasonable cost. In his global quest to find a possible prescription, Reid visits wealthy, free market, industrialized democracies like our own—including France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and Canada—where he finds inspiration in example. Reid sees problems too: He finds poorly paid doctors in Japan, endless lines in Canada, mistreated patients in Britain, spartan facilities in France. In addition to long-established systems, Reid also studies countries that have carried out major health care reform. The first question facing these countries—and the United States, for that matter—is an ethical issue: Is health care a human right?The Healing of America lays bare the moral question at the heart of our troubled system, dissecting the misleading rhetoric surrounding the health care debate: Is health care a human right?

    

    Judy Melinek began her training as a New York City forensic pathologist. With her husband T.J. and their toddler Daniel holding down the home front, Judy threw herself into the fascinating world of death investigation, performing autopsies, investigating death scenes, counseling grieving relatives. Working Stiff chronicles Judy's two years of training, taking readers behind the police tape of some of the most harrowing deaths in the Big Apple, including a firsthand account of the events of September 11, the subsequent anthrax bio-terrorism attack, and the disastrous crash of American Airlines flight 587.Lively, action-packed, and loaded with mordant wit, Working Stiff offers a firsthand account of daily life in one of America's most arduous professions, and the unexpected challenges of shuttling between the domains of the living and the dead. The body never lies, and through the murders, accidents, and suicides that land on her table, Dr. Melinek lays bare the truth behind the glamorized depictions of autopsy work on shows like CSI and Law and Order to reveal the secret story of the real morgue.