Book picks similar to
Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent by Harriet A. Washington
medicine
nonfiction
non-fiction
tbr-nonfiction
The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina—Separating the Myth from the Medicine
Jennifer Gunter - 2019
Jen Gunter now delivers the definitive book on vaginal health, answering the questions you've always had but were afraid to ask--or couldn't find the right answers to. She has been called Twitter's resident gynecologist, the Internet's OB/GYN, and one of the fiercest advocates for women's health...and she's here to give you the straight talk on the topics she knows best.Does eating sugar cause yeast infections? Does pubic hair have a function? Should you have a vulvovaginal care regimen?Will your vagina shrivel up if you go without sex?What's the truth about the HPV vaccine?So many important questions, so much convincing, confusing, contradictory misinformation! In this age of click bait, pseudoscience, and celebrity-endorsed products, it's easy to be overwhelmed--whether it's websites, advice from well-meaning friends, uneducated partners, and even healthcare providers. So how do you separate facts from fiction? OB-GYN Jen Gunter, an expert on women's health--and the internet's most popular go-to doc--comes to the rescue with a book that debunks the myths and educates and empowers women. From reproductive health to the impact of antibiotics and probiotics, and the latest trends, including vaginal steaming, vaginal marijuana products, and jade eggs, Gunter takes us on a factual, fun-filled journey. Discover the truth about:- The vaginal microbiome - Genital hygiene, lubricants, and hormone myths and fallacies - How diet impacts vaginal health - Stem cells and the vagina - Cosmetic vaginal surgery - What changes to expect during pregnancy, after childbirth, and through menopause - How medicine fails women by dismissing symptomsPlus: - Thongs vs. lace: the best underwear for vaginal health - How to select a tampon - The full glory of the clitoris and the myth of the G Spot... And so much more. Whether you're a twenty-six-year-old worried that her labia are "uncool" or a sixty-six-year-old dealing with painful sex, this comprehensive guide is sure to become a lifelong trusted resource.
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.
Conspiracies: Conspiracy Theories - The Most Famous Conspiracies Including: The New World Order, False Flags, Government Cover-ups, CIA, & FBI (Secret ... JFK Assasination, Bermuda Triangle)
Alex Monaldo - 2016
Want the real story behind history’s great Conspiracies?
Uncover the truth today!
☆★☆ Read this book for FREE on Kindle Unlimited - Download Now! ☆★☆ Get hold of more theories from this book! Now on its 3rd Edition!
Have you ever wondered about popular conspiracy theories? Ever wonder if some of them are true or not? Want go deeper and find out the truth for yourself?
Conspiracy Theories – The Most Famous Conspiracies Including: The New World Order, False Flags, Government Cover-ups, CIA, & FBI will give you all the juicy details on the greatest conspiracy theories from history and present day. Get ready for the real truth about: The New World Order The JFK Assassination The Moon Landing Was The Holocaust a Conspiracy? The Vatican Conspiracy And so much more! This book has 21 conspiracy theories that all get to the bottom of what really happened. Don’t trust the mass media? This book is purposely written to give you an eye opening experience and compel you to change your perspective regarding current explanations of popular events that made a huge impact on mankind. Each chapter talks about a specific theory; when it happened; and why it happened. It also includes a “What to believe” section that provides well thought out observations, and will help you identify loopholes in common knowledge so you can see new possibilities. Here’s WHY you should read the book: Break the status quo -- question your beliefs on history in a new way. Raise your critical thinking and awareness of current events. Learn what can’t be found on mainstream news and TV outlets. So what are you waiting for?! Get ready for a revelation of a lifetime! This book will definitely answer any questions you have regarding some of history’s most unforgettable events. Go deeper now and get your own copy TODAY! by scrolling up. Don’t forget to hit the BUY button! Enjoy!
For the Good of Mankind?: The Shameful History of Human Medical Experimentation
Vicki Oransky Wittenstein - 2013
Result: The world's first vaccine. Experiment: A slave woman is forced to undergo more than thirty operations without anesthesia. Result: The beginnings of modern gynecology. Experiment: From 1946 to 1953, seventy-four boys are fed oatmeal laced with radioactive iron and calcium. Result: A better understanding of the effects of radioactivity on the human body. Experimental incidents such as these paved the way for crucial medical discoveries and lifesaving cures and procedures. But they also violated the rights of their subjects, many of whom did not give their consent to the experiments. The subjects suffered excruciating pain and humiliation. Some even died as a result of the procedures. Even in the twenty-first century—despite laws, regulations, and ethical conventions—the tension between medical experimentation and patient rights continues. How do doctors balance the need to test new medicines and procedures with their ethical and moral duty to protect the rights of human subjects? What price has been paid for medical knowledge? Can we learn from the broken oaths of the past? Take a harrowing journey through some of history's greatest medical advances—and its most horrifying medical atrocities. You'll read about orphans injected with lethal tuberculosis and concentration camp inmates tortured by Nazi doctors. You’ll also learn about radiation experimentation and present-day clinical trials that prove fatal. Through these stories, explore the human suffering that has gone hand in hand with medical advancement.
Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory
Michael Christopher Carroll - 2004
Lab 257 blows the lid off the stunning true nature and checkered history of Plum Island. It shows that the seemingly bucolic island in the shadow of New York City is a ticking biological time bomb that none of us can safely ignore.Based on declassified government documents, in-depth interviews, and access to Plum Island itself, this is an eye-opening, suspenseful account of a federal government germ laboratory gone terribly wrong. For the first time, Lab 257 takes you deep inside this secret world and presents startling revelations on virus outbreaks, biological meltdowns, infected workers, the periodic flushing of contaminated raw sewage into area waters, and the insidious connections between Plum Island, Lyme disease, and the deadly West Nile virus. The book also probes what's in store for Plum Island's new owner, the Department of Homeland Security, in this age of bioterrorism.Lab 257 is a call to action for those concerned with protecting present and future generations from preventable biological catastrophes.
The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery
Sam Kean - 2014
Early studies of the functions of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike-strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, lobotomies, horrendous accidents-and see how the victim coped. In many cases survival was miraculous, and observers could only marvel at the transformations that took place afterward, altering victims' personalities. An injury to one section can leave a person unable to recognize loved ones; some brain trauma can even make you a pathological gambler, pedophile, or liar. But a few scientists realized that these injuries were an opportunity for studying brain function at its extremes. With lucid explanations and incisive wit, Sam Kean explains the brain's secret passageways while recounting forgotten stories of common people whose struggles, resiliency, and deep humanity made modern neuroscience possible.
Radical: The Science, Culture, and History of Breast Cancer in America
Kate Pickert - 2019
That is, until she was unexpectedly diagnosed with an aggressive type of breast cancer at the age of 35. As she underwent more than a year of treatment, Pickert realized that the popular understanding of breast care in America bears little resemblance to the experiences of today's patients and the rapidly changing science designed to save their lives. After using her journalistic skills to navigate her own care, Pickert embarked on a quest to understand the cultural, scientific and historical forces shaping the lives of breast-cancer patients in the modern age.Breast cancer is one of history's most prolific killers. Despite billions spent on research and treatments, it remains one of the deadliest diseases facing women today. From the forests of the Pacific Northwest to an operating suite in Los Angeles to the epicenter of pink-ribbon advocacy in Dallas, Pickert reports on the turning points and people responsible for the progress that has been made against breast cancer and documents the challenges of defeating a disease that strikes one in eight American women and has helped shape the country's medical culture.Drawing on interviews with doctors, economists, researchers, advocates and patients, as well as on journal entries and recordings collected over the author's treatment, Radical puts the story of breast cancer into context, and shows how modern treatments represent a long overdue shift in the way doctors approach cancer -- and disease -- itself.
Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine
Damon Tweedy - 2015
Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than in whites."Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of many health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
Sam Quinones - 2015
Communities where heroin had never been seen before—from Charlotte, NC and Huntington, WVA, to Salt Lake City and Portland, OR—were overrun with it. Local police and residents were stunned. How could heroin, long considered a drug found only in the dense, urban environments along the East Coast, and trafficked into the United States by enormous Colombian drug cartels, be so incredibly ubiquitous in the American heartland? Who was bringing it here, and perhaps more importantly, why were so many townspeople suddenly eager for the comparatively cheap high it offered?With the same dramatic drive of El Narco and Methland, Sam Quinones weaves together two classic tales of American capitalism: The stories of young men in Mexico, independent of the drug cartels, in search of their own American Dream via the fast and enormous profits of trafficking cheap black-tar heroin to America’s rural and suburban addicts; and that of Purdue Pharma in Stamford, Connecticut, determined to corner the market on pain with its new and expensive miracle drug, Oxycontin; extremely addictive in its own right. Quinones illuminates just how these two stories fit together as cause and effect: hooked on costly Oxycontin, American addicts were lured to much cheaper black tar heroin and its powerful and dangerous long-lasting high. Embroiled alongside the suppliers and buyers are DEA agents, local, small-town sheriffs, and the US attorney from eastern Virginia whose case against Purdue Pharma and Oxycontin made him an enemy of the Bush-era Justice Department, ultimately stalling and destroying his career in public service.Dreamland is a scathing and incendiary account of drug culture and addiction spreading to every part of the American landscape.
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
Randy Shilts - 1987
America faced a troubling question: What happened? How was this epidemic allowed to spread so far before it was taken seriously? In answering these questions, Shilts weaves the disparate threads into a coherent story, pinning down every evasion and contradiction at the highest levels of the medical, political, and media establishments. Shilts shows that the epidemic spread wildly because the federal government put budget ahead of the nation's welfare; health authorities placed political expediency before the public health; and scientists were often more concerned with international prestige than saving lives. Against this backdrop, Shilts tells the heroic stories of individuals in science and politics, public health and the gay community, who struggled to alert the nation to the enormity of the danger it faced. And the Band Played On is both a tribute to these heroic people and a stinging indictment of the institutions that failed the nation so badly.
Sometimes Brilliant: The Impossible Adventure of a Spiritual Seeker and Visionary Physician Who Helped Conquer the Worst Disease in History
Larry Brilliant - 2015
Sometimes Brilliant is the adventures of a philosopher, mystic, hippie, doctor, groundbreaking tech innovator, and key player in the eradication of one of the worst pandemics in human history. His story, of what happens when love, compassion and determination meet the right circumstances to effect positive change, is the kind that keeps hope and the sense of possibility alive.After sitting at the feet of Martin Luther King at the University of Michigan in 1963, Larry Brilliant was swept up into the civil rights movement, marching and protesting across America and Europe. As a radical young doctor he followed the hippie trail from London over the Khyber Pass with his wife Girija, Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm commune to India. There, he found himself in a Himalayan ashram wondering whether he had stumbled into a cult. Instead, one of India’s greatest spiritual teachers, Neem Karoli Baba, opened Larry’s heart and told him his destiny was to work for the World Health Organization to help eradicate killer smallpox. He would never have believed he would become a key player in eliminating a 10,000-year-old disease that killed more than half a billion people in the 20th century alone.Brilliant’s unlikely trajectory, chronicled in Sometimes Brilliant, has brought him into close proximity with political leaders, spiritual masters, cultural heroes, and titans of technology around the world—from the Grateful Dead to Mikhail Gorbachev, from Ram Dass, the Dalai Lama, Lama Govinda, and Karmapa to Steve Jobs and the founders of Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Microsoft and eBay and Presidents Carter, Clinton, Bush and Obama. Anchored by the engrossing account of the heroic efforts of the extraordinary people involved in smallpox eradication in India, this is a riveting and fascinating epidemiological adventure, an honest reckoning of an entire generation, and a deeply moving spiritual memoir. It is a testament to faith, love, service, and what it means to engage with life’s most important questions in pursuit of a better, more brilliant existence.
Miracle Cure: The Creation of Antibiotics and the Birth of Modern Medicine
William Rosen - 2017
That all changed in less than a generation with the discovery and development of a new category of medicine known as antibiotics. By 1955, the age-old evolutionary relationship between humans and microbes had been transformed, trivializing once-deadly infections. William Rosen captures this revolution with all its false starts, lucky surprises, and eccentric characters. He explains why, given the complex nature of bacteria—and their ability to rapidly evolve into new forms—the only way to locate and test potential antibiotic strains is by large-scale, systematic, trial-and-error experimentation. Organizing that research needs large, well-funded organizations and businesses, and so our entire scientific-industrial complex, built around the pharmaceutical company, was born. Timely, engrossing, and eye-opening, Miracle Cure is a must-read science narrative—a drama of enormous range, combining science, technology, politics, and economics to illuminate the reasons behind one of the most dramatic changes in humanity’s relationship with nature since the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago.
The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science
Siddhartha Mukherjee - 2015
The book, The Youngest Science, forced Dr. Mukherjee to ask himself an urgent, fundamental question: Is medicine a “science”? Sciences must have laws—statements of truth based on repeated experiments that describe some universal attribute of nature. But does medicine have laws like other sciences?Dr. Mukherjee has spent his career pondering this question—a question that would ultimately produce some of most serious thinking he would do around the tenets of his discipline—culminating in The Laws of Medicine. In this important treatise, he investigates the most perplexing and illuminating cases of his career that ultimately led him to identify the three key principles that govern medicine.Brimming with fascinating historical details and modern medical wonders, this important book is a fascinating glimpse into the struggles and Eureka! moments that people outside of the medical profession rarely see. Written with Dr. Mukherjee’s signature eloquence and passionate prose, The Laws of Medicine is a critical read, not just for those in the medical profession, but for everyone who is moved to better understand how their health and well-being is being treated. Ultimately, this book lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding medicine, now and into the future.
Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
Katy Butler - 2013
It will inspire the necessary and difficult conversations we all need to have with loved ones as it illuminates a path to a better way of death.Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non–life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker. The device kept his heart beating but did nothing to prevent his slide into dementia, incontinence, near-muteness, and misery. After several years, he asked his wife for help, telling her, "I am living too long." Mother and daughter faced a series of wrenching moral questions: When does death cease being a curse and become a blessing? Where is the line between saving life and prolonging a dying? When is the right time to say to a doctor, "Let my loved one go"? When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, sentencing her father to a protracted and agonizing death, Katy set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother faced her own illness, rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and instead met death head-on. Knocking on Heaven's Door, a revolutionary blend of memoir and investigative reporting, is the fruit of the Butler family's journey. With a reporter's skill, a poet's eye, and a daughter's love, Butler explores what happens when our terror of death collides with the technological imperatives of modern medicine. Her provocative thesis is that advanced medicine, in its single-minded pursuit of maximum longevity, often creates more suffering than it prevents. Butler lays bare the tangled web of technology, medicine, and commerce that modern dying has become and chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine - a growing movement that promotes care over cure. Knocking on Heaven's Door is a visionary map through the labyrinth of a broken and morally adrift medical system. It will inspire the necessary and difficult conversations we all need to have with loved ones as it illuminates a path to a better way of death.
Heart: A History
Sandeep Jauhar - 2018
It’s so bound up with our deepest feelings that emotional trauma causes it to change shape.Practising cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar beautifully weaves his own experiences with the defining discoveries of the past to tell the story of our most vital organ. He looks at some of the pioneers who risked their careers and their patients’ lives to better understand the heart. People like Daniel Hale Williams, who performed the world’s first documented heart surgery, and Wilson Greatbatch, who accidentally invented the pacemaker.Amid gripping scenes from the operating theatre, Jauhar interweaves stories about the patients he’s treated with the moving tale of his family’s own history of heart problems, from his grandfather’s sudden death in India – an event that sparked his life-long obsession – to the ominous signs of how he himself might die.He also confronts the limits of medical technology and argues that future progress will be determined more by how we choose to live rather than by any device we invent.