Improper use of antibiotics. Local warfare. Massive refugee migration. Changing social and environmental conditions around the world have fostered the spread of new and potentially devastating viruses and diseases—HIV, Lassa, Ebola, and others. Laurie Garrett takes you on a fifty-year journey through the world's battles with microbes and examines the worldwide conditions that have culminated in recurrent outbreaks of newly discovered diseases, epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas, and mutated old diseases that are no longer curable. She argues that it is not too late to take action to prevent the further onslaught of viruses and microbes, and offers possible solutions for a healthier future.

    Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George, and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies. Jessica and Boy George ride the wild adventure between riches and ruin, while Coco and Cesar stick closer to the street, all four caught in a precarious dance between survival and death. Friends get murdered; the DEA and FBI investigate Boy George; Cesar becomes a fugitive; Jessica and Coco endure homelessness, betrayal, the heartbreaking separation of prison, and, throughout it all, the insidious damage of poverty.Charting the tumultuous cycle of the generations - as girls become mothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation - LeBlanc slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism and comes back with a riveting, haunting, and true story.

    But we should--even those of us who take care of our business in pristine, sanitary conditions. For it's not only in developing countries that human waste is a major public health threat: population growth is taxing even the most advanced sewage systems, and the disease spread by waste kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause of death. Even in America, 1.95 million people have no access to an indoor toilet. Yet the subject remains unmentionable."The Big Necessity "takes aim at the taboo, revealing everything that matters about how people do--and don't--deal with their own waste. Moving from the deep underground sewers of Paris, London, and New York--an infrastructure disaster waiting to happen--to an Indian slum where ten toilets are shared by 60,000 people, Rose George stops along the way to explore the potential saviors: China's five million biogas digesters, which produce energy from waste; the heroes of third world sanitation movements; the inventor of the humble Car Loo; and the U.S. Army's personal lasers used by soldiers to zap their feces in the field.With razor-sharp wit and crusading urgency, mixing levity with gravity, Rose George has turned the subject we like to avoid into a cause with the most serious of consequences.

    With swashbuckling wit and fierce honesty, she dishes on herself and her colleagues as they try to prod reluctant governments to fund HIV prevention for the people who need it most—drug injectors, gay men, sex workers, and johns.Pisani chats with flamboyant Indonesian transsexuals about their boob jobs and watches Chinese streetwalkers turn away clients because their SUVs aren't nice enough. With verve and clarity, she shows the general reader how her profession really works; how easy it is to draw wrong conclusions from "objective" data; and, shockingly, how much money is spent so very badly. "Exhibit A": the 45 billion taxpayer dollars the Bush administration is committing to international AIDS programs.

    Drawing on momentous (yet dimly remembered) historical epidemics, contemporary analyses, and cutting-edge research from a range of scientific disciplines, bestselling author, physician, sociologist, and public health expert Nicholas A. Christakis explores what it means to live in a time of plague—an experience that is paradoxically uncommon to the vast majority of humans who are alive, yet deeply fundamental to our species.Unleashing new divisions in our society as well as opportunities for cooperation, this 21st-century pandemic has upended our lives in ways that will test, but not vanquish, our already frayed collective culture. Featuring new, provocative arguments and vivid examples ranging across medicine, history, sociology, epidemiology, data science, and genetics, Apollo's Arrow envisions what happens when the great force of a deadly germ meets the enduring reality of our evolved social nature.

    Explaining the truth behind the screening statistics and investigating the evidence behind the hype, Margaret McCartney, an award-winning writer and doctor, argues that this patient paradox - too much testing of well people and not enough care for the sick - worsens health inequalities and drains professionalism.

    But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In "Crazy Like Us," Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness -- we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves.For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties." Crazy Like Us" documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs, often at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases.In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing. In Hong Kong, he retraces the last steps of the teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters reveals the truth about a multi-million-dollar campaign by one of the world's biggest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression -- literally marketing the disease along with the drug.But this book is not just about the damage we've caused in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of people in other cultures is a gut check, a way of forcing ourselves to take a fresh look at our own beliefs about mental health and healing. When we examine our assumptions from a farther shore, we begin to understand how our own culture constantly shapes and sometimes creates the mental illnesses of our time. By setting aside our role as the world's therapist, we may come to accept that we have as much to learn from other cultures' beliefs about the mind as we have to teach.

    Instead, Guinan went to medical school and became a disease detective with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Epidemic Intelligence Service. Selected to join India's Smallpox Eradication program, Guinan traveled to remote villages to isolate smallpox cases and then vaccinate all uninfected persons within a ten-mile radius. By May 1975, the World Health Organization declared Uttar Pradesh smallpox-free.During her barrier-breaking career, Dr. Guinan met arms-seeking Afghan insurgents in Pakistan and got caught in the crossfire between religious groups in Lebanon. She was one of the first medical detectives on the ground in San Francisco at the start of the AIDS crisis. And she served as an expert witness in a landmark decision that still protects HIV patients from workplace discrimination. Randy Shilts's best-selling book on the epidemic, And the Band Played On, features her AIDS work, as does the HBO movie of the same name.In Adventures of a Female Medical Detective, Guinan weaves together twelve vivid stories of her life in medicine, describing her individual experiences in controlling outbreaks, researching new diseases, and caring for patients the world over. Occasionally heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious, Guinan's account of her pathbreaking career will inspire public health students and future medical detectives--and give all readers insight into that part of the government exclusively devoted to protecting their health.

    By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is--just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed.Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

    Richard Louis Miller discusses what is happening today in psychedelic medicine--and what will happen in the future--with top researchers and thinkers in this field, including Rick Doblin, Stanislav Grof, James Fadiman, Julie Holland, Dennis McKenna, David Nichols, Charles Grob, Phil Wolfson, Michael and Annie Mithoefer, Roland Griffiths, Katherine MacLean, and Robert Whitaker. Dr. Miller and his contributors cover the tumultuous history of early psychedelic research brought to a halt 50 years ago by the U.S. government as well as offering non-technical summaries of the most recent studies with MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca. They explore the biochemistry of consciousness and the use of psychedelics for self-discovery and healing. They discuss the use of psilocybin for releasing fear in the terminally ill and the potential for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of PTSD. They examine Dr. Charles Grob’s research on the indigenous use and therapeutic properties of ayahuasca and Dr. Gabor Mate’s attempt to transport this plant medicine to a clinical setting with the help of Canada’s Department of National Health. Dr. Miller and his contributors explore the ongoing efforts to restore psychedelic therapies to the health field, the growing threat of overmedication by the pharmaceutical industry, and the links between psychiatric drugs and mental illness. They also discuss the newly shifting political climate and the push for new research, offering hope for an end to the War on Drugs and a potential renaissance of research into psychedelic medicines around the world.

    Glidden is one of the very few to realize the sobering truths that MD directed medicine consistently fails to cure disease, and that it causes massive amounts of harm in the process. Furthermore, he understands that people around the world who continue to hold onto their cultural home remedies live longer and healthier than those that buy into modern medical methods! In America, Hispanics outlive whites by 2.5 years and blacks by 8 years - and it has nothing to do with genetics! Few physicians understand how and why this happens. Few physicians have hands-on experience delivering non-drug treatments that actually help people to recover their health. Dr. Glidden does.The MD Emperor Has No Clothes, by reconciling the ancient methods of Wholistic medicine with the urgent health needs of our modern world, offers a key to the very survival of America herself. God-speed Dr. Glidden!"- Joel Wallach BS, DVM, ND

    Himself ten years sober, Shubaly addresses the slippery nature of alcoholism, and the messy, anxiety-ridden process of making the decision to stop drinking once and for all.For Shubaly, there is no one-size-fits-all plan. He refutes the notion that the one and only solution for those struggling are 12-step programs and provides a guide for those who want a different approach to getting sober. This is a how-to for those who are serious about taking their lives back, but are ready to define their sobriety on their own terms.In the process, Shubaly exposes—in brutal, up-close, and yes, even absurd and funny detail—what drove him to drink, how he put the bottle down, and the surprising life that awaited him when he did. Cold Turkey offers real, practical, and intimate advice for those struggling, straight from someone who has really been there. Sure, he understands that for the first three days, you might need to eat all the pizza and all the greasy Chinese food. But he also understands the urgent need to improve your life and habits little by little, day by day. Shubaly, no doubt, becomes the listener’s cheerleader. He wants anyone struggling to succeed.Ultimately, the takeaway is very simple: if Shubaly did it, you can too. And more than that, he’ll be right there with you every step of the way.

    His success and good fortune at such a young age was a remarkable accomplishment for someone from a small Central California farm town. Everything was coming together for Axel until a devastating tragedy beset his hometown. Axel’s perfect life was thrown into turmoil, exposing the moral compromises that he had made to achieve success. In his struggle to put the pieces of his life back together, he discovered his true purpose. From the depths of tragedy, Axel embarked on a quest to revitalize his people and restore the American Nation.

    Why We Get Sick compels readers to reexamine the age-old attitudes toward sickness. Line drawings.

     ‘Early is a definitive history of neonatology, written with urgency and clarity, beauty and compassion. DiGregorio is at once a clear-eyed reporter and a mother who has lived through the reality of neonatal intensive care, and her balance of the two narrative strands is pitch-perfect. A popular science book that deserves its place among the best’ Francesca Segal, author of Mother ShipThe heart of many hospitals is the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). It is a place where humanity, ethics, and science collide in dramatic and deeply personal ways as parents, doctors, and nurses grapple with sometimes unanswerable questions: When does life begin? When and how should life end? And what does it mean to be human?The NICU is a place made of stories – the stories of mothers and babies who spend days, weeks and even months waiting to go home, and the dedicated clinicians who care for these tiny, developing humans. Early explores these stories, as well as the evolution of neonatology and its breakthroughs – how modern medicine can be successful at saving infants at five and a half months gestation who weigh less than a pound, when only a few decades ago there were essentially no treatments for premature babies.For the first time, Sarah DiGregorio tells the complete story of this science – and the many people it has touched. Weaving her own experiences, those of other parents, and NICU clinicians with deeply researched reporting, Early delves deep into the history and future of neonatology, one of the most boundary pushing medical disciplines: how it came to be, how it is evolving, and the political, cultural, and ethical issues that continue to arise in the face of dramatic scientific developments.Eye-opening and vital, Early uses premature birth as a lens to view our own humanity, and the humanity of those around us.