Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence


Anna Lembke - 2021
    It's also about pain. Most important, it's about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We're living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting... The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we've all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption.In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain...and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery."Brilliant... riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued."--Beth Macy, author of DopesickINSTANT NEW YORK TIMES and LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER“Brilliant… riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued.”—Beth Macy, author of DopesickAs heard on Fresh Air

Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors and Patients


Robert Pearl - 2021
    But they don’t always know how to care for them.Hardly anyone is happy with American healthcare these days. Patients are getting sicker and going bankrupt from medical bills. Doctors are burning out and making dangerous mistakes. Both parties blame our nation’s outdated and dysfunctional healthcare system. But that’s only part of the problem.In this important and timely book, Dr. Robert Pearl shines a light on the unseen and often toxic culture of medicine. Today’s physicians have a surprising disdain for technology, an unhealthy obsession with status, and an increasingly complicated relationship with their patients. All of this can be traced back to their earliest experiences in medical school, where doctors inherit a set of norms, beliefs, and expectations that shape almost every decision they make, with profound consequences for the rest of us.Uncaring draws an original and revealing portrait of what it’s actually like to be a doctor. It illuminates the complex and intimidating world of medicine for readers, and in the end offers a clear plan to save American healthcare.

Dr. John Sarno's Top 10 Healing Discoveries


Steve Ozanich - 2016
    John E. Sarno was the greatest pain physician in the world. Dubbed by Forbes as "America's Best Doctor," he changed the medical paradigm with his keen observations in healing. He then changed the world forever with his courage in publishing those findings to the general population. In this small book, TMS author and health researcher Steve Ozanich has captured the essence of Dr. Sarno's vast body of work into an easily readable and understandable form. This book is a countdown-list in descending order of the most impactful of Dr. Sarno's observations on health and society.

Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds


Lauren Slater - 2018
     Although one in five Americans now takes at least one psychotropic drug, the fact remains that nearly seventy years after doctors first began prescribing them, we still don't know exactly how or why these drugs work--or don't work--on what ails our brains. Blue Dreams offers the explosive story of the discovery, invention, people, and science behind our licensed narcotics, as told by a riveting writer and psychologist who shares her own intimate experience with the highs and lows of psychiatry's drugs. Lauren Slater's account ranges from the earliest, Thorazine and lithium, up through Prozac and other antidepressants, as well as Ecstasy, "magic mushrooms," the most cutting-edge memory drugs, and even neural implants. Along the way, she narrates the history of psychiatry itself, illuminating the imprint its colorful little capsules have left on millions of brains worldwide, and demonstrating how these wonder drugs may heal us or hurt us.

Happy Habits: 50 Science-Backed Rituals to Adopt (or Stop) to Boost Health and Happiness


Karen Salmansohn - 2020
    

The Island of the Colorblind


Oliver Sacks - 1996
    From the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars comes "a delightful inner and outer journey, destined to surprise and please the devoted Sacks reader" (Washington Post) - a work rich in curiosity and compassion and intellectual adventure.

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery


Henry Marsh - 2014
    Operations on the brain carry grave risks. Every day, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh must make agonizing decisions, often in the face of great urgency and uncertainty.If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practiced by calm and detached doctors, this gripping, brutally honest account will make you think again. With astonishing compassion and candor, Marsh reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets, and the moments of black humor that characterize a brain surgeon's life.Do No Harm provides unforgettable insight into the countless human dramas that take place in a busy modern hospital. Above all, it is a lesson in the need for hope when faced with life's most difficult decisions.

Medicine Dog: K9s, Stem Cells, and an Amazing Tail of Recovery


Júlia Szabó - 2014
    Diligently researching how to restore his quality of life, she discovered Vet-Stem, a service that provides cutting-edge regeneration therapy for pets, using stem cells harvested from animals' own tissue. Just hours after receiving IV and intra-joint injections, Sam began aging backward--which left Julia wondering why this simple, effective treatment was not available for humans.            Julia suffered from chronic inflammatory bowel disease, and after witnessing Sam's astonishing recovery, she set out on a curious quest: to be treated like a dog by a doctor as competent as her vet! After a four-year wait, Julia became the first American to be successfully cured of a perirectal fistula with stem cells derived from her own fat. With this amazing true story of how a pack of shelter dogs she rescued from death row came to save her life, Julia hopes to inspire and inform readers about exciting healthcare options available to them and their cherished animal companions.

Changing Normal: How I Helped My Husband Beat Cancer


Marilu Henner - 2016
    Within days of their first meeting in 2003, they were planning a life together, and soon they were inseparable as Michael became ever more integrated into Marilu’s family. But after only months they were thrown the ultimate curveball: Michael was diagnosed with bladder cancer, and then lung cancer. Marilu refused to lose the love of her life so easily. With the knowledge she had gained on her own health journey, chronicled in several of her bestselling books, Marilu set about finding a path for Michael that would use the best of Eastern and Western medicine to beat his cancers and return Michael to optimal health. Michael eschewed most traditional treatments and with Marilu’s help—aided by knowledgeable and sympathetic doctors—he forged his own path. In this moving and informative book, Marilu tells the story of their fast-paced romance and how this contrasted with the day-to-day battle for Michael’s life. Michael tells the story from his point of view: the search for the cause of his cancer, the mental anguish he felt as he realized how responsible he was for his condition, the physical and mental hardships that he had to overcome, and the triumph of love that made it all worthwhile. Not a “how-to” book in the traditional sense, Changing Normal is a book of empowerment, a call for all those facing similar challenges to take responsibility for their lives, to search for the causes of their illness and address them directly. Written with an engaging voice, a sense of humor, and life-changing wisdom, Changing Normal is a personal and touching look at how Marilu and Michael faced down a cancer diagnosis and came out the other side happier, healthier, and more in love than ever.

Warning: Psychiatry Can Be Hazardous to Your Mental Health


William Glasser - 2003
    Millions of patients are now routinely being given prescriptions for a wide range of drugs including Ritalin, Prosac, Zoloft and related drugs which can be harmful to the brain. A previous generation of patients would have had a course of psychotherapy without brain–damaging chemicals. Glasser explains the wide implications of this radical change in treatment and what can be done to counter it.

The Sinatra Solution: Metabolic Cardiology


Stephen T. Sinatra - 2005
    Sinatra discusses the importance of energy metabolism on cardiovascular health and the positive impact these three energy-supplying nutrients, CoQ10, carnitine, ribose, have on the cardiovascular system. Readers will learn how these miraculous nutrients work throughout the body, essentially charging up every body cell to function at optimal capacity.

The DOs: Osteopathic Medicine in America


Norman Gevitz - 1982
    The DOs chronicles the development of this controversial medical movement from the nineteenth century to the present. Historian Norman Gevitz describes the philosophy and practice of osteopathy, as well as its impact on medical care. From the theories underlying the use of spinal manipulation developed by osteopathy's founder, Andrew Taylor Still, Gevitz traces the movement's early success, despite attacks from the orthodox medical community, and details the internal struggles to broaden osteopathy's scope to include the full range of pharmaceuticals and surgery. He also recounts the efforts of osteopathic colleges to achieve parity with institutions granting M.D. degrees and looks at the continuing effort by osteopathic physicians and surgeons to achieve greater recognition and visibility.In print continuously since 1982, The DOs has now been thoroughly updated and expanded to include two new chapters addressing recent and current challenges and to bring the history of the profession up to the beginning of the new millennium.

American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts


Chris McGreal - 2018
    But American Overdose exposes the powerful forces they were up against, including the pharmaceutical industry's coopting of the Food and Drug Administration and Congress in the drive to push painkillers--resulting in the resurgence of heroin cartels in the American heartland. McGreal tells the story, in terms both broad and intimate, of people hit by a catastrophe they never saw coming. Years in the making, its ruinous consequences will stretch years into the future.

A Map of the Child: A Pediatrician's Tour of the Body


Darshak Sanghavi - 2003
    . . Sanghavi is a vivid and effortless teller of human tales and quite evidently a special doctor, too." —Atul Gawande, author of ComplicationsIn this compelling book, Dr. Darshak Sanghavi takes the reader on a dramatic tour of a child's eight vital organs, beginning with the lungs and proceeding through the heart, blood, bones, brain, skin, gonads, and gut.Along the way, we meet children and families in extraordinary circumstances—a premature baby named Adam Flax who was born with undeveloped lungs, a teenage boy with a positive pregnancy test, and a young girl who keeps losing weight despite her voracious appetite. In a deeply personal narrative, Sanghavi provides a richly detailed—and humanized—portrait of how the pediatric body functions in both sickness and health.

Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service


Maryn McKenna - 2004
    They always keep a bag packed. They seldom have more than twenty-four hours' notice before they are dispatched. The phone calls that tell them to head to the airport, sometimes in the middle of the night, may give them no more information than the country they are traveling to and the epidemic they will tackle when they get there.The universal human instinct is to run from an outbreak of disease. These doctors run toward it.They are the disease detective corps of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal agency that tracks and tries to prevent disease outbreaks and bioterrorist attacks around the world. They are formally called the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) -- a group founded more than fifty years ago out of fear that the Korean War might bring the use of biological weapons -- and, like intelligence operatives in the traditional sense, they perform their work largely in anonymity. They are not household names, but over the years they were first to confront the outbreaks that became known as hantavirus, Ebola virus, and AIDS. Now they hunt down the deadly threats that dominate our headlines: West Nile virus, anthrax, and SARS.In this riveting narrative, Maryn McKenna -- the only journalist ever given full access to the EIS in its fifty-three-year history -- follows the first class of disease detectives to come to the CDC after September 11, the first to confront not just naturally occurring outbreaks but the man-made threat of bioterrorism. They are talented researchers -- many with young families -- who trade two years of low pay and extremely long hours for the chance to be part of the group that has helped eradicate smallpox, push back polio, and solve the first major outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease, toxic shock syndrome, and "E. coli" O157.Urgent, exhilarating, and compelling, "Beating Back the Devil" goes with the EIS as they try to stop epidemics -- before the epidemics stop us.