The Laws of Human Nature


Robert Greene - 2018
    Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves.We are social animals. Our very lives depend on our relationships with people. Knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess, without which our other talents can only take us so far. Drawing from the ideas and examples of Pericles, Queen Elizabeth I, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others, Greene teaches us how to detach ourselves from our own emotions and master self-control, how to develop the empathy that leads to insight, how to look behind people's masks, and how to resist conformity to develop your singular sense of purpose. Whether at work, in relationships, or in shaping the world around you, The Laws of Human Nature offers brilliant tactics for success, self-improvement, and self-defense.

Med School Confidential: A Complete Guide to the Medical School Experience: By Students, for Students


Robert H. Miller - 2006
    Miller and Daniel M. Bissell uses the same chronological format and mentor-based system that have made Law School Confidential and Business School Confidential such treasured and popular guides. It takes the reader step-by-step through the entire med school process--from thinking about, applying to, and choosing a medical school and program, through the four-year curriculum, internships, residencies, and fellowships, to choosing a specialty and finding the perfect job. With a foreword by Chair of the Admissions Committee at Dartmouth Medical School Harold M. Friedman, M.D., Med School Confidential provides what no other book currently does: a comprehensive, chronological account of the full medical school experience.

The Primal Prescription: Surviving The "Sick Care" Sinkhole


Doug McGuff - 2015
    health care system is in a state of disrepair, but the rabbit hole goes deeper than even the staunchest critics may realize. In Primal Prescription, authors Doug McGuff and Robert Murphy combine their expertise in economics and medicine to offer a shocking, disturbing, and ultimately enlightening view into America’s health care system. You’ll discover the real history of what went wrong with U.S. health care and insurance, and why current efforts to clean up the mess are only making things worse.But far from leaving you feeling helpless at the dismal—and sometimes deadly—state of affairs, Primal Prescription equips you with both the knowledge to understand the health care conundrum and the tools for navigating your way out of it. McGuff and Murphy offer an evidence-based “game plan” for taking control of your own medical care, protecting yourself and your loved ones regardless of what the future holds for the rest of the nation.Whether you’re currently tangled in America’s broken health care system or simply trying to avoid its clutches, Primal Prescription is a must-have resource for taking your health into your own hands.

How to Grow a Human: Adventures in Who We Are and How We Are Made


Philip Ball - 2019
    This was life—but whose?  In his most mind-bending book yet, Ball makes that disconcerting question the focus of a tour through what scientists can now do in cell biology and tissue culture. He shows how these technologies could lead to tailor-made replacement organs for when ours fail, to new medical advances for repairing damage and assisting conception, and to new ways of “growing a human.” For example, it might prove possible to turn skin cells not into neurons but into eggs and sperm, or even to turn oneself into the constituent cells of embryos. Such methods would also create new options for gene editing, with all the attendant moral dilemmas. Ball argues that such advances can therefore never be about “just the science,” because they come already surrounded by a host of social narratives, preconceptions, and prejudices. But beyond even that, these developments raise questions about identity and self, birth and death, and force us to ask how mutable the human body really is—and what forms it might take in years to come.

Unconventional Medicine: Join the Revolution to Reinvent Healthcare, Reverse Chronic Disease, and Create a Practice You Love


Chris Kresser - 2017
    Chronic disease is shortening our lifespan, destroying our quality of life, bankrupting governments, and threatening the health of future generations. Sadly, conventional medicine, with its focus on managing symptoms, has failed to address this challenge. The result is burned-out physicians, a sicker population, and a broken healthcare system. In Unconventional Medicine, Chris Kresser presents a plan to reverse this dangerous trend. He shows how the combination of a genetically aligned diet and lifestyle, functional medicine, and a lean, collaborative practice model can create a system that better serves the needs of both patients and practitioners. The epidemic of chronic illness can be stopped, if patients and practitioners can adapt.

Radical Honesty : How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth


Brad Blanton - 1994
    It was a shocker! In it, Dr. Brad Blanton, a psychotherapist and expert on stress management, explored the myths, superstitions and lies by which we all live. And this newly revised edition is even worse! Blanton shows us how stress comes not from the environment, but from the self-built jail of the mind. What keeps us in our self-built jails is lying."We all lie like hell," Dr. Blanton says. "It wears us out...it is the major source of all human stress. It kills us." Not telling our friends, lovers, spouses, or bosses about what we do, feel, or think keeps us locked in that mind jail. The way out is to get good at telling the truth, and Dr. Blanton provides the tools we can use to escape from that jail of the mind. This book is the cake with the file in it.In Radical Honesty, Dr. Blanton coaches us on how to have lives that work, how to have relationships that are alive and passionate, and how to create intimacy where none exists. As we have been taught by the philosophical and spiritual sources of our culture for thousands of years, from Plato to Nietzsche, from the Bible to Emerson, the truth shall set you free.

The Wahls Protocol : How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine


Terry Wahls - 2014
    Terry Wahls focused on treating her patients’ ailments with drugs or surgical procedures—until she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 2000. Within three years, her back and stomach muscles had weakened to the point where she needed a tilt-recline wheelchair. Conventional medical treatments were failing her, and she feared that she would be bedridden for the rest of her life. Dr. Wahls began studying the latest research on autoimmune disease and brain biology, and decided to get her vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and essential fatty acids from the food she ate rather than pills and supplements. Dr. Wahl’s adopted the nutrient-rich paleo diet, gradually refining and integrating it into a regimen of neuromuscular stimulation. First, she walked slowly, then steadily, and then she biked eighteen miles in a single day. In November 2011, Dr. Wahls shared her remarkable recovery in a TEDx talk that immediately went viral. Now, in The Wahls Protocol, she shares the details of the protocol that allowed her to reverse many of her symptoms, get back to her life, and embark on a new mission: to share the Wahls Protocol with others suffering from the ravages of multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune conditions.

Hormonal: The Hidden Intelligence of Hormones -- How They Drive Desire, Shape Relationships, Influence Our Choices, and Make Us Wiser


Martie Haselton - 2018
    With fresh insight, Martie Haselton explains how the fertility cycle has evolved over millions of years into a fine-tuned signaling system. Among the fascinating findings: During ovulation, women's attractiveness peaks because their "mate search effort" is turned on. Their walking gait, voice, skin condition, and dance moves are more alluring, and they wear more revealing clothes. They also tend to shop more. Being on the Pill affects women's preferences in men, and PMS may have evolved to get rid of boyfriends with unfit sperm. The research is provocative, but Haselton also presents practical advice for women to use their hormonal cycles to their advantage, helping them achieve success in their relationships, careers, and lives. Groundbreaking and counter-intuitive, HORMONAL will empower women everywhere to embrace their biology.

Making a Good Brain Great: The Amen Clinic Program for Achieving and Sustaining Optimal Mental Performance


Daniel G. Amen - 2005
    People unknowingly endanger or injure their brains, stress them by working at a frenzied pace and not getting enough sleep, pollute them with caffeine, alcohol, and drugs, and deprive them of proper nutrients. Brain dysfunction is the number one reason people fail at school, work, and relationships. The brain is the organ of learning, working, and loving—the supercomputer that runs our lives. It’s very simple: when our brains work right, we work right—and when our brains have trouble, we have trouble in our lives.Luckily, it’s never too late: the brain is capable of change, and when you care for it, the results are amazing. Making a Good Brain Great gives you the tools you need to optimize your brain power and enrich your health and your life in the process. The principles and exercises in this book, based on years of cutting-edge neuroscience research and the experiences of thousands of people, provide a wealth of practical information to teach you how to achieve the best brain possible. You will learn:•how to eat right to think right•how to protect your brain from injuries and toxic substances•how to nourish your brain with vitamins and do mental workouts to keep it strong•the critical component of physical exercise, and which kinds work best•how to rid your brain of negative thoughts, counteract stress, and much moreFull of encouraging anecdotes from Dr. Amen’s many years of experience, Making a Good Brain Great is a positive and practical road map for enriching and improving your own greatest asset—your brain.From the Hardcover edition.

The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and Activists Are Building an Animal-Free Food System


Jacy Reese Anthis - 2018
    The End of Animal Farming pushes this conversation forward by outlining a strategic roadmap to a humane, ethical, and efficient food system in which slaughterhouses are obsolete—where the tastes of even the most die-hard meat eater are satisfied by innovative food technologies like cultured meats and plant-based protein. Social scientist Jacy Reese Anthis analyzes the social forces leading us toward the downfall of animal agriculture, the technology making this change possible for the meat-hungry public, and the activism driving consumer demand for plant-based and cultured foods.Reese contextualizes the issue of factory farming—the inhumane system of industrial farming that 95 percent of farmed animals endure—as part of humanity's expanding moral circle. Humanity increasingly treats nonhuman animals, from household pets to orca whales, with respect and kindness, and Reese argues that farmed animals are the next step. Reese applies an analytical lens of "effective altruism," the burgeoning philosophy of using evidence-based research to maximize one's positive impact in the world, in order to better understand which strategies can help expand the moral circle now and in the future.The End of Animal Farming is not a scolding treatise or a prescription for an ascetic diet. Reese invites readers—vegan and non-vegan—to consider one of the most important and transformational social movements of the coming decades.

The Metabolic Approach to Cancer: Integrating Deep Nutrition, the Ketogenic Diet, and Nontoxic Bio-Individualized Therapies


Nasha Winters - 2017
    Conventional treatment continues to rely on chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation to attack cancer cells. Yet research has repeatedly shown that 95 percent of cancer cases are directly linked to diet and lifestyle. The Metabolic Approach to Cancer is the book we have been waiting for--it offers an innovative, metabolic-focused nutrition protocol that actually works. Naturopathic, integrative oncologist and cancer survivor Dr. Nasha Winters and nutrition therapist Jess Higgins Kelley have identified the ten key elements of a person's "terrain" (think of it as a topographical map of our body) that are crucial to preventing and managing cancer. Each of the terrain ten elements--including epigenetics, the microbiome, the immune system, toxin exposures, and blood sugar balance--is illuminated as it relates to the cancer process, then given a heavily researched and tested, non-toxic and metabolic, focused nutrition prescription.The metabolic theory of cancer--that cancer is fueled by high carbohydrate diets, not "bad" genetics--was introduced by Nobel Prize-laureate and scientist Otto Warburg in 1931. It has been largely disregarded by conventional oncology ever since. But this theory is resurging as a result of research showing incredible clinical outcomes when cancer cells are deprived of their primary fuel source (glucose). The ketogenic diet--which relies on the body's production of ketones as fuel--is the centerpiece of The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. Further, Winters and Kelley explain how to harness the anticancer potential of phytonutrients abundant in low-glycemic plant and animal foods to address the 10 hallmarks of cancer--an approach Western medicine does with drug based therapies.Their optimized, genetically-tuned diet shuns grains, legumes, sugar, genetically modified foods, pesticides, and synthetic ingredients while emphasizing whole, wild, local, organic, fermented, heirloom, and low-glycemic foods and herbs. Other components of their approach include harm-reductive herbal therapies like mistletoe (considered the original immunotherapy and common in European cancer care centers) and cannabinoids (which shrink tumors and increase quality of life, yet are illegal in more than half of the United States). Through addressing the ten root causes of cancer and approaching the disease from a nutrition-focused standpoint, we can slow cancer's endemic spread and live optimized lives.

The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers


Daniel L. Schacter - 2001
    Schacter explores instances of what we would consider memory failure—absent-mindedness, transience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence—and suggests instead that these miscues are actually indications that memory is functioning as designed. Drawing from vivid scientific research and creative literature, as well as high-profile events in which memory has figured significantly (Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony, for instance), The Seven Sins of Memory provides a more nuanced understanding of how memory and the mind influence each other and shape our lives.

Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts


Stanislas Dehaene - 2014
    We can now pin down the neurons that fire when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information and understand the crucial role unconscious computations play in how we make decisions. The emerging theory enables a test of consciousness in animals, babies, and those with severe brain injuries.A joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities, Consciousness and the Brain will excite anyone interestedin cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifyingconsciousness.

Transforming Health Care: Virginia Mason Medical Center's Pursuit of the Perfect Patient Experience


Charles Kenney - 2010
    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.

Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome


Venki Ramakrishnan - 2018
    But by itself, DNA is just an inert blueprint for life. It is the ribosome--an enormous molecular machine made up of a million atoms--that makes DNA come to life, turning our genetic code into proteins and therefore into us. Gene Machine is an insider account of the race for the structure of the ribosome, a fundamental discovery that both advances our knowledge of all life and could lead to the development of better antibiotics against life-threatening diseases. But this is also a human story of Ramakrishnan's unlikely journey, from his first fumbling experiments in a biology lab to being the dark horse in a fierce competition with some of the world's best scientists. In the end, Gene Machine is a frank insider's account of the pursuit of high-stakes science.