Breath Taking
The Power, Fragility, and Future of Our Extraordinary Lungs
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Narrated by:
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Tom Parks
About this listen
From an expert in pulmonary medicine, the story of our extraordinary lungs, the organ that both explains our origins and holds the keys to our future as a species
We take an average of 7.5 million breaths a year and some 600 million in our lifetime, and what goes on in our body each time oxygen is taken in and carbon dioxide expelled is nothing short of miraculous. “Our lungs are the lynchpin between our bodies and the outside world,” writes Dr. Michael Stephen. And yet, we take our lungs for granted until we’re incapacitated and suddenly confronted with their vital importance.
In Breath Taking, pulmonologist Michael Stephen takes us on a journey to shed original and much-needed light on our neglected and extraordinary lungs, at a most critical societal moment. He relates the history of oxygen on Earth and the evolutionary origins of breathing, and explores the healing power of breath and its spiritual potential. He explains in lay terms the links our lungs have with our immune system and with society at large. And he offers illuminating chronicles of pulmonary research and discovery - from Galen in the ancient world to pioneers of lung transplant - and poignant human stories of resilience and recovery - from the frantic attempts to engage his own son’s lungs at birth to patients he treats for cystic fibrosis today.
Despite great advances in science, our lungs are ever more threatened. Asthma is more prevalent than ever; rising stress levels make our lungs vulnerable to disease; and COVID-19 has revealed that vulnerability in historic ways. In this time, Breath Taking offers inspiration and hope to millions whose lungs are affected and vital perspective to us all.
©2021 Michael J. Stephen. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Tom Parks provides superb narration.” (Library Journal)
“Brains and hearts preoccupy science writers, so this rare exploration of lungs fills a need. Pulmonologist Stephen cannot conceal his enthusiasm for his favorite organ as he mixes evolution, medical history, autobiography, and vivid stories of patients with a skillful account of how lungs operate and how we might take better care of them.... Valuable popular science.” (Kirkus Reviews)
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The Heart Healers
- The Misfits, Mavericks, and Rebels Who Created the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of Our Lives
- By: James Forrester MD
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 15 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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At one time heart disease was a death sentence. By the middle of the 20th century, it was killing millions, and, as with the Black Death centuries before, physicians stood helpless. Visionaries, though, had begun to make strides earlier. On September 7, 1895, Ludwig Rehn successfully sutured the heart of a living man with a knife wound to the chest for the first time.
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Great review of the landmark achievements in Cardiology.
- By Trauma NP on 12-14-15
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The Cancer Chronicles
- Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery
- By: George Johnson
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 8 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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When the woman he loved was diagnosed with a metastatic cancer, science writer George Johnson embarked on a journey to learn everything he could about the disease and the people who dedicate their lives to understanding and combating it. What he discovered is a revolution under way - an explosion of new ideas about what cancer really is and where it comes from. In a provocative and intellectually vibrant exploration, he takes us on an adventure through the history and recent advances of cancer research that will challenge everything you thought you knew about the disease.
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A quick read - hard to put down
- By Digital Dilema on 09-06-13
By: George Johnson
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Less Medicine, More Health
- 7 Assumptions That Drive Too Much Medical Care
- By: H. Gilbert Welch
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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The author of the highly acclaimed Overdiagnosed describes seven widespread assumptions that encourage excessive, often ineffective, and sometimes harmful medical care. You might think the biggest problem in medical care is that it costs too much. Or that health insurance is too expensive, too uneven, too complicated - and gives you too many forms to fill out. But the central problem is that too much medical care has too little value.
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The truth will set you free
- By Rene B Milner on 04-01-16
By: H. Gilbert Welch
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Chronic
- The Hidden Cause of the Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Healthy Again
- By: Steven Phillips MD, Dana Parish, Kristin Loberg
- Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt, Thomas Allen
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In this timely book, Steven Phillips, MD, and his former patient, Sony singer-songwriter Dana Parish, reveal striking evidence that a broad range of common infections, from COVID-19 to Lyme and many others, cause a variety of autoimmune, psychiatric, and chronic conditions. Chronic explores the science behind what makes them difficult to diagnose and treat, debunks widely held beliefs by doctors and patients alike, and provides solutions that empower sufferers to reclaim their lives.
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A must read book
- By Amazon Customer on 03-01-21
By: Steven Phillips MD, and others
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Ten Drugs
- How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Thomas Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book.
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Engrossing to physicians & lay persons alike
- By C. White on 03-08-19
By: Thomas Hager
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The Secret History of the War on Cancer
- By: Devra Davis Ph.D.
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 19 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The War on Cancer was run by leaders of industries that made cancer-causing products and sometimes also profited from drugs and technologies for finding and treating the disease. Filled with compelling personalities and never-before-revealed information, The Secret History of the War on Cancer shows how we began fighting the wrong war, with the wrong weapons, against the wrong enemies, a legacy that persists to this day.
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Silly Book
- By Adam Smith on 12-24-14
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Influenza
- The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic
- By: Dr. Jeremy Brown
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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On the 100th anniversary of the devastating pandemic of 1918, Jeremy Brown, a veteran ER doctor, explores the troubling, terrifying, and complex history of the flu virus, from the origins of the Great Flu that killed millions, to vexing questions such as: are we prepared for the next epidemic, should you get a flu shot, and how close are we to finding a cure?
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Important read
- By Kathryn C. on 12-21-18
By: Dr. Jeremy Brown
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Plagues, Pandemics and Viruses
- From the Plague of Athens to COVID-19
- By: Heather E. Quinlan
- Narrated by: Samara Naeymi
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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It can come in waves - like tidal waves. It changes societies. It disrupts life. It ends lives. As far back as 3000 B.C.E. (the Bronze Age), plagues have stricken mankind. COVID-19 is just the latest example, but history shows that life continues. It shows that knowledge and social cooperation can save lives. Viruses are neither alive nor dead and are the closest thing we have to zombies. Their only known function is to replicate themselves, which can have devastating consequences on their hosts.
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Somewhat elemental
- By Bertha Watkins on 10-23-21
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A Nation in Pain
- Healing Our Biggest Health Problem
- By: Judy Foreman
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 14 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Published in partnership with the International Association for the Study of Pain, A Nation in Pain offers a sweeping, deeply researched account of the chronic pain crisis, from neurobiology to public policy, and presents practical solutions that are within our grasp today. Drawing on both her personal experience with chronic pain and her background as an award-winning health journalist, she guides us through recent scientific discoveries, including genetic susceptibility to pain.
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Broad but superficial.
- By J. P. Murphy on 07-03-15
By: Judy Foreman
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The Truth About Cancer
- By: Ty M. Bollinger
- Narrated by: Ty M. Bollinger
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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One out of three women alive today, and one out of two men, will face a cancer diagnosis, according to the World Health Organization. Ty Bollinger takes this personally: in the course of a decade, he says, "I lost my entire family to cancer. I don't believe I had to lose them." The Truth about Cancer has been written for one simple reason: to share the knowledge we need to protect ourselves, treat ourselves, and in some cases save our lives or the lives of those we love.
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save a life with this valuable information.
- By edwin matias on 12-30-16
By: Ty M. Bollinger
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Under the Knife
- A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations
- By: Arnold van de Laar, Andy Brown - translator
- Narrated by: Rich Keeble
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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From the story of the desperate man from 17th-century Amsterdam who grimly cut a stone out of his own bladder to Bob Marley's deadly toe, Under the Knife offers a wealth of fascinating and unforgettable insights into medicine and history via the operating room. What happens during an operation? How does the human body respond to being attacked by a knife, a bacterium, a cancer cell, or a bullet? And, as medical advances continuously push the boundaries of what medicine can cure, what are the limits of surgery?
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Why did a surgeon need a fast horse?
- By India Clamp on 10-18-18
By: Arnold van de Laar, and others
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How Doctors Think
- By: Jerome Groopman M.D.
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within 12 seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong: with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make.
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Disappointing
- By Audiophile on 05-13-07
What listeners say about Breath Taking
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- V123
- 05-10-23
Highly informative
Fascinating information for everyone who has lungs. Highly recommend this thought provoking book. Many surprising facts.
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- Mike Buldra
- 06-21-21
Enjoyed this informative book
As a retired respiratory, I found this book very interesting and enjoyable. Although much of the medical information wasn't new, most of the historical information about the discoveries the pulmonary diseases and treatments was.
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- Henry Utset
- 06-04-24
Great history of the lungs and lung disease
Excellent tour of the history of our understanding of the lungs and the major health issues that affect the lungs. Only real detractor is that the narrator does not know how to pronounce any scientific or medical words, which was a little distracting.
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- Michelle Mendoza
- 03-03-21
Great & informative book
For those who are not lung specialists, this book is fabulous. The author covers lung function, physiology,gas exchange, and reviews several lung diseases, treatments and medical developments. Thumbs up.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Natchezman
- 05-21-22
A book for the young and old
I have the book in print, audible and Kindle. It’s fascinating reading as Dr Stephen is an excellent author. He presents the narrative very engagingly and the technical portions in easy assimilable fashion.
This book should be read by young and old (I’m 92) alike.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Amy Weintraub
- 08-12-21
Reads like a Medical Detective Novel!
The breadth and depth of Michael Stephen’s Breath Taking is literally breathtaking. In fact, there were moments when I actually held my breath, waiting to see the outcome of a procedure. Dr. Stephen’s clearly loves his patients, and he makes you care about them too. But lest you think this is one pulmonologist’s moving story with heartfelt patient anecdotes woven in, let me expand upon that notion.
This is a big book. The scope is epic. We learn how our planet evolved over four billion years to sustain life. We learn about the first appearance of oxygen, and we follow the evolution of a single cell into the multiplicity of forms living and dying today. We learn about the formation of our lungs, how we damage them with pollutants, like smoke and coal fires, inhaling tobacco, and how we can heal them with yoga breathing exercises and ever newer scientific discoveries.
One of the pleasures of reading this book is the way Stephen humanizes the unsung medical innovators, many of them women, who persisted against the odds of gender discrimination to discover the causes and treatment of pulmonary diseases. One contemporary hero is the oncologist Dr. Alice Shaw at Massachusetts General Hospital, a pioneer in the use of targeted drugs that use our own immune systems to effect a cure. Dr. Stephens writes about historical medical heroes like Dr. Virginia Apgar, whose name is given to the score newborns receive, and my personal favorite, Dr. Mary Ellen Avery, who, in 1948 was denied admission to Harvard Medical School because she was female. After training in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, she became a research scientist, on a mission to solve the mystery of premature respiratory distress. This mysterious disease, whose cause was unknown, was killing infants at great numbers when Dr. Avery did her training, including the newborn son of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. In 1959, Dr. Avery published a paper that broke through the traditional understanding of the syndrome. “Today,” says Stephens, “the mortality from respiratory distress syndrome is 5% of what it was before Dr. Avery’s brilliant insight.” In this same chapter, Stephen’s tells the story of his son’s birth, a tense and heart-pounding narrative that brought me to tears.
There are chapters that read like detective novels, wrong turns and right turns in the eradication of tuberculosis, for example. There are two heroes in this story. First, Dr. Robert Koch, whose research presented in a lecture in 1882 before the Berlin Physiological Society, “changed the field of TB forever.” The second hero in the TB story was the physician and epidemiologist Dr. Herman Biggs who, at the turn of the 20th century, brought his knowledge of how germs spread (based on Koch’s work) and prevention to New York City. Despite political opposition from both politicians and the mainstream medical community, he was able, through an early form of contact tracing and public education he spearheaded at the New York City Department of Health, significantly reduce the spread of TB.
Pollution, Stephen says, is the source of 6.5 million deaths every year, from both outdoor air quality, particularly in farming regions and urban areas, and indoor air quality resulting from wood burning stoves, dung and coal fires used for household heating.
Dr. Stephens is a leading expert on cystic fibrosis, and the stories of his patients’ bravery are nearly as moving as the story he tells about his own son’s birth. We learn through the poignant stories of his patients, about the advances, including lung transplants, that have increased life expectancy of cystic fibrosis patients. The detective novel-like narrative continues, moving from the history of diseases that at first seemed untreatable, to being treatable, to being cured.
There are cautionary tales about vaping, wood stoves and COVID. However, like any good story, Dr. Stephen leaves us feeling hope that even climate change is treatable.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Peter Hildebrandt
- 12-09-21
Great story
This book keeps you listening simply because it is an amazing narrative, beautiful success story and informs you as never before about our amazing lungs. Thanks for writing this Dr. Parks and for the wonderful narration Tom Parks.
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2 people found this helpful
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- S. Hunter
- 09-26-21
History and overview of Pulmonary medicine
This book reminds me of one of those college courses where you learn a lot of vaguely interesting historical facts but don't really come away with much that could be considered useful in day to day life
Would be a great book for anyone considering a career in pulmonary medicine.
If you are seeking a book that provides really useful information on actually BREATHING, I recommend the book, The Breathing Cure, or anything else by Patrick McKeown.
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1 person found this helpful