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Mama Might Be Better Off Dead
- The Failure of Health Care in Urban America
- Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts
- Length: 14 hrs and 27 mins
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Publisher's summary
North Lawndale, a neighborhood that lies in the shadows of Chicago's Loop, is surrounded by some of the city's finest medical facilities. Yet, it is one of the sickest, most medically underserved communities in the country.
Mama Might Be Better Off Dead immerses listeners in the lives of four generations of a poor, African-American family in the neighborhood, who are beset with the devastating illnesses that are all too common in America's inner-cities. Headed by Jackie Banes, who oversees the care of a diabetic grandmother, a husband on kidney dialysis, an ailing father, and three children, the Banes family contends with countless medical crises. From visits to emergency rooms and dialysis units, to trials with home care, to struggles for Medicaid eligibility, Laurie Kaye Abraham chronicles their access - or more often, lack thereof - to medical care. Their story reveals an inadequate health care system that is further undermined by the direct and indirect effects of poverty.
Both disturbing and illuminating, Mama Might Be Better Off Dead is an unsettling, profound look at the human face of health care in America. Published to great acclaim in 1993, the book in this new edition includes an incisive foreword by David Ansell, a physician who worked at Mt. Sinai Hospital, where much of the Banes family's narrative unfolds.
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Story
Following the death of her father, journalist and hospice volunteer Ann Neumann sets out to examine what it means to die well in the United States. When Ann Neumann's father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, she left her job and moved back to her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She became his full-time caregiver - cooking, cleaning, and administering medications. When her father died, she was undone by the experience, by grief and the visceral quality of dying.
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Ugh, so boring
- By Maranto on 05-13-19
By: Ann Neumann
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One Doctor
- Close Calls, Cold Cases, and the Mysteries of Medicine
- By: Brendan Reilly
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 15 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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An epic story told by a unique voice in American medicine, One Doctor describes life-changing experiences in the career of a distinguished physician. In riveting first-person prose, Dr. Brendan Reilly takes us to the front lines of medicine today.
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Simply Brilliant
- By Jan on 06-20-14
By: Brendan Reilly
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Confessions of a GP
- By: Benjamin Daniels
- Narrated by: Eamonn Riley
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Benjamin Daniels is angry. He is frustrated, confused, baffled and, quite frequently, very funny. He is also a GP. These are his confessions.A woman troubled by pornographic dreams about Tom Jones. An 80-year-old man who can't remember why he's come to see the doctor.
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Very enjoyable
- By PCF on 05-27-17
By: Benjamin Daniels
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Teeth
- The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America
- By: Mary Otto
- Narrated by: Suehyla El'Attar
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Teeth takes listeners on a disturbing journey into America's silent epidemic of oral disease, exposing the hidden connections between tooth decay and stunted job prospects, low educational achievement, social mobility, and the troubling state of our public health.
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Content everyone should know; dismal narration
- By Elaine on 08-04-17
By: Mary Otto
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
- A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
- By: Anne Fadiman
- Narrated by: Pamela Xiong
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos.
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Good audiobook but narrator struggles with basic pronunciation
- By Kate on 06-04-15
By: Anne Fadiman
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The Desperate Hours
- One Hospital's Fight to Save a City on the Pandemic's Front Lines
- By: Marie Brenner
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 15 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 arrived in New York City. Before long, America’s largest metropolis was at war against a virus that mercilessly swept through its five boroughs. In The Desperate Hours, award-winning journalist Marie Brenner, having been granted unprecedented 18-month access to the entire New York-Presbyterian hospital system, tells the story of the doctors, nurses, residents, researchers, and suppliers who tried to save lives across Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn and the northern periphery of the city.
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Way too much politics
- By Josh on 07-18-22
By: Marie Brenner
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Knocking on Heaven's Door
- The Path to a Better Way of Death
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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A better way to narrate a book about death?
- By MAUREEN on 10-21-13
By: Katy Butler
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Bellevue
- Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital
- By: David Oshinsky
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution.
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Fascinating
- By Jean on 12-14-16
By: David Oshinsky
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Five Days at Memorial
- Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
- By: Sheri Fink
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 17 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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After Hurricane Katrina struck and power failed, amid rising floodwaters and heat, exhausted staff at Memorial Medical Center designated certain patients last for rescue. Months later, a doctor and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs.
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Five Days in Hell/Years in Purgatory
- By Cynthia on 09-15-13
By: Sheri Fink
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Unaccountable
- What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care
- By: Marty Makary
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Marty Makary is co-developer of the life-saving checklist outlined in Atul Gawande's best-selling The Checklist Manifesto. As a busy surgeon who has worked in many of the best hospitals in the nation, he can testify to the amazing power of modern medicine to cure. But he's also been a witness to a medical culture that routinely leaves surgical sponges inside patients, amputates the wrong limbs, and overdoses children because of sloppy handwriting. Over the last 10 years, neither error rates nor costs have come down, despite scientific progress.
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Everyone should read this book.
- By Julie on 06-11-16
By: Marty Makary
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The Spectrum of Hope
- An Optimistic and New Approach to Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias
- By: Gayatri Devi MD
- Narrated by: Wendy Tremont King
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine finding a glimmer of good news in a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. And imagine how that would change the outlook of the five million Americans who suffer from Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, not to mention their families, loved ones, and caretakers. A neurologist who's been specializing in dementia and memory loss for more than 20 years, Dr. Gayatri Devi rewrites the story of Alzheimer's by defining it as a spectrum disorder - like autism, Alzheimer's is a disease that affects different people differently.
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Aging with Grace
- By Lisa F on 05-19-21
By: Gayatri Devi MD
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Critical Care
- A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between
- By: Theresa Brown
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In her former career as an English professor, Theresa Brown had been shielded from the harsh reality of death. That all changed the day she decided to become an oncology nurse. In Critical Care, Theresa writes powerfully and honestly about her first year on the hospital floor. With great compassion and a disarming sense of humor, she shares the trials and triumphs of her patients and comes to realize that caring for a patient means much more than simply treating a disease.
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Excellent all the way around!
- By Susan on 10-12-17
By: Theresa Brown