Showing titles in Medical

A political journalist and activist, Cousins was also a professor of medical humanities at UCLA, where he studied the biochemistry of human emotions and their relationship to healing. When Cousins was hospitalized with a debilitating collagen illness, he decided to take his health into his own hands. Cousins and his doctor combated the disease together by creating a regimen of laughter and vitamin C specifically calibrated to his needs. Against all odds, the treatment worked, proving to Cousins that a positive attitude was key to his improvement.

Have you ever driven home from work wearing nothing but a pair of rubber boots? For Dr. Melinda McCall, a large animal veterinarian in rural Virginia, this is living the dream. Caring for cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, llamas, and the occasional alpaca, unusual mishaps and mind-blowing adventures abound. Getting caught driving home naked after a tough day at work is just another day at the office for Dr. Melinda.

An intimate, compassionate, and expansive portrait of Borderline Personality Disorder that rejects the conventional wisdom that this condition is untreatable, told by a psychologist who specializes in BPD....

In Sisters of Mokama, Jyoti Thottam draws upon 20 years’ worth of research to tell this inspiring story of six intrepid Kentucky nuns, their journey to build a hospital in the poorest state in India, and the Indian nurses whose lives would never be the same.

On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche received her medical degree - becoming the first Native American doctor in US history. She earned her degree 31 years before women could vote and 35 years before Indians could become citizens in their own country. This is the story of an Indian woman who effectively became the chief of an entrenched patriarchal tribe, the story of a woman who crashed through thick walls of ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice and then spent the rest of her life using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lot of her people.

Army combat veteran and registered nurse Erin Olszewski's most deeply held values were put to the test when she arrived as a travel nurse at Elmhurst Hospital in the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. After serving in Iraq, she was back on the front lines - and this time, she found, the situation was even worse. Rooms were filthy, nurses were lax with sanitation measures, and hospital-acquired cases of COVID-19 were spreading like wildfire.

Britney Daniels is a Black, masculine-presenting, tattooed lesbian from a working-class background. For the last five years, she has been working as an emergency-room nurse. She began Journal of a Black Queer Nurse as a personal diary, a tool to heal from the day-to-day traumas of seeing too much and caring too much. Hilarious, gut-wrenching, and infuriating by turns, these stories are told from the perspective of a deeply empathetic, no-nonsense young nurse, who highlights the way race, inequality, and a profit-driven healthcare system make the hospital a place where systemic racism is lived.

At the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Joshua Mezrich creates life from loss, transplanting organs from one body to another. In this intimate, profoundly moving work, he illuminates the extraordinary field of transplantation that enables this kind of miracle to happen every day.

Country of Ash is the starkly compelling, original chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. He clandestinely recorded the terrible events he witnessed, but his manuscript disappeared during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, reunited with his wife and young daughter, he rewrote his story.

Have you ever been told that your pain is imaginary? That's the reality of the more than 190 million people suffering the excruciating condition known as endometriosis. Journalist Tracey Lindeman knows it all too well. Decades of suffering from endometriosis propelled the creation of BLEED—part memoir, part investigative journalism, and all scathing indictment of how the medical system fails patients. Through extensive interviews and research, BLEED tracks the modern endo experience to the origins of medicine and how the system gained its power by marginalizing women.

Dr. Joel Salinas is a Harvard-trained researcher and neurologist with extraordinary gifts that provide him unique access to his patients and enable him to experience life in an extraordinary way. He has mirror-touch synesthesia, a neurological trait that allows him to feel others' emotions and physical sensations. Susceptible to the pain and discomfort of his patients, Salinas uses his heightened empathic ability - what he calls "compulsory mindfulness" - to help understand and better treat their conditions.

Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 - May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from "bold oracle" to "publicity hound". According to poet Allen Ginsberg, he was "a hero of American consciousness", and writer Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut". President Richard Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America". During the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the counterculture movement, Leary was arrested 36 times. The following recording was made in 1992.

In late 2022, in Rome, Hanif Kureishi had a fall. When he came to, he realized he could no longer walk. He could do nothing without the help of others and required constant care in a hospital. So began a yearlong odyssey through the medical systems of Rome and Italy, with the hope of somehow being able to return home to his house in London.

Off Our Chests recounts the story of Liza and John’s experience with her diagnosis and treatment. Written in alternating voices, Liza details her treatment and the complex decisions she had to make throughout her course of chemotherapy and radiation, including clinical trial participation and an elective double mastectomy, with the added complexity of being treated at the cancer center of which John was the chief of hematology and oncology and dealing with the emotional impact of knowing she may die as a young woman with young children.

When a seed falls from a vine in the tropics and is carried by ocean currents across the Atlantic to the shores of Western Europe, it is known as a sea bean. It’s long been lucky to find a sea bean upon the shore; these seeds have been collected and used as magical charms for more than a thousand years. Sally Huband's search for the elusive sea bean begins shortly after she moves to the windswept archipelago of Shetland, the northernmost region of Great Britain, situated between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea

At age fourteen, Laura Delano saw her first psychiatrist who immediately diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and started her on a mood stabilizer and antidepressant. At school, Delano was elected the class president and earned straight-As and a national squash ranking; at home, she unleashed all the rage and despair she felt, lashing out at her family and locking herself in her bedroom, obsessing over death. Delano’s initial diagnosis marked the beginning of a life-altering saga

For six decades, Pittsburgh-based forensic scientist Cyril Wecht has been an outspoken authority when horrible things happen to everyday people--murders, childhood deaths, tragic accidents and police brutality. His expertise and testimony have been called upon in high-profile cases, including the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Elvis Presley, JonBenet Ramsey, Laci Peterson and others.

In January 2020, Admiral Brett P. Giroir, MD, was among the first federal leaders tapped to handle the reintegration of US citizens from Wuhan, China, in the earliest days of what became the Covid-19 pandemic. As such, he was one of the few to see what everyone believed were the only Americans exposed to the novel virus at the time. Ultimately, Giroir would be called to serve on the White House Coronavirus Task Force under President Donald Trump.

In this eye-opening account of life in the ER, Paul Austin recalls how the daily grind of long, erratic shifts and endless hordes of patients with sad stories sent him down a path of bitterness and cynicism. Gritty, powerful, and ultimately redemptive, Something for the Pain is a revealing glimpse into the fragility of compassion and sanity in the industrial setting of today’s hospitals.

Dr. Eben Alexander has been an academic neurosurgeon for more than 25 years. In 2008, his remarkable near-death experience radically transformed his understanding of consciousness and the brain; indeed, of all existence.