Showing titles in Physician & Patient

Too many Americans die each year as a result of preventable medical error—mistakes, complications, and misdiagnoses. And many more of us are not receiving the best care possible, even though it’s readily available and we’re entitled to it. The key is knowing how to access it. The Patient’s Playbook is a call to action.

We all know that our current healthcare system is broken, especially for primary care doctors and their patients. Primary care physicians have to see more and more patients in less and less time in order to keep up with declining reimbursement from insurance companies. This leads to rushed office visits, missed opportunities for genuine connections between doctors and their patients, frustrated patients, and burned out doctors. But it doesn't have to be this way. Direct primary care offers a real opportunity at a fulfilling practice of medicine. It’s a golden opportunity to restructure ...

This haunting and propulsive debut follows a journalist's years-long investigation into his father's old classmate: former high school valedictorian Paul Volkman, who seemed destined for greatness after earning his MD and PhD from the prestigious University of Chicago, but is now serving four consecutive life sentences at a federal prison in Arizona.

Written by a practicing emergency physician, The White Coat Investor is a high-yield manual that specifically deals with the financial issues facing medical students, residents, physicians, dentists, and similar high-income professionals. Doctors are highly-educated and extensively trained at making difficult diagnoses and performing life-saving procedures. However, they receive little to no training in business, personal finance, investing, insurance, taxes, estate planning, and asset protection.

We have lost the war on cancer. We spend $150 billion each year treating it, yet - a few innovations notwithstanding - a patient with cancer is as likely to die of it as one was 50 years ago. Most new drugs add mere months to one's life at agonizing physical and financial cost. In The First Cell, Azra Raza offers a searing account of how both medicine and our society (mis)treats cancer, how we can do better, and why we must.

The unforgettable inspiring memoir of one extraordinary doctor who is saving lives in a most unconventional way, Ask Me Why I Hurt is the touching and revealing first-person account of the remarkable work of Dr. Randy Christensen. Trained as a pediatrician, he works not in a typical hospital setting but, rather, in a 38-foot Winnebago that has been refitted as a doctor's office on wheels. His patients are the city's homeless adolescents and children.

It has been said that everyone knows a cancer survivor, but no one has met an Alzheimer's survivor - until now. In his first two books, Dr. Dale Bredesen outlined the revolutionary treatments that are changing what had previously seemed like the inevitable outcome of cognitive decline and dementia. And in these moving narratives, you can hear directly from the first survivors of Alzheimer’s themselves - their own amazing stories of hope told in their own words.

Author and spine surgeon Dr. David Hanscom has observed that in this era of corporate medicine, surgical decisions are often made quickly, without a complete evaluation or attempt at nonsurgical rehabilitation before proceeding. The result? The majority of spine operations are unnecessary, and many surgeries are performed on spines with normal, age-related conditions.

A 'textbook with passion', Hardwiring Excellence offers a road map and practical how-to guide for creating and sustaining a culture of service and operational excellence. In this book, author Quint Studer, founder of Studer Group, draws on his personal experience as a former hospital executive who led two organizations to the top 1% in patient satisfaction and his experience coaching hundreds of healthcare organizations since.

While much has been written about the minds and methods of the medical professionals who save our lives, precious little has been said about their emotions. Physicians are assumed to be objective, rational beings, easily able to detach as they guide patients and families through some of life’s most challenging moments. But understanding doctors’ emotional responses to the life-and-death dramas of everyday practice can make all the difference on giving and getting the best medical care.

All Bleeding Stops gives listeners an intimate look at what goes on inside a trauma center, highlighting injuries sustained in car crashes, shootings, and stabbings—basically anything bleeding, obstructed, or perforated. Having lived and breathed trauma for four decades, Dr. Cohn is an ideal guide to demystify the role of the trauma surgeon and their place in a hospital. The behind-the-scenes look he provides is infused with sobering tales from his career as a military surgeon and in trauma centers across the country as well as his descriptions of high-profile medical stories.

Despite modern medicine's infatuation with high-tech gadgetry, the single most powerful diagnostic tool is the doctor-patient conversation, which can uncover the lion's share of illnesses. However, what patients say and what doctors hear are often two vastly different things. Patients, anxious to convey their symptoms, feel an urgency to "make their case" to their doctors. Doctors, under pressure to be efficient, multitask while patients speak and often miss the key elements.

Dr. Aoife Abbey takes us beyond the medical perspective to see the humanity at work inside our hospitals through the eyes of doctors and nurses as they witness and experience the full spectrum of human emotion with every shift. It is their responsibility to mitigate the grief of a family in mourning, calm a patient about to die, and confront their own fear of failure when lives are on the line.

Develop an action plan and learn to overcome the fear of diabetes to manage it successfully. Take steps to strike a balance among your food, physical activities, and medications and cultivate determination to tale charge of your life.

Financial Boot Camp will teach you what you need to know to joint the ranks of these financially secure doctors. It starts at the very beginning and is filled with straight talk and clear explanations. Although appropriate for the financial novice, it also contains advanced concepts unknown to many financial advisors. Besides giving you the information you need, the included anecdotes from real doctors will also inspire you to finally take action and get control of your financial life.

In medical school, Matt McCarthy dreamed of being a different kind of doctor - the sort of mythical, unflappable physician who could reach unreachable patients. But when a new admission to the critical care unit almost died his first night on call, he found himself scrambling. Visions of mastery quickly gave way to hopes of simply surviving hospital life, where confidence was hard to come by and no amount of med school training could dispel the terror of facing actual patients.

In 1949, Ron Losee, a young Yale Medical School graduate, headed west with his wife and small daughter to begin the practice of medicine. They settled in Ennis, Montana, in a log cabin that also became their office and lab. Patients made themselves at home in the living room. One small bag held all their medical equipment. It was a proud moment when a patient first called Losee "Doc." His fee on that occasion was three dollars.

A young father with a rare form of lung cancer who has been turned down for a transplant by several hospitals. A kid considered not “smart enough” to be worthy of a transplant. A young mother dying on the waiting list in front of her two small children. A father losing his oldest daughter after a transplant goes awry. The nights waiting for donor lungs to become available, understanding that someone needed to die so that another patient could live. These are some of the stories in this memoir about Dr. Weill’s 10 years spent directing the lung transplant program at Stanford.

When it comes to helping patients manage chronic and acute conditions and make healthier choices in such areas as medication adherence, smoking, diet, and preventive care, good advice alone is not enough. By using MI techniques, doctors, nurses, and other providers can transform conversations about change. The book shows how even the briefest clinical interaction can serve to build trust, clarify patients' goals as well as reasons for ambivalence, and guide them to take positive steps.

In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, one of the nation's top physicians, examines what he calls medicine's "Gutenberg moment". Much as the printing press liberated knowledge from the control of an elite class, new technology is poised to democratize medicine. In this new era, patients will control their data and be emancipated from a paternalistic medical regime in which "the doctor knows best."