Showing titles in Physician & Patient

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.

From the drug addicts who call Amanda ‘the mother I never had’ to the women who’ve pushed back at domestic abuse, to women close to release in their 70s, who just want to stay in the place that they’ve always known, these are stories that are heartbreaking, harrowing and heart-warming. Amanda listens, prescribes and does what she can. After all, she’s their doctor.

While modern medicine produces miracles, it also delivers care that is too often unsafe, unreliable, unsatisfying, and impossibly expensive. For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare's ills. But medicine stubbornly resisted computerization - until now. Over the past five years, thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, health care has finally gone digital.

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.

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.

In his exceptionally thought-provoking and moving memoir, neurosurgeon Joseph D. Stern explores how personal loss influences the way physicians relate to patients and their families.

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.

Going against the conventional wisdom reinforced by the medical establishment and Big Pharma that more screening is the best preventative medicine, Dr. Gilbert Welch builds a compelling counterargument that what we need are fewer, not more, diagnoses. Documenting the excesses of American medical practice that labels far too many of us as sick, Welch examines the social, ethical, and economic ramifications of a health-care system that unnecessarily diagnoses and treats patients.

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.

Sex Matters tackles one of the most urgent, yet unspoken issues facing women's healthcare today: all models of medical research and practice are based on male-centric models that ignore the unique biological and emotional differences between men and women - an omission that endangers women's lives. McGregor explores the issues that arise from such treatment and offers clear, practical suggestions for what can be done.

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.

As a third-year Harvard Medical student doing a clinical rotation in surgery, Ronald Epstein watched an experienced surgeon fail to notice his patient's kidney turning an ominous shade of blue. In that same rotation, Epstein was awestruck by another surgeon's ability to slow down and shift between autopilot and intentionality. The difference between these two doctors left a lasting impression on Epstein and set the stage for his life's work - to identify the qualities and habits that distinguish masterful doctors from those who are merely competent.

When you are told that you have leukemia, your world stops. Your brain can't function. You are asked to make decisions about treatment almost immediately, when you are not in your right mind. And yet you pull yourself together and start asking questions. Beside you is your doctor, whose job it is to solve the awful puzzle of bone marrow gone wrong. The two of you are in it together. In When Blood Breaks Down, Mikkael Sekeres, a leading cancer specialist, takes listeners on the journey that patient and doctor travel together.

Every doctor is haunted by memories of difficult patients. People whom, despite all of their patience and persistence and the best communication, diagnostic and reasoning skills, they haven't helped. And anyone who has been a patient will tell you about encounters with difficult doctors, of relationships freighted with mutual bafflement, hostility and pain. Despite its vast resources, medicine is so often destined to fail people. Written by a practising GP, this book is told through stories of Dr Peter Dorward's hardest cases.

This book builds on the person-centered medicine movement to promote a shift in the philosophy of care of distress. It discusses the vital importance of whole person health, healing, and growth. Developing a new transdisciplinary concept of sense of safety, this book argues that the whole person needs to be understood within their context and relationships and explores the appraisal and coping systems that are part of health.

Seamus O'Mahony charts the realities of work in the 'ministry of bodies', that huge complex where people come to be cured and to die. From unexpected deaths to moral quandaries and bureaucratic disasters, O'Mahony documents life in the halls and wards that all of us will visit at some point in our lives with his characteristic wit and dry and unsentimental intelligence.

An epic memoir from a man whose life is defined by exploration and innovation, The Sky Below re-creates some of the most unforgettable adventures of our time. From dramatic, high-risk spacewalks to author Scott Parazynski's death-defying quest to summit Mount Everest - his body ravaged by a career in space - listeners will experience the life of an elite athlete, physician, and explorer.

This is a book of miracles - medical events witnessed by leading physicians for which there is no reasonable medical explanation, or, if there is, the explanation itself is extraordinary. These dramatic first-person essays detail spectacular serendipities, impossible cures, breathtaking resuscitations, extraordinary awakenings, and recovery from unimaginable disasters. Miracles We Have Seen is a book of inspiration and optimism, and a compelling glimpse into the lives of physicians.

At the start of his second year at Harvard, Martin was hit by a car and thrown 150 feet. He landed on his head, suffering severe traumatic brain injury. He resolved to get back. Climbing Back: A Family's Journey Through Brain Injury follows Martin's sister, father, and mother (the author) as they accompany Martin through rehabilitation and recovery. They find that they too must work to get back, to heal their own minds and souls.

Learn how big Pharma sells drugs by faking their studies. Understand the lies they stuff into websites and medical journals. Learn why it all gets ignored (hint: Pharma has the largest criminal settlements in history). Learn how to conquer healthcare costs. Medical spending per person is double that of other countries and it is the top reason for US personal bankruptcy. I will show you how to escape the over-billing and prosper anyway.