Author: Victoria Sweet
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1594633592
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
In the quarter-century that Victoria Sweet has been a doctor, 'healthcare' has replaced medicine, 'providers' look at their laptops more than at their patients, and the ruthless pursuit of efficiency has vanquished the effectiveness of treatment. Victoria Sweet knows that there is an alternative way, because she has lived and practised it. In her new book, she reflects with compassion, wit, and profound insight on experiences drawn from her time in medical school, internship, and residencies, the path to the 'slow medicine' in which she has been pioneer and inspiration.
Author: Victoria Sweet
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1594486549
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
Victoria Sweet's new book, SLOW MEDICINE, is on sale now! For readers of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, a medical “page-turner” that traces one doctor’s “remarkable journey to the essence of medicine” (The San Francisco Chronicle). San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God’s hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves—“anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times” and needed extended medical care—ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for twenty years. Laguna Honda, relatively low-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished. Gradually, the place transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients evoked an older idea, of the body as a garden to be tended. God’s Hotel tells their story and the story of the hospital itself, which, as efficiency experts, politicians, and architects descended, determined to turn it into a modern “health care facility,” revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for the body and the soul.
Author: Dennis McCullough
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006186353X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
“[A] geriatrician’s guide to stepping in as escort, caregiver and advocate for your parent’s final journey . . . comforting in its compassion and detail.” —St. Petersburg Times Geriatrician Dennis McCullough has spent his life helping families to cope with their parents’ aging and eventual final passage, experiences he faced with his own mother. In this comforting and much-needed book, he recommends a new approach, which he terms “Slow Medicine.” Shaped by common sense and kindness, grounded in traditional medicine yet receptive to alternative therapies, Slow Medicine advocates for careful anticipatory “attending” to an elder’s changing needs rather than waiting for crises that force acute medical interventions—an approach that improves the quality of elders’ extended late lives without bankrupting their families financially or emotionally. As Dr. McCullough argues, we need to learn that time and kindness are sometimes more important and humane at these late stages than state-of-the-art medical interventions. My Mother, Your Mother will help you learn how to: Form an early and strong partnership with your parents and siblings Strategize on connecting with doctors and other care providers Navigate medical crises Create a committed Advocacy Team Reach out with greater empathy and awareness Face the end-of-life time with confidence and skill Although taking care of those who have always cared for us is not an easily navigated time of life, My Mother, Your Mother will help you and your family to prepare for this complex journey. This is not a plan for getting ready to die; it is a plan for understanding, for caring, and for helping those you love live well during their final years. And the time to start is now.
Author: Michael Finkelstein
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062410830
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
“Dr. Michael Finkelstein masterfully guides us through the 77 questions that connect the dots of our lives.” — Dr. Mehmet Oz, Vice Chair and Professor of Surgery, New York-Presbyterian Columbia “Everyone should read Slow Medicine.... Dr. Finkelstein is a visionary practitioner, with decades of experience combining a scientist’s perspective with common sense and wisdom. Slow Medicine represents a superbly insightful advancement in the literature of Integrative Health. It is important, fun to read, and potentially life changing.” — Andrew Weil, MD “Living a life of unthinking habit can lead to unhealthy outcomes, emotionally and spiritually as well as physically...Finkelstein’s queries reflect an approach that may start with one’s physical habits...but then go much deeper. Answering [them] may lead the way to a healthier, more aware life.” — Energy Times
Author: Louise Aronson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620405482
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 467
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Book Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction A New York Times Bestseller Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Winner of the WSU AOS Bonner Book Award Winner of the 2022 At Home With Growing Older Impact Award As revelatory as Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson's Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. For more than 5,000 years, "old" has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we've made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied. Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age that's neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy--a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself. Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author's own words, "an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being."
Author: Victoria Sweet
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399573313
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
"Wonderful... Physicans would do well to learn this most important lesson about caring for patients." —The New York Times Book Review Over the years that Victoria Sweet has been a physician, “healthcare” has replaced medicine, “providers” look at their laptops more than at their patients, and costs keep soaring, all in the ruthless pursuit of efficiency. Yet the remedy that economists and policy makers continue to miss is also miraculously simple. Good medicine takes more than amazing technology; it takes time—time to respond to bodies as well as data, time to arrive at the right diagnosis and the right treatment. Sweet knows this because she has learned and lived it over the course of her remarkable career. Here she relates unforgettable stories of the teachers, doctors, nurses, and patients through whom she discovered the practice of Slow Medicine, in which she has been both pioneer and inspiration. Medicine, she helps us to see, is a craft and an art as well as a science. It is relational, personal, even spiritual. To do it well requires a hard-won wisdom that no algorithm can replace—that brings together “fast” and “slow” in a truly effective, efficient, sustainable, and humane way of healing.
Author: Dr. H. Gilbert Welch
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807077585
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
A nationally recognized expert describes seven widespread assumptions that encourage excessive, ineffective, and sometimes harmful medical care—for readers of Overdiagnosed and Malcolm Gladwell 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. Dr. H. Gilbert Welch is worried about too much medical care. He doesn’t deny that some people get too little medical care—rather that the conventional concern about “too little” needs to be balanced with a concern about “too much”: too many people being made to worry about diseases they don’t have and are at only average risk to get; too many people being tested and exposed to the harmful effects of the testing process; too many people being subjected to treatments they don’t need or can’t benefit from. The American public has been sold the idea that seeking medical care is one of the most important steps to maintain wellness. Surprisingly, medical care is not, in fact, well correlated with good health. More medicine does not equal more health; in reality the opposite may be true. In Less Medicine, More Health, Dr. Welch pushes against established wisdom and suggests that medical care can be too aggressive. Drawing on his twenty-five years of medical practice and research, he notes that while economics and lawyers contribute to the excesses of American medicine, the problem is essentially created when the general public clings to these powerful assumptions about the value of tests and treatments—a number of which are just plain wrong. By telling fascinating (and occasionally amusing) stories backed by reliable data, Dr. Welch challenges patients and the health-care establishment to rethink some very fundamental practices. His provocative prescriptions hold the potential to save money and, more important, improve health outcomes for us all.
Author: Elisabeth Rosenthal
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698407180
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast? Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.
Author: Haider Warraich
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250104580
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
A contemporary exploration of death and dying by a young Duke Fellow who investigates the hows, whys, wheres, and whens of modern death and their cultural significance.
Author: Dean T. Jamison
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821361805
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 1449
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Book Description
Based on careful analysis of burden of disease and the costs ofinterventions, this second edition of 'Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, 2nd edition' highlights achievable priorities; measures progresstoward providing efficient, equitable care; promotes cost-effectiveinterventions to targeted populations; and encourages integrated effortsto optimize health. Nearly 500 experts - scientists, epidemiologists, health economists,academicians, and public health practitioners - from around the worldcontributed to the data sources and methodologies, and identifiedchallenges and priorities, resulting in this integrated, comprehensivereference volume on the state of health in developing countries.
