Health Care Industry

Few of us need convincing that the American health insurance system needs reform. But many of the existing proposals focus on expanding one relatively successful piece of the system or building in piecemeal additions. These proposals miss the point. As the Stanford health economist Liran Einav and the MIT economist and MacArthur Genius Amy Finkelstein argue, our health care system was never deliberately designed, but rather pieced together to deal with issues as they became politically relevant.

In The Truth About Obamacare, Sally C. Pipes - president of the Pacific Research Institute and an acknowledged expert on health care reform - reveals what Democrats in Congress and President Barack Obama don't want you to know: Obamacare is even worse than most critics suspect. Debunking the myths that the current administration has touted, Pipes shows exactly what the new health care law will mean for you, your family, your doctor, and your wallet.

He has been called the greatest surgeon of the 20th century. The son of Lebanese immigrants, Michael DeBakey rose from humble beginnings in a backwater Louisiana town to dominate the landscape of modern medicine. His contributions to our understanding and treatment of cardiovascular disease, in particular, were innumerable and epoch-making. DeBakey led a life of high drama, from the streets of Jazz Age New Orleans and the operating theaters of pre-war Europe, to the battlefields of World War II and the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.

Today we have the knowledge, understanding, and technology to predictably relieve pain and neurological deficits like never before—yet many patients are still getting subpar care. Foundational knowledge of surgical spine care isn't spreading to the medical community, let alone to patients, whose quality of life hangs in the balance. With The Back Story on Spine Care, orthopedic specialist Dr. Drew Bednar presents case studies that illuminate the common issues plaguing patients—and their treatment—today.

What would it mean for your career to be able to speak and write freely in English when working in the medical industry? How about understanding more of what you hear or read? The idioms, phrases, words, and expressions in Medical English Dialogues are designed to improve your English quickly and easily.

John C. Kendrew (1917-1997) was a pioneer in structural biology and a catalyst for the emergence of molecular biology in the second half of the 20th century. He was the first person to determine the three-dimensional structure of a protein at atomic resolution and, for this, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962. Kendrew ultimately became an international organizer, administrator, and advocate for science, and his expansive legacy lives on today.

In January 1918, as World War I raged on, a new and terrifying virus began to spread across the globe. In three successive waves, from 1918 to 1919, influenza killed more than 50 million people. German soldiers termed it Blitzkatarrh, British soldiers referred to it as Flanders Grippe, but worldwide, the pandemic gained the notorious title of “Spanish flu”. Nowhere on earth escaped: the United States recorded 550,000 deaths (five times its total military fatalities in the war) while European deaths totaled more than two million.

‘A second’s silence and then an almighty scream. It was the most moving thing I had ever seen … A baby, a real live baby, another human life had entered the world. It didn’t seem possible and yet I had witnessed it with my very own eyes.’ Born into a happy working-class North London family in the mid-twentieth century, Katie is determined to ‘do something’ with her life. Working in the impoverished East End in the 1950s, she meets the Sisters of St John the Divine – a community of nuns dedicated to nursing and midwifery.

Written by experienced professors and professionally narrated for easy listening, this crash course is a valuable tool both during school and when preparing for the USMLE, or if you’re simply interested in the subject of infectious disease. The audio is focused and high-yield, covering the most important topics you might expect to learn in a typical medical school infectious disease course.

As much of the world's population grows older, the quest for a "good death" has become a significant issue. For many, the right to die often means the right to die with dignity. The Inevitable moves beyond margins of the law to the people who are meticulously planning their final hours - far from medical offices, legislative chambers, hospital ethics committees, and polite conversation - and the people who help them, loved ones or clandestine groups on the Internet known as the "euthanasia underground".

Weaving together family history, genetic discovery, and scenes from her life, Ami McKay tells the compelling, true-science story of her own family's unsettling legacy of hereditary cancer while exploring the challenges that come from carrying the mutation that not only killed many people you loved, but might also kill you.

Government, industry, and the medical profession, however, have a mixed record when it comes to framing policies and generating knowledge to address drug use and misuse. In Strange Trips, Lucas Richert investigates the myths, meanings, and boundaries of recreational drugs, palliative care drugs, and pharmaceuticals as well as struggles over product innovation, consumer protection, and freedom of choice in the medical marketplace.

The explosion of Internet commerce, coupled with globalization and increased pharmaceutical use, has led to an unprecedented vulnerability in the US drug supply. Today, an estimated 80 percent of our drugs are manufactured overseas, mostly in India and China. Every link along this supply chain offers an opportunity for counterfeiters, and increasingly, they are breaking in. Even when the US system works, consumers are increasingly circumventing the safeguards. Skyrocketing health care costs in the US have forced more Americans to become "medical tourists" seeking drugs, life-saving treatments, and transplants abroad, sometimes in countries with rampant counterfeit drug problems and no FDA. Bitter Pills will heighten the public's awareness about counterfeit drugs, critically examine possible solutions, and help people protect themselves.

A Healthy Society offers a new approach to politics–and a new approach to building a healthier world. Dr. Meili argues that health delivery too often focuses on treatment of immediate causes and ignores fundamental conditions that lead to poor health such as income, education, employment, housing, and environment.

What is medicine and what is it for? What does it mean to be a good doctor? The Way of Medicine articulates and defends an account of medicine and medical ethics meant to challenge the reigning provider of services model, in which clinicians eschew any claim to know what is good for a patient and instead offer an array of “health care services” for the sake of the patient’s subjective well-being.

The poor die sooner. Blacks die sooner. And poor urban Blacks die sooner than almost all other Americans. David Ansell has spent nearly four decades as a doctor at hospitals serving some of the poorest communities in Chicago, and has witnessed firsthand the lives behind these devastating statistics. In

The Death Gap, he gives a grim survey of these realities, drawn from observations and stories of his patients.

In Good Blood, best-selling writer Julian Guthrie tells the gripping tale of the race to cure a horrible affliction known as Rh disease that stalked families and caused a mother’s immune system to attack her own unborn child. The story is anchored by two very different men on two continents: Dr. John Gorman in New York, who would land on a brilliant yet contrarian idea, and the unassuming Australian whose almost magical blood - and his unyielding devotion to donating it - would save millions of lives.

Against a global backdrop of wartime suffering and postwar hope, Borrowing Life gathers the personal histories of the men and women behind the team that enabled and performed the modern medical miracle of the world's first successful organ transplant.

As a teenager, Molly Case underwent an operation that saved her life. Nearly a decade later, she finds herself in the operating room again - this time as a trainee nurse. She learns to care for her patients, sharing not only their pain, but also life-affirming moments of hope. In doing so, she offers a compelling account of the processes that keep them alive, from respiratory examinations to surgical prep, and of the extraordinary moments of human connection that sustain both nurse and patient.

More than 80,000 new chemicals have been developed and released into the global environment during the last four decades. Today the World Health Organization attributes more than one-third of all childhood deaths to environmental causes, and as rates of childhood disease skyrocket, it raises serious, difficult questions around how the chemical environment is impacting children's health. Children and Environmental Toxins: What Everyone Needs to Know® offers an accessible guide to understanding and identifying the potential sources of harm in a child's environment.