Health Technology

When a waiting world learned on April 12, 1955, that Jonas Salk had successfully created a vaccine to prevent poliomyelitis, he became a hero overnight. Born in a New York tenement, humble in manner, Salk had all the makings of a 20th-century icon - a knight in a white coat. In the wake of his achievement, he received a staggering number of awards and honors; for years his name ranked with Gandhi and Churchill on lists of the most revered people.

In Distracted, journalist Maggie Jackson ponders our increasingly cyber-centric world and fears we're entering a dark age of interruption that will render us unable to think critically, work creatively or cultivate meaningful relationships.

Imagine living in a world where people use their computers, drive their cars, and communicate with one another simply by thinking. In this stunning and inspiring work, Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis shares his revolutionary insights into how the brain creates thought and the human sense of self - and how this might be augmented by machines, so that the entire universe will be within our reach.

Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.

Sigmund Freud is known as the father of psychoanalysis and is perhaps the most significant figure in the history of psychology. He was the first to have recognized the influence of the unconscious and to have developed a theory of the structure of the mind that took it into account. Freud's ideas, including coping mechanisms, repression, denial, libido, and ego have become household terms, key elements of the modern understanding of the human experience.

Eighteen-year-old Nami Miyamoto is certain her life is just beginning. She has a great family, just graduated high school, and is on her way to a party where her entire class is waiting for her - including, most importantly, the boy she’s been in love with for years. The only problem? She’s murdered before she gets there.

Este libro es una obra maestra, única, que tiene muchos consejos útiles para entender la naturaleza de las relaciones humanas. Según el Dr. Eric Berne, los juegos son patrones de comportamiento entre individuos que pueden indicar sentimientos o emociones ocultas. Estamos jugando todo el tiempo - juegos sexuales, juegos maritales, juegos de poder con nuestros jefes y juegos competitivos con nuestros amigos.

In medical school, Paul Farmer found his life’s calling: To cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. Tracy Kidder’s magnificent account shows how one person can make a difference in solving global health problems through a clear-eyed understanding of the interaction of politics, wealth, social systems, and disease.

Today's teenagers spend about nine hours per day online. Parents of this ultra-connected generation struggle with decisions completely new to parenting: Should an 8-year-old be allowed to go on social media? How can parents help their children gain the most from the best aspects of the digital age? How can we keep kids safe from digital harm?

In Life Finds a Way, biologist Andreas Wagner reveals the deep symmetry between innovation in biological evolution and human cultural creativity. Rarely is either a linear climb to perfection - instead, "progress" is typically marked by a sequence of peaks, plateaus, and pitfalls. For instance, in Picasso's 40-some iterations of Guernica, we see the same combination of small steps, incessant reshuffling, and large, almost reckless, leaps that characterize the way evolution transformed a dinosaur's grasping claw into a condor's soaring wing.

For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives - if they survived - in and out of asylums, accumulating life's wreckage around them. In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind - manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle.

Technological innovation is deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, and is no less a basic feature of American health care. Medical technology saves lives and relieves suffering, and is enormously popular with the public, profitable for doctors, and a source of great wealth for industry. Yet its costs are rising at a dangerously unsustainable rate. The control of technology costs poses a terrible ethical and policy dilemma. How can we deny people what they may need to live and flourish?

Health care as it stands today needs to be re-imagined. Redefining the Boundaries of Medicine by Paul Cerrato and Dr. John Halamka challenges the profession to renegotiate its priorities and address the fact that it’s become timid and reluctant to explore new care delivery models. The guiding premise of this book is that rethinking and reimagining the way medicine is practiced in the 21st century will improve health outcomes, and that technology is central to this transformation.

On May 10, 1998, biologist Craig Venter, director of the Institute for Genomic Research, announced that he was forming a private company that within three years would unravel the complete genetic code of human life, seven years before the projected finish of the U.S. government's Human Genome Project. Venter hoped that by decoding the genome ahead of schedule, he would speed up the pace of biomedical research and save the lives of thousands of people. He also hoped to become very famous and very rich.

Exciting new technology is revolutionizing healthcare in the twenty-first century. This visionary guide by the former CIO of the Cleveland Clinic shows you how to design, implement, and maximize your organization's IT systems to deliver fully integrated, coordinated, high-quality care. Using the latest advancements in IT, you'll be able to access and apply a range of online tools and field-tested strategies to any organization. Go behind the scenes at Clinic Cleveland to see how caregivers executed their IT strategy in a working environment—and how patients benefitted as a result.

What propels some individuals to reach extraordinary creative heights in the earliest years of life while others discover their passions decades later? Are prodigies imbued with innate talent? Do late bloomers reveal their talents because their skills require life experience and contemplation? Through engaging storytelling and intriguing historical and cutting-edge scientific research, best-selling author and acclaimed journalist Claudia Kalb explores these questions to uncover what makes a prodigy and what drives a late bloomer.

With the exception of sleep, humans spend more of their lifetimes on work than any other activity. It is central to our economy, our society, and the family. It underpins our finances and our sense of meaning in life. Given the overriding importance of work, we need to recognize a profound transformation in the nature of work that is significantly altering lives: the incoming tidal wave of shadow work. Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations.

As one of America’s most celebrated vascular surgeons, Dr. Frank Veith’s career was anything but conventional—from working undercover with the CIA to fighting to make vascular surgery an independent specialty to creating the largest vascular conference in the world.

Erno Rubik was a child when he first became obsessed with puzzles of all kinds. "Puzzles", he writes, "bring out important qualities in each of us: concentration, curiosity, a sense of play, the eagerness to discover a solution". To Rubik, puzzles aren't just games - they're creativity machines. He encourages us to embrace our inner curiosity and find the puzzles that surround us in our everyday lives. "If you are determined, you will solve them", he writes. Rubik's own puzzle, the Cube, has been solved by millions worldwide for more than 40 years....

In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson documents how every technological innovation - from the printing press to the telegraph - has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But as in the past, we adapt, learning to use the new and retaining what’s good of the old.