Medical Diseases

Every 69 seconds, someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Of the top 10 killers, it is the only disease for which there is no cure or treatment. For most people, there is nothing that they can do to fight back. But one family is doing all they can. The DeMoe family has the most devastating form of the disease that there is: early onset Alzheimer's, an inherited genetic mutation that causes the disease in 100 percent of cases, and has a 50 percent chance of being passed onto the next generation.

Five months pregnant, Amanda Adams and her husband were given two abysmal choices regarding her pregnancy: force her baby to fight for his life through countless invasive and dangerous surgeries, or perform a late term abortion. Despite the fact that Liam was missing half his heart, Amanda chose life. Amanda's emotional plate was full as she found herself redefining the usual expectations a mother has for her child. Instead of wondering where he'd go to college, she wondered if he would survive his first birthday. The eventual acceptance of Amanda's grief helped her accept her new role as a powerful advocate.

What's one of the leading causes of premature death in the Western world? Loneliness. And whom does loneliness kill? Who does it not? For every citizen in every one of the world's technologically advanced nations--from homemakers to businesspeople, from college students to school dropouts, from the elderly to the young--loneliness is an unrecognized, unguarded-against stalker.

Shortly after his daughter, Leontine, was born, Christian Donlan's world shifted an inch to the left. He started to miss light switches and door handles when reaching for them. He would injure himself in a hundred stupid ways every day. First playful and then maddening, these strange experiences were the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis, an incurable and degenerative neurological disease.

A journey through the deepest valleys and highest peaks of parenting. When a two-month old baby falls ill, his apparently ordinary symptoms turn out to signal a rare and lethal immune deficiency. For parents Miguel Sancho and Felicia Morton, the discovery that their son, Sebastian, has chronic granulomatous disease (CGD) upends their lives and leaves the family with few options, all of them terrifying.

In this book, Stephen G. Post offers new perspectives on the worth and dignity of people with Alzheimer's and related disorders despite the negative influence of "hypercognitive" values that place an ethically unacceptable emphasis on human dignity as based on linear rationality and strength of memory. With vignettes and narratives, he argues for a deeper dignity grounded in consciousness, emotional presence, creativity, interdependence, music, and a self that is not "gone" but "differently abled."

Are you interested in medicine? This book will give the listener a chance to see if they can diagnose a patient's condition based on their medical history. Can you diagnose appendicitis? Strep throat? A stroke? If you are interested in becoming a health care provider or just enjoy listening about medical conditions, this book may be for you!