Medical Diseases

What is it like to encounter cancer? How does it feel to face the unknown, to enter a world of hope, loss, and dread? From the diagnosis of his childhood friend’s mother to his poignant memories in the lab, David Scadden’s seen the unknown world of cancer from the lens of a young boy, a classmate, a researcher, a friend, a doctor, and a neighbor. Scadden chronicles his personal memories of cancer - his visits to his sick neighbor and his classmate who left school and never came back.

At the age of 53, Tony walks away from a life of journalism and into an unknown future dogged by self-doubt and financial worry. June is 48 years old then, a writer and a teacher, and over the following nine years she watches as her husband gradually changes - in interests, goals, and behavior - until Tony has a sudden fall, ending their life as they have known it.

In researching his acclaimed true-crime books, Philip Carlo interviewed some of the most infamous criminals and killers of our times in prisons and on death rows throughout the country. He was able to forge trusting relationships with his subjects, enabling him to extract the facts behind their monstrous acts and identify what motivated them to commit their horrific crimes.

Our hips are critical to our ability to move effectively, so it makes sense to do what we can to keep them functioning well. I wrote this audiobook to give you options you may not even be aware of to keep your hips healthy and heal injuries before they become chronic.

Jamie Tyrone was 49 years old when she learned she had a 91% chance of getting Alzheimer's disease - by accident through genetic testing. She was shocked, but after an initial bout with depression she decided to take action rather than concede defeat. Jamie teamed up with Dr. Marwan Sabbagh, a renowned neurologist, and together they created a resource detailing not just Jamie's experience, but expert medical advice for anyone facing the disease.

At twenty-four, Arnold Beisser was a recent medical school graduate and a nationally ranked tennis player. But overnight a devastating bout of polio left him permanently paralyzed from the neck down and dependent on an iron lung to draw his next breath. Polio robbed Arnold Beisser of his strength, his athletic ability, and almost his life. Yet he discovered in this unthinkable trap not only the expected sadness and despair, but wonder, delight, and the pleasure of everyday living.

In November of 1970, the Finell family's lives were changed forever by a family vacation to Acapulco. Seven-year-old Stephanie fell ill soon after their return to the United States, but her mother, Karin, thinking it was an intestinal disorder, kept her home from school for a few days. She was completely unprepared when Stephanie went into violent convulsions on a Friday morning. Following a series of tests at the hospital, doctors concluded she had contracted viral equine encephalitis while in Mexico.

Living in the Belgian Congo with her husband in the 1960s, Fran’s mother became pregnant with a daughter. However, right after she gave birth in the hospital, she felt strange. Unbeknownst to anyone, another daughter was on the way, but before anybody responded, an hour had passed. Because of the delay, Fran was born with cerebral palsy. Growing up with her siblings in Africa, Fran always felt different. When everyone else was playing and having fun, she would watch and wish she could join in.

In this transporting book, David Oliver Relin shines a light on the work of Geoffrey Tabin and Sanduk Ruit, gifted ophthalmologists who have dedicated their lives to restoring sight to some of the world’s most isolated, impoverished people through the Himalayan Cataract Project, an organization they founded in 1995. Tabin was the high-achieving bad boy of Harvard Medical School, an accomplished mountain climber and adrenaline junkie as brilliant as he was unconventional.

Eloquent. Philosophical. Introspective. These are not the words usually associated with an autistic child. But in a remarkable display of courage and creativity, a boy named Tito has shattered stereotypes, and in The Mind Tree makes us question all of our previous assumptions about autism. For Tito is severely autistic and nearly nonverbal, and this is his story.

Miracle Survivors provides that lifeline with a collection of stories of cancer survivors who were given a terminal diagnosis but shocked everyone by thriving years past their prognoses. These miracle survivors have different cancers and circumstances, but share a poor prognosis and incredible drive to overcome it.

From New York Times best-selling author, Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist, and leading Alzheimer's advocate Meryl Comer comes a profoundly intimate account of her husband's battle with Alzheimer's disease, one of today's most pressing - and least understood - health epidemics.

An estimated 50 million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer’s erase parts of one’s memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don’t simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging....

The United States is the most advanced society in the world, yet the majority of pain medications, procedures, and surgeries are not solving this paindemic. Paindemic will open your eyes to what you should know. Too many unnecessary and risky interventions are being done, with little benefit and at great expense. It's time to gain a better perspective to guide you down a more rational path to address and improve chronic pain, even low-back pain. Ignorance is not bliss. What you don't know about your pain could hurt you.

Are you tired of living with high blood pressure and feeling like it has taken over your life? It's time to take control, and fix the problem, once and for all. Living with high blood pressure is a daunting task. It feels like you're always walking a tightrope, constantly worrying about the risks of complications and struggling to find the right medications and lifestyle changes that work for you.

This book explores Alzheimer’s disease through the intertwined perspectives of a patient and her devoted caregiver, offering a deeply personal look at the emotional, physical, and mental challenges they face. From the first signs of memory loss to the final days of care, listeners are taken on a raw and honest journey through the daily struggles, heartbreaks, and small victories of providing care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.

At 24 Amy was a typical type-A law student: smart, driven, and highly competitive. With a full course load and a budding romance, it seemed nothing could slow her down...until her heart began to fail. Amy chronicles her harrowing medical journey from the first misdiagnosis to her astonishing recovery, which is made all the more dramatic by the romantic bedside courtship with her future husband and her uncompromising desire to become a mother.

At the relatively young age of 49, I was told I had a rather dangerous situation with my heart that needed fixing sooner than later. I had both an aortic aneurysm and a damaged aortic valve. It was a ticking time bomb in my chest and only a matter of time. My only viable option was to undergo the most invasive and riskiest of procedures – open-heart surgery.

Journalist Sarah Dingle was 27 when she learned that her identity was a lie. Over dinner one night, her mother casually mentioned Sarah had been conceived using a sperm donor. The man who’d raised her wasn’t her father; in fact, she had no idea who her father was. Or who she really was. As the shock receded, Sarah began to investigate her own existence. Thus began a 10-year journey - digging through hospital files, chasing leads and taking a DNA test - that finally led to her biological origins.

After a hard-fought battle in the heart, Progen has defeated the agents of the entity that wants to destroy the body he is determined to control. It was a temporary defeat, however, as the entity retreated up into the body’s brain, safely entrenched behind the blood-brain barrier that is preventing the dungeon crystal from accessing the coveted home base of the central nervous system. As he further establishes his control over the different systems that he can access, a grievous wound to the body creates a problem that could spell the end of his objective.