Medical Diseases

Unearth the secrets to hormonal harmony, even if struggling with hormonal imbalance has been sending you on an emotional roller coaster for years. Are you tired of feeling like a stranger in your own body? Are irregular periods, mood swings, hot flashes, chronic fatigue, weight gain, or other confounding symptoms making your daily life a battle? You feel bloated and uncomfortable, and the idea of making it through the afternoon with what feels like a rock in your stomach makes you want to crawl back into bed.

Over three million people are diagnosed with Alzheimer's every year in the US. Alzheimer's affects the entire family. A diagnosis of Alzheimer's can be confusing and devastating at the same time. Author Laura Town's personal experience with this disease, and co-author Karen Kassel's pharmacology background, make them the perfect team to unravel the mysteries of Alzheimer's.

L'histoire célèbre les victoires que les médecins ont remportées sur les maladies. Mais elle néglige leurs patients dont les troubles, les souffrances ou les plaintes ont inauguré de nouveaux diagnostics, remis en cause certaines théories médicales ou ouvert des perspectives thérapeutiques inédites.

Rebooting My Brain is the true story of what happens when you get yanked out of your life by a crisis and have to get back on the ride all over again. With refreshing candor, Maria Ross shares how the relentless pace of her life came to a screeching halt when an undetected brain aneurysm ruptured and nearly killed her. Along her stubborn road back to health, her resulting cognitive and emotional challenges forced her sometimes kicking and screaming to reframe her life, her work and her identity.

An Epidemic of Absence asks what will happen in developing countries, which, as they become more affluent, have already seen an uptick in allergic disease: Will India end up more allergic than Europe? Velasquez-Manoff also details a controversial underground movement that has coalesced around the treatment of immune-mediated disorders with parasites. Against much of his better judgment, he joins these do-it-yourselfers and reports his surprising results.

When Jane, a world-famous Harvard oncologist, suddenly collapses at work, the medical team resuscitating her makes a shocking discovery: she has advanced breast cancer that she’s been hiding for years. The results are catastrophic. In Sickness shows how even the most rational people can be nearly destroyed by their irrational fears. Tragic, moving, and wryly funny at times, this is an unflinching portrayal of a complicated marriage and its secrets.

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.

Playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body - how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body - a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.” But Ensler is shocked out of her distance.

Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, Susan Gubar underwent radical debulking surgery, an attempt to excise the cancer by removing part or all of many organs in the lower abdomen. Her memoir mines the deepest levels of anguish and devotion as she struggles to come to terms with her body’s betrayal and the frightful protocols of contemporary medicine. She finds solace in the abiding love of her husband, children, and friends while she searches for understanding in works of literature, visual art, and the testimonies of others who suffer with various forms of cancer.

In this harrowing and intimate memoir, Harriet Alida Lye explores how, at just 15 years old, she was diagnosed with a form of leukemia called Natural Killer, named "the rarest and worst malignancy". The average survival time of patients with this diagnosis is 58 days. There are no known survivors. There were no known survivors. Fifteen years after Harriet's diagnosis, she became pregnant, despite having been told that her chemotherapy treatment would likely make conception impossible. To be a mother is to make a death, as death is bound up in life.

The Cancer Whisperer chronicles Sophie's extraordinary relationship with cancer and the very effective methods she has used for dealing with her fear, anger, denial, and grief. The Brené Brown of cancer, Sophie empowers listeners to reject the traditional adversarial relationship with cancer by teaching us how to listen to it; how to be healed by it as well as how to seek to cure it; and how to be emotionally free even when we are physically curtailed.

Larry Brilliant's life journey has led him on a purposeful path across continents and countercultural movements, marching arm in arm with the men and women who defined a generation. A man who has always been in the right place at the right time, Brilliant has engaged with some of the most prominent thought leaders, spiritual masters, heroes, and icons in the world, including Neem Karoli Baba (Maharajji), Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, Mikhail Gorbachev, Wavy Gravy, the Grateful Dead, the Dalai Lama, and Barack Obama.

Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of every type - from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to diabetes and sickle cell anemia. Told from the perspectives of the patients, families, physicians, scientists, and philanthropists fighting on the front lines, Breath from Salt is a remarkable story of unlikely scientific and medical firsts, of setbacks and successes, and of people who refused to give up hope....

When her husband, Alan, is injured in a speedboat accident, Cathy Crimmins reluctantly assumes the role of caregiver and learns to cope with the person he has become. No longer the man who loved obscure Japanese cinema and wry humor, Crimmins’ husband has emerged from the accident a childlike and unpredictable replica of his former self with a short attention span and a penchant for inane cartoons. Where Is the Mango Princess? is a breathtaking account that explores the very nature of personality - and the complexities of the heart.

In this book, Prusiner tells the remarkable story of his discovery of prions - infectious proteins that replicate and cause disease but surprisingly contain no genetic material - and reveals how superb and meticulous science is actually practiced with talented teams of researchers who persevere. He recounts the frustrations and rewards of years of research and offers fascinating portraits of his peers as they raced to discover the causes of fatal brain diseases.

Restaurateur, magazine publisher, celebrity chef, and nationally known lifestyle maven, B. Smith is struggling at 66 with a tag she never expected to add to that string: Alzheimer's patient. She's not alone. Every 67 seconds someone newly develops it, and millions of lives are affected by its aftershocks.

Acclaimed CBS News reporter Barry Petersen writes about hearing the unimaginable; what it meant, what it still means, what he did---and didn't do---and how this beautiful love story needs to be heard by the thousands of families who have already heard that same devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease. Even though Barry has spent his long-time, award-winning television career covering wars and events that shaped the world, he was not even slightly prepared for what happened to his darling wife, Jan, and how it would impact his life.

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases, and even into her 30s, she only knew that her aunt had died of a rare illness called Chagas. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas - or the kissing bug disease - is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.

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.

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."