Medical Diseases

Vaccines have been used to safely introduce people's bodies to diseases for centuries, and they save millions of lives each year. By giving people a weakened or dead version of a disease, a vaccine allows the body to develop antibodies which recognize and fight the disease later on. Early vaccinations used dry scabs from smallpox to promote smallpox immunity. Doctors and scientists across nations took and improved the method, developing vaccines for health crises from whooping cough to polio to COVID-19. This history features famous cases and current challenges.

Bacterial infections are a constant threat to human health. Antibiotics stop a bacterial infection from multiplying. They help treat pneumonia, strep throat, and many other infections. But before antibiotics, treatments for these diseases were limited or misguided. In 1929, the accidental discovery of the first antibiotic, a bacteria-killing liquid called penicillin, kicked off a medical revolution. The use of this new treatment has saved countless lives, from World War II soldiers to modern hospital patients. Explore current issues in antibiotics and the best ways to fight bacteria.

This book covers the history of 12 important diseases and addresses public health responses and societal upheavals.

Allie Cashel has suffered from chronic Lyme disease for 16 years - but much of the medical community refuses to recognize her symptoms as the result of infectious disease. In Suffering the Silence: Chronic Lyme Disease in an Age of Denial, Cashel paints a living portrait of what is often called post-treatment Lyme syndrome, featuring the stories of chronic Lyme patients from around the world and their struggle for recognition and treatment.

At the peak of her career, classical homeopath and health-care columnist Katina Makris was stricken with a mysterious "flu". Only after five years of torment - two completely bedridden - and devastating blows to her professional and family life was Katina's illness finally diagnosed as Lyme disease.

In Making Tough Decisions About End-of-Life Care in Dementia, Dr. Anne Kenny, a skilled palliative care physician, describes how to navigate the difficult journey of late-stage dementia with sensitivity, compassion, and common sense. Combining her personal experience caring for a mother with dementia with her medical expertise in both dementia and end-of-life care, Dr. Kenny helps the listener prepare for a family member's death while managing their own emotional health.

From a darkened world, bound by four walls, a young woman called Jessica tells the tale of her battle against the M. E. Monster. The severest form of a neuroimmune disease called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis went to war with her at just 15 years old. From beneath her dark glasses, Jessica glimpses a world far different from the one she remembers as a teenage schoolgirl. This true story follows her path as she ends up living in a hospital for years with tubes keeping her alive.

Dinah Roseberry, author and editor for the prominent company Schiffer Publishing in Pennsylvania, is a strange one. Fighting stage four breast cancer since 2012 and still in remission, she's taken the strange in her life to manage and thrive during a most horrendous journey. Using her paranormal and mind/body/training, she has found some techniques to make things a bit smoother along the way, and now she steps up to the plate to share those methods with you.

The biggest risk factor for breast cancer is simply being a woman. Madhulika Sikka's A Breast Cancer Alphabet offers a new way to live with and plan past the hardest diagnosis that most women will ever receive: a personal, practical, and deeply informative look at the road from diagnosis to treatment and beyond. What Madhulika Sikka didn't foresee when initially diagnosed, and what this audiobook brings to life so vividly, are the unexpected and minute challenges that make navigating the world of breast cancer all the trickier.

An internist and clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School fuses Eastern practices with cutting-edge Western medicine to help you connect body and mind to transform your health today and tomorrow.

Following the trail of an unexpected family connection, acclaimed journalist Pam Fessler has unearthed the lost world of the patients, nurses, doctors, and researchers at Carville who struggled for over a century to eradicate Hansen's disease, the modern name for leprosy. Amid widespread public anxiety about foreign contamination and contagion, patients were deprived of basic rights - denied the right to vote, restricted from leaving Carville, and often forbidden from contact with their own parents or children.

Surviving Myotonic Dystrophy is about Ann S. Woodbury’s struggle to care for her family who have a rare disease - myotonic dystrophy (DM). Ann’s four children and her husband have DM. In 1998, at the time of the diagnosis, even the doctors didn’t know all of the effects of DM or that it was a brain disorder. Listening to this book will take you on a journey of understanding this disease and its effects on Ann’s family members.

Ross Donaldson is one the few who have ventured into dark territory of a country ravaged by war to study one of the world's most deadly diseases. As an untried medical student studying the intersection of global health and communicable disease, Donaldson soon found himself in dangerous Sierra Leone, on the border of war-struck Liberia, where he struggled to control the spread of Lassa Fever. The words, "you know Lassa can kill you, don't you?" haunted him each day. He'ss forced to make life-and-death decisions alone as a never-ending onslaught of contagious patients flood the hospital.

Throughout history, there have been numerous epidemics that have threatened mankind with destruction. Diseases have the ability to highlight our shared concerns across the ages, affecting every social divide from national boundaries, economic categories, racial divisions, and beyond. Whether looking at smallpox, HIV, Ebola, or COVID-19 outbreaks, we see the same conversations arising as society struggles with the all-encompassing question: What do we do now?

The Cancer Problem offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in 19th-century Britain. It argues that it was in the 19th century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease's incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.

At 49 years old, Carol Clupny was an active, driven woman with a career, a family, and a zest for adventure. A mere year later, she struggles with strange symptoms of internal tremors, frozen shoulders, and a serious intestinal infection. She doesn’t understand why she can’t paddle a kayak or throw the ball for her dogs. Then comes the diagnosis: early onset Parkinson’s Disease. Carol is not afraid to face the apathy and depression. Instead of being drug down into darkness, she finds strategies for lifting herself, and others around her, up into the light.

Prostate Cancer: A Comprehensive Integrative Guide is a must-have book for men with prostate cancer, for their caretakers, for health care providers and anyone seeking to understand how an integrative approach combining both conventional and alternative therapies to treating cancer offers far better outcomes.

Craig Huber was living the dream. Now a hard-working sales professional with an unswervingly supportive and caring wife by his side, after nearly two decades serving as a full-time minister in Central and South America, he knew how blessed his life had been. But when odd physical symptoms sent him to the doctor, his heart sank at the crippling words of his physician: late-stage liver disease.

"Du har cancer Charlotta" sa läkaren. 35 år gammal fick jag aggressiv trippelnegativ bröstcancer. Mina barn var då ett, två och fyra år. Jag stekte pannkakor och planerade inför min begravning. När Charlotta får reda på att hon är gravid med sitt fjärde barn är hon redan i artonde veckan. Det är bara sju månader efter hennes senaste cellgiftsbehandling och läkarna hade sagt att hon inte skulle kunna få fler barn. Hon överväldigas av känslor. Lycka. Rädsla. Hon börjar skriva ner sina tankar, för att komma underfund med tankarna om allt det ljusa och allt det mörka.

Dr. Tonya Echols Cole knows cancer intimately. Not only has she worked as an oncologist for decades, she is also a breast cancer survivor. Her unique position of having been both cancer doctor and cancer patient allows her to give real-world advice about how to overcome challenges that cancer survivors face, both during and after treatment. Dr. Cole combines anecdotes from her own cancer journey with personal development strategies and health maintenance advice into a comprehensive prescription for cancer survivors to thrive in a more healthy, confident, and abundant life.