Medical Diseases

We have lost the war on cancer. We spend $150 billion each year treating it, yet - a few innovations notwithstanding - a patient with cancer is as likely to die of it as one was 50 years ago. Most new drugs add mere months to one's life at agonizing physical and financial cost. In The First Cell, Azra Raza offers a searing account of how both medicine and our society (mis)treats cancer, how we can do better, and why we must.

The controversial Emanuel Revici, M.D., made the bones grow back in cancer patients, and restored health to AIDS patients as well as drug addicts and alcoholics. His medicines lifted debilitating migraines in as little as three minutes. Revici's reward? He was attacked and ostracized by the best. JAMA published false reports about his work. The American Cancer Society blasted him time and again. Meanwhile, word of mouth brought new patients to see him for decades.

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.

Mosquito Warrior tells the engrossing story of General William C. Gorgas (1854-1920), the once-renowned pioneer in tropical disease research and public health. His fascinating life illuminates vast transformations in the United States. Carol R. Byerly's balanced and contemporary examination of Gorgas illuminates his complex legacy in medicine and public health, military history, and American ambitions at the dawn of United States global ascendency.

In The Medical Marijuana Guide: Cannabis and Your Health, Dr. Patricia Frye takes a direct, no-nonsense approach to educating listeners about cannabis and its medicinal qualities. In this audiobook, using humorous and touching stories from the many situations she has encountered in her practice over the years, Dr. Frye provides valuable information about the undeniable medicinal qualities of cannabis. This audiobook helps to destigmatize this misunderstood drug and educate listeners on the history of cannabis and how it is used by the medical community today.

Emma Watson, a brilliant research physician, has been training for years for the mission of a lifetime: to study living beings in space. Jack McCallum, Emma's estranged husband, has shared her dream of space travel, but a medical condition has grounded and embittered him. He must watch from the sidelines as his wife prepares for her first mission to the international Space Station.

For 200 years, a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces raw before collapsing. What these strange conditions share is their cause: prions.

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.

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.

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.

Human history hinges on the battle to confront our most dangerous enemies—the half-dozen diseases responsible for killing almost all of mankind. The story of our medical triumphs reveals an inspiring tapestry of human achievement, but the journey was far from smooth. It is a tale replete with dramatic episodes as spellbinding as any blockbuster Hollywood movie. In The Masters of Medicine, Dr. Andrew Lam, an award-winning author and retinal surgeon, distills the long arc of medical progress down to the crucial moments that were responsible for the world's greatest medical miracles.

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....

How does one begin to treat such cases, to counsel people whose lives may be changed forever? How does one train the next generation of clinicians to deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease? Dr. Ropper and his colleague answer these questions by taking the listener into a rarified world where lives and minds hang in the balance.

In this highly personal account, Dr Gibbs documents the effect his diagnosis has had on his life and explains his advocacy for improving early recognition of Alzheimer’s. Weaving clinical knowledge from decades caring for dementia patients with his personal experience of the disease, this is an optimistic tale of one man’s journey with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.

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.

At the age of 38, Danish scientist Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard is struck down by an acute bout of bacterial meningitis. Weeks later, she wakes from a coma in intensive care to find herself “locked in,” unable to show she is conscious except by blinking her eyes. Despite a mere 5 percent chance of survival, she makes a miraculous recovery and returns to the world - painfully learning how to breathe, move, eat, and speak again, even resume her work as a scientist.

Cardiac Failure Explained is a comprehensive, user-friendly guide on understanding and managing heart failure. Written by a cardiologist who has been treating patients with heart failure for decades, this book provides detailed explanations of the diagnosis, heart anatomy, tests performed, and medications used to treat cardiac failure in an easy-to-understand format. This book takes you through a step-by-step process of how to manage your condition from medication management to lifestyle changes that can prevent symptoms from getting worse.

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.

Eleanor met Aaron when she was just a teenager, and he was working at a local record store - older, experienced, and irresistibly charming. Escaping the clichés of fleeting young love, their summer romance bloomed into a relationship that survived college and culminated in a marriage and two children. From the outside looking in, their life had all the trappings of what most would consider a success story. But, as in any marriage, things weren’t always as they seemed.