Patient Care

Medical students and physicians-in-training embark on a long journey that, although steeped in scientific learning and technical skill building, includes little guidance on the emotional and interpersonal dimensions of becoming a healer. Written for anyone in the health care community who hopes to grow emotionally and cognitively in the way they interact with patients, On Becoming a Healer explains how to foster doctor-patient relationships that are mutually nourishing.

If you are an accomplished dentist who wonders why patients continually miss appointments and don’t follow your recommendations, know that you’re not the only one plagued with these questions. In The Well-Referred Dentist, Dr. Bita Saleh addresses the missing factor essential to patient compliance in all stages of dental treatment by identifying and resolving the patient’s “triad” of obstacles - fears, anxieties, and limiting beliefs. 

As a healer, you want to heal, but often, you can feel trapped in a life of exhaustion, burnout, and misery. You are forced to sacrifice your family, relationships, and health - only to realize you still aren’t making the difference you were born to make. Many people have a dream to make a greater difference healing with their own signature soul-satisfying programs, without putting their family at risk, but they have no idea how to do that...until now.

While modern medicine produces miracles, it also delivers care that is too often unsafe, unreliable, unsatisfying, and impossibly expensive. For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare's ills. But medicine stubbornly resisted computerization - until now. Over the past five years, thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, health care has finally gone digital.

Offering examples of how to make medicine better for the healers and those they serve, If I Betray These Words profiles clinicians across the country who are tough, resourceful, and resilient, but feel trapped between the patient-first values of their Hippocratic oath and the business imperatives of a broken healthcare system. If I Betray These Words confronts the threat and broken promises of moral injury—what it is; where it comes from; how it manifests; and who’s fighting back against it. We need better healthcare—for patients and for the workforce. It’s time to act.

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.

At the age of 28, with his Beijing-based science communications business doing well and a new relationship blossoming, Ben Bravery woke from a colonoscopy to be told he had stage 3 colorectal cancer. As a scientist, Ben understood the seriousness of his condition. Cancer had quite literally whacked him in the guts, after all. But what he didn't expect was how being a patient, and a young one at that, would make him feel. Why hadn't he been better prepared for the embarrassment and vulnerability of lying naked on the radiation table?

The law of attraction is based on the idea that everything in the universe has a polarity, meaning that everything - from the food you eat to the people you talk to, to the things you say to the things you think - contains either a positive or a negative kind of energy. Notice that being with people who complain or rant a lot tends to make you feel bad, even though you're not exactly experiencing what they're going through - that's the law of attraction working its magic. When you focus on negative stuff, then more negative stuff will happen to you.

Since FDR, the US healthcare system has been mired in politics and policy. All the while it has only increased in complexity and cost. Today half of all personal bankruptcies are attributable to healthcare costs. Many community hospitals are barely getting by with single digit profit margins. With a system teetering on the edge of a systemic crisis, we need to turn to a brand-new approach to rescue the US healthcare system.

Author and spine surgeon Dr. David Hanscom has observed that in this era of corporate medicine, surgical decisions are often made quickly, without a complete evaluation or attempt at nonsurgical rehabilitation before proceeding. The result? The majority of spine operations are unnecessary, and many surgeries are performed on spines with normal, age-related conditions.

Doctors and patients have lost control of American medicine. Generative AI can put the power back in their hands, save millions of lives, and restore the doctor-patient relationship. Welcome to ChatGPT, MD. In this unique collaboration, renowned healthcare leader Dr. Robert Pearl teams up with the artificial intelligence system ChatGPT to examine the transformational power of generative AI in medicine.

If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the future looks scary and uncertain. What treatment options are there? What will your quality of life be? How do you talk to your family about your diagnosis? What are the financial implications? If you find yourself with more questions than answers then you need Living with Pancreatic Cancer.

Treating People Not Patients, Dr. Michael Sonick provides an invaluable look into the principles that have allowed him to create a state-of-the-art patient centric practice. His back and front stage processes are not only applicable to the practice of dentistry, but to any business that serves people. His insights will empower you to grow your practice or business by changing how you view the people you serve and your role as a professional.

In Physician Leadership, renowned medical leader Dr. Karen J. Nichols delivers a concise guide for busy physicians doing their best to successfully lead people and organizations. The book covers foundational leadership essentials that every physician needs to master to transform themselves from a highly motivated novice leader into an effective, skilled, and productive leader.

As a University of Chicago–trained economist and Harvard medical school professor and doctor, Anupam Jena is uniquely equipped to answer these questions. And as a critical care doctor at Massachusetts General who researches health care policy, Christopher Worsham confronts their impact on the hospital’s sickest patients. In this singular work of science and medicine, Jena and Worsham show us how medicine really works, and its effect on all of us.

Anyone who has fallen off the conveyer belt of mainstream health care and into the shadowy corners of illness knows what a dark place it is to land. Where is the infrastructure, the information, the guidance? What should you do next? In Rebel Health, Susannah Fox draws on twenty years of tracking the expert networks of patients, survivors, and caregivers who have come of age between the cracks of the health care system to offer a way forward.

From birth to death, a lyrical exploration of the role of transformation in human life. To be alive is to be in perpetual metamorphosis: Growing, healing, learning, aging. In Shapeshifters, physician and writer Gavin Francis considers the inevitable changes all of our bodies undergo - such as birth, puberty, and death, but also laughter, sleeping, and healing - and those that only some of our bodies will: Like getting a tattoo, experiencing psychosis, suffering anorexia, being pregnant, or undergoing a gender transition.

Singular Intimacies is the story of becoming a doctor by immersion at Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the country—and perhaps the most legendary. It is both the classic inner-city hospital and a unique amalgam of history, insanity, beauty, and intellect. When Danielle Ofri enters these 250-year-old doors as a tentative medical student, she is immediately plunged into the teeming world of urban medicine: mysterious illnesses, life-and-death decisions, patients speaking any one of a dozen languages, and overworked interns.

Thousands of patients every year are admitted to hospitals because of irregular, fast, or strong heartbeats. For the portion that will eventually be diagnosed with a heart condition, there are important choices to make moving forward. But there is rarely time in a short doctor’s visit to go over all the details. This comprehensive overview fills that information gap by imparting everything there is to know about abnormal heart rhythms through all stages of care.

Death comes in many forms, and medical professionals have seen them all. The first pair of hands to hold us when we enter this world and the last to comfort us when we leave it usually belong to a member of the healing profession. Where one finds death and drama, one also finds ghosts. Small wonder that doctors, nurses, paramedics, and the patients that they treat regularly encounter the spirits of the departed. Sometimes, those spirits are friendly. But not always...