Patient Care

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.

The Confident Patient is your road map and key to truly understanding and navigating your healthcare situation. This powerful guide provides you with real answers, specific questions to gain clarity, information you can use immediately, and gives you concrete ways to partner with your medical team. Healthcare is intensely personal and intimate, and The Confident Patient honors you and your family’s individual situation like a trusted friend, in a supportive, compassionate way.

Conflicts of interest, misrepresentation of clinical trials, hospital price-fixing, and massive expenditures for procedures of dubious efficacy - these and other critical flaws leave little doubt that the current US health-care system is in need of an overhaul. In this essential guide, preeminent physician Nortin Hadler urges American health-care consumers to take time to understand the existing system and to visualize what the outcome of successful reform might look like.

Danger. Deportation. Death. These are just some of the fates facing the inmates at Huntercombe prison. Some have fled their homeland in fear of their lives. Others are being sent to a country they left decades ago. But Dr Amanda Brown is doing all she can for each patient stuck in no-man’s land. They have little or no idea of what awaits them outside, but she treats them with kindness and respect. Whatever their crime, and whatever their future holds, she is still their doctor.

Patient is a quirky, humorous, and occasionally poignant romp through the American health care system. After a seemingly mild case of COVID-19, the author finds himself hospitalized with acute renal failure. The connection to COVID-19 is tenuous at best, yet he is examined from head to toe with the ruthless efficiency that only a hospital with the latest technology can accomplish. Scans and tests of every possible type are conducted, eliminating the most dire of diagnoses.

The biggest barrier entrepreneurs face is the insurmountable number of obstacles to overcome, coupled with the lack of time to find solutions to them all. They are trapped in the mindset that in order to be successful they must do everything, but they don't know where to start. How do you determine what needs to be fixed first? How do you accurately prioritize your to-do list? If you had only a compass and a road map, you could navigate your business' problems with confidence.

What if we could see a doctor faster, more efficiently, and at a lower cost? With the emergence of telemedicine, we now can. And this book is a primer on telemedicine for anyone who wants to take charge of their health and understand all their healthcare options. This valuable guide illustrates why telemedicine is not only a viable solution to many of our healthcare problems but also an inevitable and crucial one.

Echoing an enduring message of rare vulnerability and uplifting positivity, On the Other Side of Terminal is a powerful book that shares author Allen Chankowsky’s inspiring and deeply authentic account of his 30-year relationship with cancer. Shattering all expectations, Allen bravely exposes the depths in which he struggled to overcome his rare form of stage-4 cancer. With a palpable sense of unmistakable urgency, his unique style skillfully illuminates the emotional strength it takes to manage the realities of living with a world-crushing diagnosis.

Few experiences stir the emotions and throw a person into crisis as illness does. If affects not only the body but also the spirit and soul. Illness is about life and death, fear and hope, love and conflict, spirit and body. And yet, the healthcare system is not structured around these considerations—our doctors and other medical professionals are not trained to deal with the whole person.

Physicians enter their professions with the highest of hopes and ideals for compassionate and efficient patient care. Along the way, however, recurring problems arise in their interactions with some patients that lead physicians to label them as "difficult." Some studies indicate that physicians identify 15 percent or more of their patients as "difficult." The negative feelings that physicians have toward these patients may lead to frustration, cynicism, and burnout.

First, do no harm - doctors, nurses, and clinicians swear by this code of conduct. Yet in hospitals and doctors' offices across the country, errors are made every single day - avoidable, simple mistakes that often cost lives. Inspired by two medical mistakes that not only ended in unnecessary deaths but hit close to home, Dr. Peter Pronovost made it his personal mission to improve patient safety and make preventable deaths a thing of the past, one hospital at a time.

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.

Despite billions of dollars invested in medical research and technological breakthroughs in American healthcare made to prolong and improve the lives of patients, a devastating statistic remains. Two thirds of Americans die in healthcare institutions tethered to machines and tubes at bankrupting costs, despite research that shows 80 percent of Americans would prefer to spend their last days in their homes surrounded by loved ones.

Chiropractor, lecturer, expert federal chiropractic examiner, and supervising clinician Michael Vianin (MSc, DC) is committed to ensuring clinicians and other healthcare professionals involved in the management of musculoskeletal disorders and pain syndromes have access to practical tools allowing them to apply a dispositionalist model of musculoskeletal care. In-depth and evidence-based, Michael advocates for a patient-centered and collaborative approach to pain management and treatment.

The Inner Consultation, Second Edition sets out the author’s thoughts on how consulting skills, and methods of teaching them, have evolved in the 17 years since the book’s first publication. It also develops the theme of "curiosity" as the key requirement for patient-centered consulting and provides a practical consultation model with five checkpoints to work to, advice for developing skills, and suggestions for doctors to ensure they know the cues in the consultation that require their full attention.

Learn how big Pharma sells drugs by faking their studies. Understand the lies they stuff into websites and medical journals. Learn why it all gets ignored (hint: Pharma has the largest criminal settlements in history). Learn how to conquer healthcare costs. Medical spending per person is double that of other countries and it is the top reason for US personal bankruptcy. I will show you how to escape the over-billing and prosper anyway.

Until very recently, if you were to ask most doctors, they would tell you there were only two kinds of medicine: the quack kind, and the evidence-based kind. The former is baseless, and the latter based on the best information human effort could buy. Well, Eric Topol isn't most doctors, and he suggests you entertain the notion of a third kind of medicine, one that will make the evidence-based state-of-the-art stuff look scarcely better than an alchemist trying to animate a homunculus in a jar.

The New Patient Generator is a step-by-step guide for health practitioners, revealing all the secrets of social media and digital marketing to create an endless supply of new patients.

Do you wish you understood others better? Do you want to master your own emotions? In recent years, it’s become increasingly obvious that emotional intelligence just as important, if not more so, than simply possessing a high IQ. Research suggests that people with higher emotional intelligence lead more successful, productive lives. They are happier, healthier, and generally better at achieving their goals. But what is emotional intelligence? How does it differ from IQ? And how can you learn to improve yours?

Still Not Safe is the story of the rise of the patient - safety movement - and how an "epidemic" of medical errors was derived from a reality that didn't support such a characterization. Physician Robert Wears and organizational theorist Kathleen Sutcliffe trace the origins of patient safety to the emergence of market trends that challenged the place of doctors in the larger medical ecosystem.