Wellness Industry

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.

Caroline Crampton’s life was upended at the age of seventeen, when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a relatively rare blood cancer. After years of invasive treatment, she was finally given the all clear. But being cured of the cancer didn’t mean she felt well. Instead, the fear lingered, and she found herself always on the alert, braced for signs that the illness had reemerged.

Since the mid-1950s, the psychoactive compound DMT has attracted the attention of experimentalists, prohibitionists, scientists, artists, alchemists, and hyperspace emissaries. Mystery School in Hyperspace is the first book to delve into the history of this substance, the discovery of its properties, and the impact it has had on poets, artists, and musicians.

Far more than a rhetorical exercise, this book is designed to inform, inspire, and spur action. Based on Sachs' 14 years as director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and as special advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals, The Age of Sustainable Development is a landmark publication and a clarion call for all who care about our planet and global justice.

Part memoir, part illuminating treatise on why science is looking to the past for the future of medicine, Unlocking the Ancient Secrets to Healing chronicles the personal tribulations and professional discoveries behind the remarkable realization of Gail Lynn’s dream.

America’s Bitter Pill is Steven Brill’s acclaimed book on how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing—and failing to change—the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of the titanic fight to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America’s largest, most dysfunctional industry. It’s a penetrating chronicle of how the profiteering that Brill first identified in his trailblazing Time magazine cover story continues, despite Obamacare.

We all want to be healthy. But somehow the good information about how to get healthy keeps getting twisted. In The Cure for Everything! health and law expert Timothy Caulfield sets out to find the truth about what it takes to achieve a healthy lifestyle, even testing out many of the health claims on himself. He signs up for circuit training with a Hollywood trainer. He tackles a diet that really works with the help of his own Food Advisory Team (FAT). He also sends a test tube of warm spit to a genetics laboratory.

Fully updated, this matter-of-fact audio handbook includes the most recent discoveries about drug use, including new information on electronic smoking devices, abuse of prescription stimulants, and the opioid crisis. Neither a “just say no” treatise nor a “how to” manual, Buzzed is based on the conviction that people make better decisions with accurate information at hand.

The struggle against deadly microbes is endless. Diseases that have plagued human beings since ancient times still exist, new maladies make their way into the headlines, we are faced with vaccine shortages, and the threat of germ warfare has reemerged as a worldwide threat. In this riveting account, medical historian Howard Markel takes an eye-opening look at the fragility of the American public health system.

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row - a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year - and they're still rising. Case and Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class.

By 2030, the world will be short of approximately 15 million health workers - a fifth of the workforce needed to keep healthcare systems going. Global healthcare leader and award-winning author, Dr. Mark Britnell, uses his unique insights from advising governments, executives, and clinicians in more than 70 countries to present solutions to this impending crisis.

With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I. Laura Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain and from South Africa to Odessa. She shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered, and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test.

In 1994, Peter Hotez's 19-month-old daughter, Rachel, was diagnosed with autism. Dr. Hotez, a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the world's poorest people, became troubled by the decades-long rise of the influential anti-vaccine community and their inescapable narrative around childhood vaccines and autism. Hotez draws on his experiences as a pediatrician, vaccine scientist, and father of an autistic child to outline the arguments on both sides of the debate.

An examination of how suicide prevention efforts largely fail due to the mistaken assumption that greater mental health awareness is the key to saving lives.

In this revealing analysis, Dr. Brodie Ramin tells the story of the opioid crisis, showing us the disease and cure from his perspective as an addiction doctor working on the front lines. We meet his patients, hear from other addiction experts, and learn about the science and medicine of opioid addiction and its treatments. He shows us how addiction can be prevented, how knowledge can reduce stigma, and how epidemics can be beaten.

Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is - complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human.

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.

Dr. Bonnie Henry has been called "one of the most effective public health figures in the world" by The New York Times. She has been called "a calming voice in a sea of coronavirus madness", and "our hero" in national newspapers. But in the waning days of 2019, when the first rumours of a strange respiratory ailment in Wuhan, China began to trickle into her office in British Columbia, these accolades lay in a barely imaginable future.

In Make America Healthy Again, Nicole Saphier, a Memorial Sloan Kettering physician, nationally recognized patient advocate, and media personality, reveals how individual negligence and big government incompetence have destroyed America's health care system. Combining historical events, economic trends, and essential lifestyle advice, with her unique perspective, she offers concrete solutions to address this epic problem.

In 2020, an estimated 5.8 million Americans had Alzheimer’s, and more than half a million died because of the disease and its devastating complications. Sixteen million caregivers are responsible for paying as much as half of the $226 billion annual costs of their care. As more people live beyond their 70s and 80s, the number of patients will rise to an estimated 13.8 million by 2025. Part case studies, part meditation on the past, present and future of the disease, The Problem of Alzheimer's traces Alzheimer’s from its beginnings to its recognition as a crisis.