Contributors. Larry Churchill, David DeGrazia, Cora Diamond, James Edwards, Carl Elliott, Grant Gillett, Paul Johnston, Margaret Olivia Little, James Lindemann Nelson, Knut Erik Tranoy
This book is intended as a guide for practicing physicians, medical students, and residents to help identify and address the spiritual needs of patients. Those who will benefit most will be physicians who wish to know how to integrate spirituality into clinical practice in an effective and sensitive manner. Other professionals, such as nurses and chaplains, may use this book as they interact with doctors, other health professionals, and hospital administrators.
Heated debates are not unusual when confronting tough medical issues where it seems that moral and religious perspectives often erupt in conflict with philosophical or political positions. In The Sanctity of Human Life, Jewish theologian David Novak acknowledges that it is impossible not to take into account the theological view of human life, but the challenge is how to present the religious perspective to nonreligious people. In doing so, he shows that the two positions—the theological and the philosophical—aren't as far apart as they may seem.
Novak digs deep into Jewish scripture and tradition to find guidance for assessing three contemporary controversies in medicine and public policy: the use of embryos to derive stem cells for research, socialized medicine, and physician-assisted suicide. Beginning with thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Nietsche, and drawing on great Jewish figures in history—Maimonides, Rashi, and various commentators on the Torah (written law) and the Mishnah (oral law)—Novak speaks brilliantly to these modern moral dilemmas.
The Sanctity of Human Life weaves a rich and sophisticated tapestry of evidence to conclude that the Jewish understanding of the human being as sacred, as the image of God, is in fact compatible with philosophical claims about the rights of the human person—especially the right to life—and can be made intelligible to secular culture. Thus, according to Novak, the use of stem cells from embryos is morally unacceptable; the sanctity of the human person, and not capitalist or socialist approaches, should drive our understanding of national health care; and physician-assisted suicide violates humankind's fundamental responsibility for caring for one another.
Novak's erudite argument and rigorous scholarship will appeal to all scholars and students engaged in the work of theology and bioethics.
English translation of the second volume of Laurent Joubert’s 1578 French work Erreurs Populaires
Joubert proposed to dispel folk remedies and folklore still relied on by doctors and care-givers in France. It also challenged medical theories and advice from classical Greek and Latin writers that French doctors followed uncritically.
Complementary and alternative healing encompass a wide range of practices that share a common ground: the belief that our physical well-being is inextricably linked to an unseen world beyond our physical senses. Our view of that world can be traced to two key thinkers: Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Anton Mesmer.
Who were these men, and what shaped their thought? How did their ideas capture the public imagination? How did they speak to movements as diverse as utopianism, Spiritualism, psychic healing, and homeopathy? Historian John S. Haller traces the threads of Swedenborg’s and Mesmer’s influence through the history of nineteenth-century medicine, illuminating the lasting impact these men have had on concepts of alternative healing.
Moving images are used as diagnostic tools and locational devices every day in hospitals, clinics, and laboratories. But how and when did they come to be established and accepted sources of knowledge about the body in medical culture? How are the specialized techniques and codes of these imaging techniques determined, and whose bodies are studied, diagnosed, and treated with the help of optical recording devices?
Screening the Body traces the fascinating history of scientific film during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to show that early experiments with cinema are important precedents of contemporary medical techniques such as ultrasound and PET scanning. Lisa Cartwright brings to light eccentric projects in the history of science and medicine, such as Thomas Edison's sensational attempt to image the brain with X rays before a public audience, and the efforts of doctors to use the motion picture camera to capture movements of the body, from the virtually imperceptible flow of blood to epileptic seizures.Drawing on feminist film theory, cultural studies, the history of film, and the writings of Foucault, Cartwright illustrates how this scientific cinema was part of a broader tendency in society toward the technological surveillance, management, and physical transformation of the individual body and the social body. She unveils an area of film culture that has rarely been discussed but that will leave readers with a new way of seeing the everyday practice of diagnostic imaging that we all inevitably encounter in clinics and hospitals.In Spirituality and Health Research: Methods, Measurement, Statistics, and Resources, Dr. Harold G. Koenig leads a comprehensive overview of this complex subject. Dr. Koenig is one of the world’s leading authorities on the relationship between spirituality and health, and a leading researcher on the topic. As such, he is distinctively qualified to author such a book.
“I’m covered—why should I foot the bill for somebody who isn’t?”
This question, unspoken but simmering at the center of the debate over universal health care coverage, comes in for a thoughtful hearing—and, perhaps, gentle corrective—in Larry Churchill’s timely book. Churchill, whose Rationing Health Care in America put the nation’s health care crisis into perspective, here does the same for our crisis of conscience over health care coverage. As Clinton and Congress spar over the financing and organization of a national health system, the true debate, this book reveals, is about moral and political values, about the meaning and ethics of health care reform.
Churchill begins by cutting through the confused discussion about rationing health care. Concerns about rationing, with all the moral and political questions they raise, deflect our attention from a more important issue, which this book brings into focus. Arguing that care is already rationed by ability to pay, Churchill suggests that the proper question is not whether to ration but how to do so fairly, and that answering requires a clear sense of the aims of a health care system. In pursuit of this necessary understanding, Churchill explores values and concepts such as security and solidarity, self-interest and social affinity, rights and responsibilities. Drawing on philosophical ideas of justice and individual responsibility, rendered here with remarkable clarity, he shows that universal care is morally as well as economically comprehensible and that a truly inclusive health care system should be seen as a common civic purpose rather than as a supply of services to be consumed. Accessible, deeply felt, and cogently argued, this book should revise the terms of the national debate over health care reform.
Praise for the 3-volume second edition of The Social Medicine Reader:
“A superb collection of essays that illuminate the role of medicine in modern society. Students and general readers are not likely to find anything better.”—Arnold S. Relman, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Praise for the first edition:
“This reviewer strongly recommends The Social Medicine Reader to the attention of medical educators.”—Samuel W. Bloom, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association
Volume 2:
Ranging from a historical look at eugenics to an ethnographic description of parents receiving the news that their child has Down syndrome, from analyses of inequalities in the delivery of health services to an examination of the meaning of race in genomics research, and from a meditation on the loneliness of the long-term caregiver to a reflection on what children owe their elderly parents, this volume explores health and illness. Social and Cultural Contributions to Health, Difference, and Inequality brings together seventeen pieces new to this edition of The Social Medicine Reader and five pieces that appeared in the first edition. It focuses on how difference and disability are defined and experienced in contemporary America, how the social categories commonly used to predict disease outcomes—such as gender, race and ethnicity, and social class—have become contested terrain, and why some groups have more limited access to health care services than others. Juxtaposing first-person narratives with empirical and conceptual studies, this compelling collection draws on several disciplines, including cultural and medical anthropology, sociology, and the history of medicine.
Contributors: Laurie K. Abraham, Raj Bhopal, Ami S. Brodoff, Daniel Callahan, David Diamond, Liam Donaldson, Alice Dreger, Sue E. Estroff, Paul Farmer, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Jerome Groopman, Gail E. Henderson, Linda M. Hunt, Barbara A. Koenig, Donald R. Lannin, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Carol Levine, Judith Lorber, Nancy Mairs, Holly F. Mathews, James P. Mitchell, Joanna Mountain, Alan R. Nelson, Martin S. Pernick, Rayna Rapp, Sally L. Satel, Robert S. Schwartz, Brian D. Smedley, Adrienne Y. Stith, Sharon Sytsma, Gordon Weaver, Bruce Wilson, Irving Kenneth Zola
Praise for the 3-volume second edition of The Social Medicine Reader:
“A superb collection of essays that illuminate the role of medicine in modern society. Students and general readers are not likely to find anything better.”—Arnold S. Relman, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Praise for the first edition:
“This reviewer strongly recommends The Social Medicine Reader to the attention of medical educators.”—Samuel W. Bloom, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association
Volume 3:
Over the past four decades the American health care system has witnessed dramatic changes in private health insurance, campaigns to enact national health insurance, and the rise (and perhaps fall) of managed care. Bringing together seventeen pieces new to this second edition of The Social Medicine Reader and four pieces from the first edition, Health Policy, Markets, and Medicine draws on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives—including political science, economics, history, and bioethics—to consider changes in health care and the future of U.S. health policy. Contributors analyze the historical and moral foundation of today’s policy debates, examine why health care spending is so hard to control in the United States, and explain the political dynamics of Medicare and Medicaid. Selections address the rise of managed care, its impact on patients and physicians, and the ethical implications of applying a business ethos to medical care; they also compare the U.S. health care system to the systems in European countries, Canada, and Japan. Additional readings probe contemporary policy issues, including the emergence of consumer-driven health care, efforts to move quality of care to the top of the policy agenda, and the implications of the aging of America for public policy.
Contributors: Henry J. Aaron, Drew E. Altman, George J. Annas, Robert H. Binstock, Thomas Bodenheimer, Troyen A. Brennan, Robert H. Brook, Lawrence D. Brown, Daniel Callahan, Jafna L. Cox, Victor R. Fuchs, Kevin Grumbach, Rudolf Klein, Robert Kuttner, Larry Levitt, Donald L. Madison, Wendy K. Mariner, Elizabeth A. McGlynn, Jonathan Oberlander, Geov Parrish, Sharon Redmayne, Uwe E. Reinhardt, Michael S. Sparer, Deborah Stone
From race-based pharmaceutical prescriptions and marketing, to race-targeted medical “hot spotting” and the Affordable Care Act, to stem-cell trial recruitment discourse, Subprime Health is a timely examination of race-based medicine as it intersects with the concept of debt.
The contributors to this volume propose that race-based medicine is inextricable from debt in two key senses. They first demonstrate how the financial costs related to race-based medicine disproportionately burden minorities, as well as how monetary debt and race are conditioned by broader relations of power. Second, the contributors investigate how race-based medicine is related to the concept of indebtedness and is often positioned as a way to pay back the debt that the medical establishment—and society at large—owes for the past and present neglect and abuses of many communities of color. By approaching the subject of race-based medicine from an interdisciplinary perspective—critical race studies, science and technology studies, public health, sociology, geography, and law—this volume moves the discussion beyond narrow and familiar debates over racial genomics and suggests fruitful new directions for future research.
Contributors: Ruha Benjamin, Princeton U; Catherine Bliss, U of California, San Francisco; Khiara M. Bridges, Boston U; Shiloh Krupar, Georgetown U; Jenna M. Loyd, U of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech.
An event-by-event look at how institutionalized racism harms the health of African Americans in the twenty-first century
A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Sickening examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine.
From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis—and even the life-threatening childbirth experience for tennis star Serena Williams—author Anne Pollock takes readers on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare. She goes beneath the surface to deconstruct the structures that make these events possible, including mass incarceration, police brutality, and the hypervisibility of Black athletes’ bodies. Ultimately, Sickening shows what these shocking events reveal about the everyday racialization of health in the United States.
Concluding with a vital examination of racialized healthcare during the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter rebellions of 2020, Sickening cuts through the mind-numbing statistics to vividly portray healthcare inequalities. In a gripping and passionate style, Pollock shows the devastating reality and consequences of systemic racism on the lives and health of Black Americans.
A provocative call to rethink America's values in health care.
Murphy traces the transnational circulation of cheap, do-it-yourself health interventions, highlighting the uneasy links between economic logics, new forms of racialized governance, U.S. imperialism, family planning, and the rise of NGOs. In the twenty-first century, feminist health projects have followed complex and discomforting itineraries. The practices and ideologies of alternative health projects have found their way into World Bank guidelines, state policies, and commodified research. While the particular moment of U.S. feminism in the shadow of Cold War and postcolonialism has passed, its dynamics continue to inform the ways that health is governed and politicized today.
Sick building syndrome embodied a politics of uncertainty that continues to characterize contemporary American environmental debates. Michelle Murphy explores the production of uncertainty by juxtaposing multiple histories, each of which explains how an expert or lay tradition made chemical exposures perceptible or imperceptible, existent or nonexistent. She shows how uncertainty emerged from a complex confluence of feminist activism, office worker protests, ventilation engineering, toxicology, popular epidemiology, corporate science, and ecology. In an illuminating case study, she reflects on EPA scientists’ efforts to have their headquarters recognized as a sick building. Murphy brings all of these histories together in what is not only a thorough account of an environmental health problem but also a much deeper exploration of the relationship between history, materiality, and uncertainty.
Four decades have passed since reports of a mysterious “gay cancer” first appeared in US newspapers. In the ensuing years, the pandemic that would come to be called AIDS changed the world in innumerable ways. It also gave rise to one of the late twentieth century’s largest health-based empowerment movements. Scholars across diverse traditions have documented the rise of the AIDS activist movement, chronicling the impassioned echoes of protestors who took to the streets to demand “drugs into bodies.”
And yet not all activism creates echoes. Included among the ranks of 1980s and 1990s-era AIDS activists were individuals whose expressions of empowerment differed markedly from those demanding open access to mainstream pharmaceutical agents. Largely forgotten today, this activist tradition was comprised of individuals who embraced unorthodox approaches for conceptualizing and treating their condition. Rejecting biomedical expertise, they shared alternative clinical paradigms, created underground networks for distributing unorthodox nostrums, and endorsed etiological models that challenged the association between HIV and AIDS. The theatre of their protests was not the streets of New York City’s Greenwich Village but rather their bodies. And their language was not the riotous chants of public demonstration but the often-invisible embrace of contrarian systems for defining and treating their disease.
The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health and perceptions of biomedicine through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health activism flourished during the twentieth century’s last major pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the twenty-first century’s first major pandemic: COVID-19. As a deeply researched portrait of distrust and disenchantment, The Sounds of Furious Living helps explain the persistence of movements that challenge biomedicine’s authority well into a century marked by biomedical innovation, while simultaneously posing important questions regarding the meaning and metrics of patient empowerment in clinical practice.In the year 2000 the World Health Organization estimated that 85 percent of fifteen-year-olds in Botswana would eventually die of AIDS. In Saturday Is for Funerals we learn why that won’t happen.
Unity Dow and Max Essex tell the true story of lives ravaged by AIDS—of orphans, bereaved parents, and widows; of families who devote most Saturdays to the burial of relatives and friends. We witness the actions of community leaders, medical professionals, research scientists, and educators of all types to see how an unprecedented epidemic of death and destruction is being stopped in its tracks.
This book describes how a country responded in a time of crisis. In the true-life stories of loss and quiet heroism, activism and scientific initiatives, we learn of new techniques that dramatically reduce rates of transmission from mother to child, new therapies that can save lives of many infected with AIDS, and intricate knowledge about the spread of HIV, as well as issues of confidentiality, distributive justice, and human rights. The experiences of Botswana offer practical lessons along with the critical element of hope.
The AIDS epidemic has touched the lives of all Americans. An entire generation has been forced to redefine the way it looks at intimacy. Our very images of ourselves are being altered in the wake of this tragic illness. Yet we are only now beginning to discover the true extent of the change AIDS has wrought on American society. This massive challenge to public health is creating a fault line beneath our institutions, threatening to undermine much that we have taken for granted about the pillars of our culture. Looking out across the landscape of AIDS, we sense a fundamental shift in the way we think about ourselves, about others, and about government.
Shattered Mirrors is a deeply moving meditation on the impact AIDS is having on American consciousness. AIDS has become a moral lesson for our nation, Monroe Price argues, but not the narrow lesson about the dangers of deviancy that certain segments of society have professed. The AIDS epidemic challenges some of our most cherished ideas about individual autonomy, free expression, fairness, and confidence in the future. As this book points out, the ultimate legacy of the AIDS epidemic is far more than its terrible impact on the health of the citizenry.
As the disease grinds on, several traditional barriers between church and state, government and the media, citizen and consumer have begun to erode, while other barriers of class, race, and lifestyle are growing larger. It is too early to say whether these and similar changes will be permanent, but as long as there is uncertainty about how devastating AIDS will prove to be to our society, we will continue to debate its meaning and how we should respond to the threat it poses to all of us. In the long run, Price maintains, AIDS may force us to reexamine the role government should play in shaping our personal lives. More than this, it may well oblige us to redefine what we mean by identity and community in a democracy under siege.
How do smokers evaluate evidence that smoking harms health? Some evidence suggests that smokers overestimate health risks from smoking. This book challenges this conclusion. The authors find that smokers tend to be overly optimistic about their longevity and future health if they quit later in life.
Older adults' decisions to quit smoking require personal experience with the serious health impacts associated with smoking. Smokers over fifty revise their risk perceptions only after experiencing a major health shock--such as a heart attack. But less serious symptoms, such as shortness of breath, do not cause changes in perceptions. Waiting for such a jolt to occur is imprudent.
The authors show that well-crafted messages about how smoking affects quality of life can greatly affect current perceptions of smoking risks. If smokers are informed of long-term consequences of a disease, and if they are told that quitting can indeed come too late, they are able to evaluate the risks of smoking more accurately, and act accordingly.
For 15 years, Steven Schrader worked as a firefighter and an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) in Atlanta, Georgia. There, he faced the day-to-day stress created by having to deal with nonstop human catastrophe, one moment administering to terribly hurt accident victims, the next talking down a suicidal person from a rooftop. Added to these difficulties were his own personal struggles, not the least being the bias he experienced because of his severe hearing loss. Silent Alarm presents his no-frills, stunning account of survival in a profession with a notoriously high burn-out rate, and the good that he did as a topnotch EMT.
Schrader makes palpable the constant tension of being the first summoned to life-or-death situations, and he also outlines the grim reality of being an EMT in dangerous parts of the community. “Always wear a bulletproof vest; keep a weapon (out of sight of the supervisors, of course); never, never stand in front of a door when knocking,” are just a few of his rules for the street.
Despite these cautions, time and again he and his partners plunged into danger to save children, elderly citizens, indigents, criminals, and any other persons they found at risk. His hearing loss occasionally hindered him, and sometimes saved him, but, mostly, as it should, it became part of the background to the astonishing compassion in the stories he tells.
A social history of death investigations in the urban Midwest
The scene of myriad grisly deaths, late nineteenth-century St. Louis was a hotbed for homicide, suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and workplace accidents. The role of the city’s Gilded Age coroners has not been fully examined, contextualized, or interrogated until now. Sarah E. Lirley investigates the process in which these outcomes were determined, finding coroners’ rulings were not uniform, but rather varied by who was conducting the inquest. These fascinating case studies explore the lives of the deceased, as well as their families, communities, press coverage of the events, and the coroners themselves.
Sudden Deaths in St. Louis is a study of 120 coroners’ inquests conducted between 1875 and 1885. Each chapter analyzes the typical versus the atypical in verdicts of death. At the time, inaccurate findings and cursory investigations fueled criticisms of coroner’s offices for employing poorly trained laymen. The coroners featured in this book had the power to shape public perception of the deceased, and they often relied on preexisting reputations to determine cause of death. For instance, women who worked as prostitutes were likely to be ruled as suicides, whether or not that was actually the case, and women who were respected members of their communities, particularly mothers, frequently received rulings of suicide caused by insanity. Verdicts also depended in part on availability of witnesses, including family members, to determine whether another person could be held liable for the death. Lirley’s book highlights the stories of ordinary men and women whose lives were tragically cut short, and the injustice they received even after death.
This new edition of Fundamentals of Radiology brings up to date the consummate, classic work by Lucy Frank Squire and Robert A. Novelline that has introduced generations of medical students to radiology.
The standard introductory text for more than thirty years, Fundamentals of Radiology is a model of clarity and comprehensiveness. Robert Novelline continues that tradition by thoroughly updating and expanding this edition to reflect the latest types and uses of imaging techniques. Complementing the text are many superb reproductions of plain film, computed tomography, magnetic-resonance, and ultrasound images--hundreds of them new to this edition. In addition, Novelline has added five important chapters. A new chapter near the beginning of the book provides an atlas of drawings and images that allows the reader to review normal plain film and CT anatomy. Another new chapter is devoted to vascular imaging, including CT angiography, MR angiography, and vascular ultrasound, especially full-color Doppler ultrasound images. The chapter on interventional radiology covers therapeutic procedures performed by radiologists, such as angioplasty, embolization, and percutaneous biopsy. To address the different medical conditions of males, females, and children, another new chapter examines the imaging of obstetrical, gynecological, testicular, prostate, and urethral disorders, and considers a variety of childhood ailments and problems, including child abuse. Finally, a new chapter on TB and AIDS shows how radiology can track the course of a single disease over time and trace the depredations of a multisystem disease.
Medical students preparing for a career in clinical practice must become familiar with a wide range of diagnostic imaging techniques and image-guided interventions. They must learn to identify the indications for radiological examination and recognize the role each procedure plays in the workup, diagnosis, and therapeutic management of patients. That is why Squire’s Fundamentals of Radiology has been such an important, long-standing resource for medical students, physicians, and other professionals at all stages of their careers. It teaches essential topics in the radiology curriculum and features hundreds of illustrative cases clinicians can turn to again and again in practice.
In this long-awaited seventh edition, Robert Novelline provides more than 600 new high-resolution images representing the current breadth of radiological procedures: conventional x-rays, ultrasound, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), angiography, radioisotope scanning, positron emission tomography (PET), and molecular imaging. This edition’s expanded coverage addresses dual energy CT, breast tomosynthesis, PET-MR scanning, and tractography brain imaging, along with best practices for managing patient experiences during and after examination. All new images were produced at a major teaching hospital using state-of-the-art imaging technologies.
Squire’s Fundamentals of Radiology is designed to be read cover to cover by students, with concepts, principles, and methods progressing in a logical, cumulative manner. It also serves as an invaluable tool for teachers and an indispensable reference for seasoned practitioners. Written by a radiologist who has trained thousands of medical students and residents, this textbook is the clear choice for excelling in the general practice of radiology.
"No eyebrows. No eyelashes. When it rains the water will run straight down into my eyes," Catherine Lord wrote before her hair fell out during chemotherapy. Propelled into an involuntary performance piece occasioned by the diagnosis of breast cancer, Lord adopted the online persona of Her Baldness—an irascible, witty, polemical presence who speaks candidly about shame and fear to her listserv audience. While Lord suffers from unwanted isolation and loss of control as her treatment progresses, Her Baldness talks back to the society that stigmatizes bald women, not to mention middle-aged lesbians with a life-threatening disease.
In this irreverent and moving memoir, Lord draws on the e-mail correspondence of Her Baldness to offer an unconventional look at life with breast cancer and the societal space occupied by the seriously ill. She photographs herself and the rooms in which she negotiates her disease. She details the clash of personalities in support groups, her ambivalence about Western medicine, her struggles to maintain her relationship with her partner, and her bemusement when she is mistaken for a "sir." She uses these experiences—common to the one-in-eight women who will be diagnosed at some point with breast cancer—to illuminate larger issues of gender signifiers, sexuality, and the construction of community.
The history of medicine is much more than the story of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Seeking to understand the patient’s perspective, historians scour the archives, searching for rare personal accounts. Bringing together a trove of more than 400 family letters by Charles Dwight Willard, Suffering in the Land of Sunshine provides a unique window into the experience of sickness.
A Los Angeles civic leader at the turn of the twentieth century, Willard is well known to historians of the West, but exclusively for his public life as a booster and reformer. Willard’s evocative story offers fresh insights into several critical issues, including how concepts of gender, class, and race shape patients’ representations of their illness, how expectations of cure affect the illness experience, how different cultures constrain the coping strategies of the sick, and why robust health is such an exalted value in certain societies.
A young woman suffers a stroke; she rebuilds her career and personal life, but not before her marriage falls apart. An eighty-year-old man dies unexpectedly of stroke, leaving his grown sons to wonder whether they are genetically predisposed to stroke. A recently retired woman confronts her future with a husband suddenly disabled by stroke. How can she help her husband? Will he ever recover? How will she cope with her own emotional stress?
In Stroke and the Family: A New Guide, Joel Stein shows the many faces of stroke and the people it strikes. To the family just beginning to cope with the aftermath of a stroke, the diagnostic tests, drug regimens, rehabilitation strategies, and varied prognoses can be completely bewildering. Because stroke can affect memory, speech, and movement, the impact on everyday routines and close relationships can be especially intense. Stein has produced a book that allows general readers and nonphysicians working with stroke survivors to make sense of the confusing variety of diagnoses and treatment options, and goes on to explore challenges the recovering stroke patient and the recovering family will face during a long recuperation with an uncertain outcome. Stroke and the Family offers up-to-date information and places the current research findings in context.
A physician with thirty-five years of experience treating people with brain injuries shares the latest research on concussions and best practices for care.
The explosion of attention to sports concussions has many of us thinking about the addled brains of our football and hockey heroes. But concussions happen to everyone, not just elite athletes. Children fall from high chairs, drivers and cyclists get into accidents, and workers encounter unexpected obstacles on the job. Concussions are prevalent, occurring even during everyday activities. In fact, in less time than it takes to read this sentence, three Americans will experience a concussion. The global statistics are no less staggering.
Shaken Brain offers expert advice and urgently needed answers. Elizabeth Sandel, MD, is a board-certified physician who has spent more than three decades treating patients with traumatic brain injuries, training clinicians, and conducting research. Here she explains the scientific evidence for what happens to the brain and body after a concussion. And she shares stories from a diverse group of patients, educating readers on prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Few people understand that what they do in the aftermath of their injury will make a dramatic difference to their future well-being; patient experiences testify to the best practices for concussion sufferers and their caregivers. Dr. Sandel also shows how to evaluate risks before participating in activities and how to use proven safety strategies to mitigate these risks.
Today concussions aren’t just injuries—they’re big news. And, like anything in the news, they’re the subject of much misinformation. Shaken Brain is the resource patients and their families, friends, and caregivers need to understand how concussions occur, what to expect from healthcare providers, and what the long-term consequences may be.
One person can't help stuttering. The other can't help laughing. And in the way one bodily betrayal of better intentions mirrors the other, we find ourselves in the gray area where mind and body connect--and, at the damnedest moments, disconnect. In a book that explores the phenomenon of stuttering from its practical and physical aspects to its historical profile to its existential implications, Marc Shell plumbs the depths of this murky region between will and flesh, intention and expression, idea and word. Looking into the difficulties encountered by people who stutter--as do fifty million worldwide--Shell shows that, however solitary stutterers may be in their quest for normalcy, they share a kinship with many other speakers, both impeded and fluent.
Stutter takes us back to a time when stuttering was believed to be "diagnosis-induced," then on to the complex mix of physical and psychological causes that were later discovered. Ranging from cartoon characters like Porky Pig to cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe, from Moses to Hamlet, Shell reveals how stuttering in literature plays a role in the formation of tone, narrative progression, and character. He considers such questions as: Why does stuttering disappear when the speaker chants? How does singing ease the verbal tics of Tourette's Syndrome? How do stutterers cope with the inexpressible, the unspeakable?
Written by someone who has himself struggled with stuttering all his life, this provocative and wide-ranging book shows that stuttering has implications for myriad types of expression and helps to define what it means to be human.
Spirituality is an important part of many clients’ lives. It can be a resource for stabilization, healing, and growth. It can also be the cause of struggle and even harm. More and more therapists—those who consider themselves spiritual and those who do not—recognize the value of addressing spirituality in therapy and increasing their skill for engaging it ethically and effectively.
In this immensely practical book, Russell Siler Jones helps therapists feel more competent and confident about having spiritual conversations with clients. With a refreshing, down-to-earth style, he describes how to recognize the diverse explicit and implicit ways spirituality can appear in psychotherapy, how to assess the impact spirituality is having on clients, how to make interventions to maximize its healthy impact and lessen its unhealthy impact, and how therapists can draw upon their own spirituality in ethical and skillful ways. He includes extended case studies and clinical dialogue so readers can hear how spirituality becomes part of case conceptualization and what spiritual conversation actually sounds like in psychotherapy.
Jones has been a therapist for nearly 30 years and has trained therapists in the use of spirituality for over a decade. He writes about a complex topic with an elegant simplicity and provides how-to advice in a way that encourages therapists to find their own way to apply it.
Spirit in Session is a pragmatic guide that therapists will turn to again and again as they engage their clients in one of the most meaningful and consequential dimensions of human experience.
Schizophrenia: Science and Practice brings together the work of many of today's most distinguished authorities in psychiatry. From diverse perspectives, these specialists review what is presently known—and unknown—about schizophrenia. The conceptual underpinnings of the diagnosis of schizophrenic illness, recent elaborations of psychosocial and developmental theories, current genetic and biochemical research, and traditional as well as newer treatment approaches are among the topics discussed in this unusually clear and lively account.
How effective are contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches to schizophrenia? What drug therapies are being used or proposed, and why? What about the treatment milieu and the difficult strategic questions surrounding the recent movement toward the “deinstitutionalization” of schizophrenic patients? Ultimately, should schizophrenia be defined as a toxic illness or as a way of life? In attempting to answer these and other questions, Dr. Shershow is joined by contributors Irwin Savodnik, Seymour Kety, Theodore Udz, Gerald Klerman, Ian Creese, Solomon Snyder, Leo Hollister, Jonathan Borus, Daniel Schwartz, and Loren Mosher, among others.
All the issues confronting psychiatry as a self-conscious discipline within contemporary medicine converge on the problem of schizophrenia. The important hope Schizophrenia: Science and Practice raises is that a fruitful pluralism among the variety of approaches to schizophrehia, and to psychiatric problems in general, can be sustained.
Dana Crowley Jack offers startling new insights into the roots of female depression as she illuminates why women are far more likely than men to suffer major depression in adulthood. Silencing the Self is the first sweeping overview of depression in women that draws on new understandings of the importance of relationships in women’s lives. Attending closely to what depressed women have to say about their lives, Jack reframes major concepts of depression, freeing them from traditional models that have restricted our ability to listen to women’s perspectives on depression.
Jack weaves these voices of depressed women directly into her discussion, providing new meanings to familiar themes: dependence, pleasing, anger, goodness, low self-esteem. These women clearly articulate a no-win, either/or tension in their lives, a tension between sacrificing their own needs in order to preserve a relationship and acting on their needs and feelings at the risk of losing the relationship. Their stories bring to light the “activity required to be passive”—the way women actively silence themselves in order to cultivate and maintain intimate relationships. To accommodate, they learn to censor themselves, to devalue their experience, to repress anger, to be silent. Examining moral themes in depressed women’s narratives, Jack demonstrates how internalized cultural expectations of feminine goodness affect women’s behavior in relationships and precipitate the plunge into depression. In a brilliant synthesis, Jack draws on myth and fairy tale for metaphors to further the understanding of depressed women.
Silencing the Self makes a major contribution to the psychology of women by drawing from the recent literature on women’s relational self and detailing its relevance to female depression. This insightful approach to the dynamic of female depression forges new pathways to self-change, therapy, and research.
Hearing about the destructive compulsion of bulimia nervosa, outsiders may wonder, "How could you ever start?" Those suffering from the eating disorder ask themselves in despair, "How can I ever stop?" How do you break the cycle of bingeing, vomiting, laxative abuse, and shame? While many books describe the descent into eating disorders and the resulting emotional and physical damage, this book describes recovery.
Psychologist Sheila Reindl has listened intently to women's accounts of recovering. Reindl argues compellingly that people with bulimia nervosa avoid turning their attention inward to consult their needs, desires, feelings, and aggressive strivings because to do so is to encounter an annihilating sense of shame. Disconnected from internal, sensed experience, bulimic women rely upon external gauges to guide their choices. To recover, bulimic women need to develop a sense of self--to attune to their physical, psychic, and social self-experience. They also need to learn that one's neediness, desire, pain, and aggression are not sources of shame to be kept hidden but essential aspects of humanity necessary for zestful life. The young women with whom Reindl speaks describe, with great feeling, their efforts to know and trust their own experience.
Perceptive, lucid, and above all humane, this book will be welcomed not only by professionals but by people who struggle with an eating disorder and by those who love them.
Vietnam still haunts the American conscience. Not only did nearly 58,000 Americans die there, but--by some estimates--1.5 million veterans returned with war-induced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This psychological syndrome, responsible for anxiety, depression, and a wide array of social pathologies, has never before been placed in historical context. Eric Dean does just that as he relates the psychological problems of veterans of the Vietnam War to the mental and readjustment problems experienced by veterans of the Civil War.
Employing a multidisciplinary approach that merges military, medical, and social history, Dean draws on individual case analyses and quantitative methods to trace the reactions of Civil War veterans to combat and death. He seeks to determine whether exuberant parades in the North and sectional adulation in the South helped to wash away memories of violence for the Civil War veteran. His extensive study reveals that Civil War veterans experienced severe persistent psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, and flashbacks with resulting behaviors such as suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence. By comparing Civil War and Vietnam veterans, Dean demonstrates that Vietnam vets did not suffer exceptionally in the number and degree of their psychiatric illnesses. The politics and culture of the times, Dean argues, were responsible for the claims of singularity for the suffering Vietnam veterans as well as for the development of the modern concept of PTSD.
This remarkable and moving book uncovers a hidden chapter of Civil War history and gives new meaning to the Vietnam War.
Autism is a complex and incurable constellation of bizarre behaviors, impaired cognition, limited language, and most distressingly, a lack of responsiveness to other people, and it has been the center of impassioned debates for decades. What is it? What causes it? How can it be treated?
In The Science and Fiction of Autism, one of the country's leading experts in behavioral treatments approaches autism through the context of its controversies, showing where extraordinary and unfounded claims have falsely raised hopes, stirred fears, and ruined lives. Arguing that autism is an entirely biological disorder, however complex its neurological origins, Laura Schreibman lays waste to the beliefs that it is caused by "refrigerator mothers" or the MMR vaccine, as well as to the simplistic claims that it can be cured by a variety of unsubstantiated treatments.
Drawing from her own long clinical experience with autistic children and their parents, Schreibman arms her readers--students, educators, psychologists, and parents alike--with information and arguments to deal with the onslaught of good, bad, deficient, and irrelevant ideas about autism.
Each year one in four hundred births among black Americans is a baby with sickle cell anemia and a life expectancy of only twenty years. Fifty thousand Americans of all ages suffer from the disease, yet there is no treatment for the sickling of cells. This book is the first attempt to summarize all that we know about the historical and cultural roots of sickle cell anemia and the molecular details of how it attacks humans.
The discovery of the molecular basis of sickle cell disease is a riveting story that encapsulates many of the major events in the history of molecular biology. We now know that sickling is triggered by a mutation that alters hemoglobin molecules of the red blood cells. The high incidence of individuals of African descent with this mutation is linked to the slight resistance to malaria provided by the mutant hemoglobin.
But this volume tells more than the story of a disease. Stuart Edelstein recounts his personal experiences in Africa, where he conducted fieldwork among the Igbo of Nigeria. There he explored a possible relation between sickle cell anemia and the Igbo belief in ogbanje, the “repeater children” who are born, die young, and are reborn to the same parents. Sickling cells and “water in the blood,” as traditional healers describe the anemia, are implicated in the amputation of the end of the left little finger as part of a ritual to induce the ogbanje child to “stay.”
From such fascinating myths and practices the author proceeds to examine the evolutionary stages of the hemoglobin molecule in primates and how cells can become distorted into sickle shapes. These molecular aspects of the anemia provide the background for considering the latest efforts to diagnose and treat it. Although genetic engineering techniques may someday cure the disease, most current efforts are directed at developing antisickling drugs to modify the hemoglobin molecules. This engaging yet scholarly book blends cultural anthropology, linguistics, genetics, biochemistry, and medicine into a multifaceted look at a disease by a world-renowned expert on hemoglobin.
A bold new indictment of the racialization of science
Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.
James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes.
Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.
From five-year-olds playing T-ball to teenagers showing off their inline skating skills, kids love participating in sports. Their parents, who often know little about their child's chosen sport, assume the roles of cheerleader, coach, or, when injuries occur, trainer. For these parent-coaches, here is a comprehensive, illustrated guide to preventing and treating sports-related injuries written by a family physician certified in sports medicine.
FEATURES:
- Explains the physical and psychological readiness of children for certain sports at different ages
- Identifies injuries by the part of the body Lists sport-specific injuries, from baseball through wrestling
- Emphasizes preventing injuries and illness
- Contains a glossary of basic medical terms
- Includes illustrations of injuries and preventive exercises
Whether their kids are avid or occasional athletes, this handy reference will increase parents' ability to deal with minor injuries and to identify potentially more serious problems that require professional attention.
Appearance- and performance-enhancing drugs—specifically, anabolic steroids (APEDs)—provide a tempting competitive advantage for amateur baseball players. But this shortcut can exact a fatal cost on talented athletes. In his urgent book Suicide Squeeze, William Kashatus chronicles the experiences of Taylor Hooton and Rob Garibaldi, two promising high school baseball players who abused APEDs in the hopes of attracting professional scouts and Division I recruiters. However, as a result of their steroid abuse, they ended up taking their own lives.
In Suicide Squeeze—named for the high-risk play in baseball to steal home—Kashatus identifies the symptoms and dangers of steroid use among teens. Using archival research and interviews with the Hooton and Garibaldi families, he explores the lives and deaths of these two troubled young men, the impact of their suicides on MLB, and the ongoing fight against adolescent APED use by their parents.
A passionate appeal to prevent additional senseless deaths by athletes, Suicide Squeeze is an important contribution to debates on youth and sports and on public policy.
If you’re going to have a heart attack, an organ transplant, or a joint replacement, here’s the key to getting the very best medical care: be a white, straight, middle-class male. This book by a pioneering black surgeon takes on one of the few critically important topics that haven’t figured in the heated debate over health care reform—the largely hidden yet massive injustice of bias in medical treatment.
Growing up in Jim Crow–era Tennessee and training and teaching in overwhelmingly white medical institutions, Gus White witnessed firsthand how prejudice works in the world of medicine. And while race relations have changed dramatically, old ways of thinking die hard. In Seeing Patients White draws upon his experience in startlingly different worlds to make sense of the unconscious bias that riddles medical treatment, and to explore what it means for health care in a diverse twenty-first-century America.
White and coauthor David Chanoff use extensive research and interviews with leading physicians to show how subconscious stereotyping influences doctor–patient interactions, diagnosis, and treatment. Their book brings together insights from the worlds of social psychology, neuroscience, and clinical practice to define the issues clearly and, most importantly, to outline a concrete approach to fixing this fundamental inequity in the delivery of health care.
“A powerful and extraordinarily important book.”
—James P. Comer, MD
“A marvelous personal journey that illuminates what it means to care for people of all races, religions, and cultures. The story of this man becomes the aspiration of all those who seek to minister not only to the body but also to the soul.”
—Jerome Groopman, MD, author of How Doctors Think
Growing up in Jim Crow–era Tennessee and training and teaching in overwhelmingly white medical institutions, Gus White witnessed firsthand how prejudice works in the world of medicine. While race relations have changed dramatically since then, old ways of thinking die hard. In this blend of memoir and manifesto, Dr. White draws on his experience as a resident at Stanford Medical School, a combat surgeon in Vietnam, and head orthopedic surgeon at one of Harvard’s top teaching hospitals to make sense of the unconscious bias that riddles medical care, and to explore how we can do better in a diverse twenty-first-century America.
“Gus White is many things—trailblazing physician, gifted surgeon, and freedom fighter. Seeing Patients demonstrates to the world what many of us already knew—that he is also a compelling storyteller. This powerful memoir weaves personal experience and scientific research to reveal how the enduring legacy of social inequality shapes America’s medical field. For medical practitioners and patients alike, Dr. White offers both diagnosis and prescription.”
—Jonathan L. Walton, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, Harvard University
“A tour de force—a compelling story about race, health, and conquering inequality in medical care…Dr. White has a uniquely perceptive lens with which to see and understand unconscious bias in health care…His journey is so absorbing that you will not be able to put this book down.”
—Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., author of All Deliberate Speed
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press