Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream

Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream PDF Author: Carl Elliott
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393346668
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
"Elliott's absorbing account will make readers think again about the ways that science shapes our personal identities."—American Scientist Americans have always been the world's most anxiously enthusiastic consumers of "enhancement technologies." Prozac, Viagra, and Botox injections are only the latest manifestations of a familiar pattern: enthusiastic adoption, public hand-wringing, an occasional congressional hearing, and calls for self-reliance. In a brilliant diagnosis of our reactions to self-improvement technologies, Carl Elliott asks questions that illuminate deep currents in the American character: Why do we feel uneasy about these drugs, procedures, and therapies even while we embrace them? Where do we draw the line between self and society? Why do we seek self-realization in ways so heavily influenced by cultural conformity?

Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream

Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream PDF Author: Carl Elliott
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393346668
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Elliott's absorbing account will make readers think again about the ways that science shapes our personal identities."—American Scientist Americans have always been the world's most anxiously enthusiastic consumers of "enhancement technologies." Prozac, Viagra, and Botox injections are only the latest manifestations of a familiar pattern: enthusiastic adoption, public hand-wringing, an occasional congressional hearing, and calls for self-reliance. In a brilliant diagnosis of our reactions to self-improvement technologies, Carl Elliott asks questions that illuminate deep currents in the American character: Why do we feel uneasy about these drugs, procedures, and therapies even while we embrace them? Where do we draw the line between self and society? Why do we seek self-realization in ways so heavily influenced by cultural conformity?

The Creative Destruction of Medicine

The Creative Destruction of Medicine PDF Author: Eric Topol
Publisher:
ISBN: 0465025501
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A professor of medicine reveals how technology like wireless internet, individual data, and personal genomics can be used to save lives.

Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs

Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs PDF Author: Patrick Holford
Publisher: Piatkus
ISBN: 0748125132
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
FOOD IS BETTER MEDICINE THAN DRUGS is an important and potentially controversial book from top nutritionist Patrick Holford and leading health journalist Jerome Burne. Brilliantly researched and based on solid scientific trials and illuminating case histories, Food is Better Medicine than Drugs will revolutionise the way you think about your health and put you back in charge. The authors reveal how modern medicine has become distorted and is now, for reasons largely to do with profit and power, heavily dependent on prescription drugs. They look at common health problems (pain/arthritis, heart, depression, diabetes, memory, hormones, digestion, breathing, infections etc) and compare the effectiveness of nutrition-based approaches with today's potentially harmful commonly used medicines.

Improving Diagnosis in Health Care

Improving Diagnosis in Health Care PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309377722
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
Getting the right diagnosis is a key aspect of health care - it provides an explanation of a patient's health problem and informs subsequent health care decisions. The diagnostic process is a complex, collaborative activity that involves clinical reasoning and information gathering to determine a patient's health problem. According to Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, diagnostic errors-inaccurate or delayed diagnoses-persist throughout all settings of care and continue to harm an unacceptable number of patients. It is likely that most people will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime, sometimes with devastating consequences. Diagnostic errors may cause harm to patients by preventing or delaying appropriate treatment, providing unnecessary or harmful treatment, or resulting in psychological or financial repercussions. The committee concluded that improving the diagnostic process is not only possible, but also represents a moral, professional, and public health imperative. Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, a continuation of the landmark Institute of Medicine reports To Err Is Human (2000) and Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001), finds that diagnosis-and, in particular, the occurrence of diagnostic errorsâ€"has been largely unappreciated in efforts to improve the quality and safety of health care. Without a dedicated focus on improving diagnosis, diagnostic errors will likely worsen as the delivery of health care and the diagnostic process continue to increase in complexity. Just as the diagnostic process is a collaborative activity, improving diagnosis will require collaboration and a widespread commitment to change among health care professionals, health care organizations, patients and their families, researchers, and policy makers. The recommendations of Improving Diagnosis in Health Care contribute to the growing momentum for change in this crucial area of health care quality and safety.

More than Medicine

More than Medicine PDF Author: Robert M. Kaplan
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674975901
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Stanford’s pioneering behavioral scientist draws on a lifetime of research and experience guiding the NIH to make the case that America needs to radically rethink its approach to health care if it wants to stop overspending and overprescribing and improve people’s lives. American science produces the best—and most expensive—medical treatments in the world. Yet U.S. citizens lag behind their global peers in life expectancy and quality of life. Robert Kaplan brings together extensive data to make the case that health care priorities in the United States are sorely misplaced. America’s medical system is invested in attacking disease, but not in addressing the social, behavioral, and environmental problems that engender disease in the first place. Medicine is important, but many Americans act as though it were all important. The United States stakes much of its health funding on the promise of high-tech diagnostics and miracle treatments, while ignoring strong evidence that many of the most significant pathways to health are nonmedical. Americans spend millions on drugs for high cholesterol, which increase life expectancy by only six to eight months on average. But they underfund education, which might extend life expectancy by as much as twelve years. Wars on infectious disease have paid off, but clinical trials for chronic conditions—costing billions—rarely confirm that new treatments extend life. Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health spends just 3 percent of its budget on research on the social and behavioral determinants of health, even though these factors account for 50 percent of premature deaths. America’s failure to take prevention seriously costs lives. More than Medicine argues that we need a shakeup in how we invest resources, and it offers a bold new vision for longer, healthier living.

Better Medicine

Better Medicine PDF Author: David Gratzer
Publisher: ECW Press
ISBN: 1550225057
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Donner Prize-winning author Dr. David Gratzer (Code Blue) edits and introduces this collection of twelve essays on health care reform in Canada, advocating an open-minded approach to such concepts as privatization, two-tier health care, and user fees. Gratzer has assembled a stellar list of authors who invite Canadians to question their confidence in government-managed public health. Contributors include Order of Canada member and University of Toronto professor Michael Bliss, who argues that our current problems are the result of increasingly aggressive government measures to control patients and health-care providers.Globe and Mailcolumnist Margaret Wente offers vignettes that address the day-to-day problems of health care: queue jumping, excessive waits, provider burnout, aging equipment, and the politicization of health administration. And, Vancouver-based health analyst Cynthia Ramsey places Canada’s health care system in an international context. Her findings are unsettling. Other contributors include McGill economist andNational Postcontributor William Watson, former Quebec Medical Association president Dr. Edwin Coffey, former Ontario Medical Association president Dr. William Orovan, and Urban Futures Institute executive Director David Baxter. All Canadians concerned about the state of health care in Canada should read this informative and intelligent collection.

Overdiagnosed

Overdiagnosed PDF Author: H. Gilbert Welch
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807022012
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
An exposé on Big Pharma and the American healthcare system’s zeal for excessive medical testing, from a nationally recognized expert More screening doesn’t lead to better health—but can turn healthy people into patients. Going against the conventional wisdom reinforced by the medical establishment and Big Pharma that more screening is the best preventative medicine, Dr. Gilbert Welch builds a compelling counterargument that what we need are fewer, not more, diagnoses. Documenting the excesses of American medical practice that labels far too many of us as sick, Welch examines the social, ethical, and economic ramifications of a health-care system that unnecessarily diagnoses and treats patients, most of whom will not benefit from treatment, might be harmed by it, and would arguably be better off without screening. Drawing on 25 years of medical practice and research on the effects of medical testing, Welch explains in a straightforward, jargon-free style how the cutoffs for treating a person with “abnormal” test results have been drastically lowered just when technological advances have allowed us to see more and more “abnormalities,” many of which will pose fewer health complications than the procedures that ostensibly cure them. Citing studies that show that 10% of 2,000 healthy people were found to have had silent strokes, and that well over half of men over age sixty have traces of prostate cancer but no impairment, Welch reveals overdiagnosis to be rampant for numerous conditions and diseases, including diabetes, high cholesterol, osteoporosis, gallstones, abdominal aortic aneuryisms, blood clots, as well as skin, prostate, breast, and lung cancers. With genetic and prenatal screening now common, patients are being diagnosed not with disease but with “pre-disease” or for being at “high risk” of developing disease. Revealing the economic and medical forces that contribute to overdiagnosis, Welch makes a reasoned call for change that would save us from countless unneeded surgeries, excessive worry, and exorbitant costs, all while maintaining a balanced view of both the potential benefits and harms of diagnosis. Drawing on data, clinical studies, and anecdotes from his own practice, Welch builds a solid, accessible case against the belief that more screening always improves health care.

Deep Medicine

Deep Medicine PDF Author: Eric Topol
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541644646
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
A Science Friday pick for book of the year, 2019 One of America's top doctors reveals how AI will empower physicians and revolutionize patient care Medicine has become inhuman, to disastrous effect. The doctor-patient relationship--the heart of medicine--is broken: doctors are too distracted and overwhelmed to truly connect with their patients, and medical errors and misdiagnoses abound. In Deep Medicine, leading physician Eric Topol reveals how artificial intelligence can help. AI has the potential to transform everything doctors do, from notetaking and medical scans to diagnosis and treatment, greatly cutting down the cost of medicine and reducing human mortality. By freeing physicians from the tasks that interfere with human connection, AI will create space for the real healing that takes place between a doctor who can listen and a patient who needs to be heard. Innovative, provocative, and hopeful, Deep Medicine shows us how the awesome power of AI can make medicine better, for all the humans involved.

More Than Medicine

More Than Medicine PDF Author: LaTonya J. Trotter
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501748173
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In More Than Medicine, LaTonya J. Trotter chronicles the everyday work of a group of nurse practitioners (NPs) working on the front lines of the American health care crisis as they cared for four hundred African American older adults living with poor health and limited means. Trotter describes how these NPs practiced an inclusive form of care work that addressed medical, social, and organizational problems that often accompany poverty. In solving this expanded terrain of problems from inside the clinic, these NPs were not only solving a broader set of concerns for their patients; they became a professional solution for managing "difficult people" for both their employer and the state. Through More Than Medicine, we discover that the problems found in the NP's exam room are as much a product of our nation's disinvestment in social problems as of physician scarcity or rising costs.

Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Health Care

Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Health Care PDF Author: William Rayburn
Publisher: LWW
ISBN: 9781496356345
Category : Clinical competence
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Publisher's Note: Products purchased from 3rd Party sellers are not guaranteed by the Publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product. Improve clinical competence and performance, deliver better health care, and enhance patient outcomes. Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Health Care helps you design, deliver, and evaluate evidence-based continuing education and professional development programs with the goal of keeping practitioners' knowledge, skills, attitudes, competencies, and performance current and patient centered. Authored by key thought leaders in the field, including members of the Society of Academic Continuing Medical Education (SACME), the book presents today's most advanced thinking on how to empower clinicians to continuously improve their performance throughout their professional careers. Organized under five critical themes and 28 essential topics, the book's chapters start with cases describing real-world dilemmas; continue with evidence-based theories, solutions, and/or resources; and close with "future directions" and contemporary reference lists. Use continuing education to transform the delivery of care - with multidisciplinary guidance that draws on theoretical frameworks and evolving evidence from engineering, neuroscience, education, organization management, sociology, and psychology. Master techniques for maximizing educational benefits (learning, administrative, and otherwise) - from the evolution of core competencies to advances in simulation. Access evidence-informed techniques for providing realistic, personal needs assessments to improve health outcomes. Accommodate needs for education that are more flexible, efficient, effective, and accessible, with less need to travel. Promote evolving new competencies in clinician-patient communication and clinician cultural awareness. Explore methods for conducting research to measure the degree of effectiveness in professional education. In an era of rapidly changing health systems, anyone responsible for improving health professionals' continuing professional development is strongly encouraged to take advantage of the guidance within Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Health Care.