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Author: Mark J. Plotkin
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780140262100
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
In Medicine Quest, Mark Plotkin moves beyond the Amazon rainforests of his classic Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice to describe the ongoing race to find new medicines for intractable diseases such as AIDS,cancer, diabetes, and tuberculosis in far-flung places all over the world. While highlighting the unlikely marriage of natural products, indigenous wisdom, and biotechnology, Plotkin details discoveries that are producing stunning results in the laboratory: painkillers from the skin of rainforest frogs, anticoagulants from leech saliva, and antitumor agents from snake venom. An entertaining and educational weave of medicine, ecology, ethnobotany, history, exploration, and adventure, Medicine Quest will thrill scientists, naturalists, and armchair explorers, and heighten our appreciation for the inexhaustible therapeutic potential of our natural world.
Author: Mark J. Plotkin
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780140262100
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Get Book Here
Book Description
In Medicine Quest, Mark Plotkin moves beyond the Amazon rainforests of his classic Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice to describe the ongoing race to find new medicines for intractable diseases such as AIDS,cancer, diabetes, and tuberculosis in far-flung places all over the world. While highlighting the unlikely marriage of natural products, indigenous wisdom, and biotechnology, Plotkin details discoveries that are producing stunning results in the laboratory: painkillers from the skin of rainforest frogs, anticoagulants from leech saliva, and antitumor agents from snake venom. An entertaining and educational weave of medicine, ecology, ethnobotany, history, exploration, and adventure, Medicine Quest will thrill scientists, naturalists, and armchair explorers, and heighten our appreciation for the inexhaustible therapeutic potential of our natural world.
Author: John E. Wennberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199830851
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
Written by a groundbreaking figure of modern medical study, Tracking Medicine is an eye-opening introduction to the science of health care delivery, as well as a powerful argument for its relevance in shaping the future of our country. An indispensable resource for those involved in public health and health policy, this book uses Dr. Wennberg's pioneering research to provide a framework for understanding the health care crisis; and outlines a roadmap for real change in the future. It is also a useful tool for anyone interested in understanding and forming their own opinion on the current debate.
Author: Brent R. Stockwell
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231525524
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
After more than fifty years of blockbuster drug development, skeptics are beginning to fear we are reaching the end of drug discovery to combat major diseases. In this engaging book, Brent R. Stockwell, a leading researcher in the exciting new science of chemical biology, describes this dilemma and the powerful techniques that may bring drug research into the twenty-first century. Filled with absorbing stories of breakthroughs, this book begins with the scientific achievements of the twentieth century that led to today's drug innovations. We learn how the invention of mustard gas in World War I led to early anti-cancer agents and how the efforts to decode the human genome might lead to new approaches in drug design. Stockwell then turns to the seemingly incurable diseases we face today, such as Alzheimer's, many cancers, and others with no truly effective medicines, and details the cellular and molecular barriers thwarting scientists equipped with only the tools of traditional pharmaceutical research. Scientists such as Stockwell are now developing methods to combat these complexities technologies for constructing and testing millions of drug candidates, sophisticated computational modeling, and entirely new classes of drug molecules all with an eye toward solving the most profound mysteries of living systems and finding cures for intractable diseases. If successful, these methods will unlock a vast terrain of untapped drug targets that could lead to a bounty of breakthrough medicines. Offering a rare, behind-the-scenes look at this cutting-edge research, The Quest for the Cure tells a thrilling story of science, persistence, and the quest to develop a new generation of cures.
Author: Robert Aronowitz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022604971X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
"Will ever-more sensitive screening tests for cancer lead to longer, better lives? Will anticipating and trying to prevent the future complications of chronic disease lead to better health? Not always, says Robert Aronowitz. In fact, it often is hurting us... Drawing on such controversial examples as HPV vaccines, cancer screening programs, and the cancer survivorship movement, Aronowitz demonstrates that patients and their doctors have come to believe, perilously, that far too many medical interventions are worthwhile because they promise to control our fears and reduce uncertainty." -- Taken from book flyleaf.
Author: Mark J. Plotkin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014012991X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
The fascinating account of a pioneering ethnobotanist’s travels in the Amazon—at once a gripping adventure story, a passionate argument for conservationism, and an investigation into the healing power of plants, by the author of The Amazon: What Everyone Needs to Know For thousands of years, healers have used plants to cure illness. Aspirin, the world's most widely used drug, is based on compounds originally extracted from the bark of a willow tree, and more than a quarter of medicines found on pharmacy shelves contain plant compounds. Now Western medicine, faced with health crises such as AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer, has begun to look to the healing plants used by indigenous peoples to develop powerful new medicines. Nowhere is the search more promising than in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest, home to a quarter of all botanical species on this planet—as well as hundreds of Indian tribes whose medicinal plants have never been studied by Western scientists. In Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, ethnobotanist Mark J. Plotkin recounts his travels and studies with some of the most powerful Amazonian shamans, who taught him the plant lore their tribes have spent thousands of years gleaning from the rain forest. For more than a decade, Dr. Plotkin raced against time to harvest and record new plants before the rain forests' fragile ecosystems succumb to overdevelopment—and before the Indians abandon their own culture and learning for the seductive appeal of Western material culture. Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice relates nine of the author's quests, taking the reader along on a wild odyssey as he participates in healing rituals; discovers the secret of curare, the lethal arrow poison that kills in minutes; tries the hallucinogenic snuff epena that enables the Indians to speak with their spirit world; and earns the respect and fellowship of the mysterious shamans as he proves that he shares both their endurance and their reverence for the rain forest.
Author: Philip K Wilson
Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
ISBN: 1782625127
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
The Mesoamerican population who lived near the indigenous cultivation sites of the "Chocolate Tree" (Theobromo cacao) had a multitude of documented applications of chocolate as medicine, ranging from alleviating fatigue to preventing heart ailments to treating snakebite. Until recently, these applications have received little sound scientific scrutiny. Rather, it has been the reputed health claims stemming from Europe and the United States which have attracted considerable biomedical attention. This book, for the first time, describes the centuries-long quest to uncover chocolate's potential health benefits. The authors explore variations in the types of evidence used to support chocolate's use as medicine as well as note the ongoing tension over categorizing chocolate as food or medicine, and more recently, as functional food or nutraceutical. The authors, Wilson an historian of science and medicine, and Hurst an analytical chemist in the chocolate industry, bring their collective insights to bear upon the development of ideas and practices surrounding the use of chocolate as medicine. Chocolate's use in this manner is explored first among the Mesoamerican peoples, then as it is transported to Europe, and back into Colonial North America. The authors then focus upon more recent bioscience experimental undertakings which have been aimed to ascertain both long-standing and novel suggestions as to chocolate's efficacy as a medicinal and a nutritional substance. Chocolate/s reputation as the most craved food boosts this book's appeal to food and biomedical scientists, cacao researchers, ethnobotanists, historians, folklorists, and healers of all types as well as to the general reading audience.
Author: Jürgen Drews
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780387955421
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
An eminent scientist talks about the pharmaceutical industry, biotechnology and the future of drug research. In the course of our busy, technologically-driven lives, it is taken for granted that we respond to minor fluctuations in our health by taking pills -- pills for headache and for toothache; sleeping pills and tranquilizers; pills to lower fever, quiet coughs, and clear the sinuses; medicines to reduce appetite; preparations to relieve heartburn; and many more. In the war against serious disease, medicines are an indispensable weapon in the physician's arsenal: they save lives, or at least prolong them and make them more bearable. Despite the important role that pharmaceuticals play in our lives, few of us know where medicines come from or how the pharmaceutical industry discovers and develops new drugs. Jurgen Drews, an acclaimed leader in the pharmaceutical industry, tells the fascinating story of drug discovery and development from his years of successfully leading internatnional research teams at Hoffman-LaRoche. Drews traces the history of modern drug development from pharmacies, chemical companies, and individual entrepeneurs in Switzerland, Germany and the U.S. to the mega-corporations that dot the landscape of Europe, Japan and America. He describes the process by which new drugs are tested and brought to market, including a provacative look at how AIDS activism stimulated the approval process in the US. Drews' commentary on the role of clinical trials -- the time involved and their cost -- is sobering testimony to the complexity of bringing innovation to the marketplace. In the final two chapters of "In Quest of Tomorrow's Medicines", Drews offers an important and critical analysis of research in the the pharmaceutical industry, pointing to strategies that work and management practices that impede progress. Drews' comments on the impact that the growing relationship between the biotechnology industry and university-sponsored research will have ont he pharmaceutical industry makes provocative reading for pharmaceutical researchers, managers and investors. "In Quest of Tomorrow's Medicines" in written in clear, thoughtful language for people in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, as well as policy makers, industry analysts and observers.
Author: Mickey S. Eisenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195101790
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
This medical detective story traces the ongoing quest to reverse sudden death, looking at such breakthroughs in our understanding as respiration, circulation and defibrillation. It includes a guide to emergency CPR
Author: Nancy N. Chen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231134842
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
What we eat, how we eat, where we eat, and when we eat are deeply embedded cultural practices. Eating is also related to how we medicate. The multimillion-dollar diet industry offers advice on how to eat for a better body and longer life, and avoiding harmful foods (or choosing healthy ones) is considered separate from consuming medicine--another multimillion-dollar industry. In contrast, most traditional medical systems view food as inseparable from medicine and regard medicinal foods as the front line of healing. Drawing on medical texts and food therapy practices from around the world and throughout history, Nancy N. Chen locates old and new crossovers between food and medicine in different social and cultural contexts. The consumption of spices, sugar, and salt was once linked to specific healing properties, and trade in these commodities transformed not just the political economy of Europe, Asia, and the New World but local tastes and food practices as well. Today's technologies are rapidly changing traditional attitudes toward food, enabling the cultivation of new admixtures, such as nutraceuticals and genetically modified food, that link food to medicine in novel ways. Chen considers these developments against the evolving food regimes of the diet industry in order to build a framework for understanding diet as individual practice, social prescription, and political formation.
Author: Ian Dowbiggin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139498681
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
This is the story of one of the most far-reaching human endeavors in history: the quest for mental well-being. From its origins in the eighteenth century to its wide scope in the early twenty-first, this search for emotional health and welfare has cost billions. In the name of mental health, millions around the world have been tranquilized, institutionalized, psycho-analyzed, sterilized, lobotomized and even euthanized. Yet at the dawn of the new millennium, reported rates of depression and anxiety are unprecedentedly high. Drawing on years of field research, Ian Dowbiggin argues that if the quest for emotional well-being has reached a crisis point in the twenty-first century, it is because mass society is enveloped by cultures of therapism and consumerism, which increasingly advocate bureaucratic and managerial approaches to health and welfare.
