Author: Jean Sharon Abbott
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780996979306
Category : Cerebral palsied
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Jean Sharon Abbott was misdiagnosed as a young child with Spastic Dipligia, a form of Cerebral Palsy. After 33 years of countless doctors visits, medical procedures,unnecessary medications and surgeries, she was correctly diagnosed with Dopa Responsive Dystonia (DRD). Jean enjoys all the adventures of her new life, but wouldn't change the journey that brought her to where she is today. Her positive attitude is highly contagious as she encourages others to appreciate the little things in life.
Author: Jody Berger
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1402293909
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
"Berger movingly details her journey to healing. Her indefatigable quest...underscores the fact that there is no such thing as one size fits all in medicine."—Gayatri Devi, MD, clinical associate professor, NYU School of Medicine, and author of A Calm Brain Taking charge of your health has never been so important as it is today. Jody Berger has discovered this first hand: at forty-three, the award-winning journalist and marathoner sees a doctor about a minor tingling sensation in her hands and feet. One MRI later, she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and told to pick a drug and accept her fate. Instead Jody starts asking questions—only to receive a different diagnosis from each specialist she turns to, from vitamin deficiencies to metal toxicity to depression. In this powerful, witty, and eye-opening account of her misadventures from misdiagnosis to miraculous recovery, Jody offers insightful tips on how to ask doctors the right questions to get the answers and treatment you need, listen to your body, and choose health over illness. After all, while we can't always heal, we can always take control of our health and ourselves—starting now. "In this compelling, beautifully written book, Jody Berger offers an empowering look at the importance of finding the strength and confidence to take charge of your health."—Mary Shomon, New York Times bestselling author and patient advocate
Author: Sarah Fay
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063068702
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
AN APPLE BOOKS PICK OF THE MONTH “Masterfully written, distinctively researched, deeply humane . . . Genius.”—ANTHONY SWOFFORD, author of Jarhead “A major contribution . . . A necessary book.”—JOHANN HARI, author of Lost Connections “This book is a triumph of the spirit and the flesh.”—ELIZA GRISWOLD, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Amity and Prosperity In this stunning debut—both a memoir and a work of investigative journalism—writer Sarah Fay explores the ways we pathologize human experiences. Over thirty years, doctors diagnosed Sarah Fay with six different mental illnesses—anorexia, major depressive disorder (MDD), anxiety disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and bipolar disorder.Pathological is the gripping story of what it was like to live with those diagnoses, and the crippling impact each had on her life. It is also a rigorous investigation into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—psychiatry’s “bible,” the manual from which all mental illness diagnoses come. Yet as Fay found out, some of our most prominent psychiatrists have been trying to warn us that the DSM is fiction sold to the public as fact. In Pathological, former advisory editor at The Paris Review and award-winning writer Fay calls for a new conversation about mental health diagnosis, one based on rigorous transparency. With exquisite detail and a precise presentation of fact, she digs up her own life at the root to finally ask, Is a diagnosis a lifeline or a self-fulfilling prophecy? Powerful, mesmerizing, and unputdownable, Pathological sits alongside the other brave and inspiring classics of our time that explore a more intelligent, forgiving, and nuanced approach to human suffering.
Author: Martin Pistorius
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 1400205840
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
When you lose your voice, who will speak for you? When it all seems hopeless, how do you get through each day? In the New York Times bestseller Ghost Boy, Martin Pistorius tells the harrowing story of his return to life through the healing power of love and faith. In January 1988, a happy, healthy twelve-year-old Martin Pistorius came home from school with a sore throat. Soon, he was sleeping all day, refusing meals, and starting to lose his voice. His doctors were mystified. Within eighteen months, his voice fell silent and his developing mind became trapped inside a body he couldn't control. Martin's parents were told that the unknown degenerative disease he was struggling with would mean that he had less than two years to live. He felt invisible--like a ghost of himself. The stress and heartache shook his family to the core, bringing his parents to the brink of separation. Their boy was gone--or so they thought. Martin started to come back to life. He couldn't make a sign or a sound, but he'd become aware of the world around him again and was finally finding his way back to himself. In these pages, you'll hear the highs and lows of Martin's journey from his own perspective, including: A family's resilience in the face of hardship The consequences of misdiagnosis The gift of a wild imagination Ghost Boy shares the beautiful, heart-wrenching story of a life reclaimed, a business created, a family transformed, and a new love that's blossomed. Martin's emergence from his own darkness invites us to celebrate our own lives and fight for a better life for those around us.
Author: Gayle Brandeis
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807044865
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Award-winning novelist and poet Gayle Brandeis’s wrenching memoir of her complicated family history and her mother’s suicide Gayle Brandeis’s mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant at her chest, and a grieving daughter trying to piece together what happened, who her mother was, and all she had and hadn’t understood about her. Around the time of her suicide, Gayle’s mother had been working on a documentary about the rare illnesses she thought ravaged her family: porphyria and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. In The Art of Misdiagnosis, taking its title from her mother’s documentary, Gayle braids together her own narration of the charged weeks surrounding her mother’s suicide, transcripts of her mother’s documentary, research into delusional and factitious disorders, and Gayle’s own experience with misdiagnosis and illness (both fabricated and real). Slowly and expertly, The Art of Misdiagnosis peels back the complicated layers of deception and complicity, of physical and mental illness in Gayle’s family, to show how she and her mother had misdiagnosed one another. Gayle’s memoir is both a compelling search into the mystery of one’s own family and a life-affirming story of the relief discovered through breaking familial and personal silences. Written by a gifted stylist, The Art of Misdiagnosis delves into the tangled mysteries of disease, mental illness, and suicide and comes out the other side with grace.
Author: Elinor Cleghorn
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593182960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
A trailblazing, conversation-starting history of women’s health—from the earliest medical ideas about women’s illnesses to hormones and autoimmune diseases—brought together in a fascinating sweeping narrative. Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman ten years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As Elinor learned to live with her unpredictable disease she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis. In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn traces the almost unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women by treating their bodies as alien and other, often to perilous effect. The result is an authoritative and groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between women and medical practice, from the "wandering womb" of Ancient Greece to the rise of witch trials across Europe, and from the dawn of hysteria as a catchall for difficult-to-diagnose disorders to the first forays into autoimmunity and the shifting understanding of hormones, menstruation, menopause, and conditions like endometriosis. Packed with character studies and case histories of women who have suffered, challenged, and rewritten medical orthodoxy—and the men who controlled their fate—this is a revolutionary examination of the relationship between women, illness, and medicine. With these case histories, Elinor pays homage to the women who suffered so strides could be made, and shows how being unwell has become normalized in society and culture, where women have long been distrusted as reliable narrators of their own bodies and pain. But the time for real change is long overdue: answers reside in the body, in the testimonies of unwell women—and their lives depend on medicine learning to listen.
Author: Annita Perez Sawyer
Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
ISBN: 1939650275
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
"A fiercely honest and beautifully written book." —Paul Austin, author, Beautiful Eyes and Something for the PainA cautionary tale of careless psychiatric diagnosis, treatment, and resilienceSawyer's memoir is a harrowing, heroic, and redeeming story of her battle with mental illness, and her triumph in overcoming it. In 1960, as a suicidal teenager, Sawyer was institutionalized, misdiagnosed, and suffered through 89 electroshock treatments before being transferred, labeled as "unimproved." The damage done has haunted her life. Discharged in 1966, after finally receiving proper psychiatric care, Sawyer kept her past secret and moved on to graduate from Yale University, raise two children, and become a respected psychotherapist. That is, until 2001, when she reviewed her hospital records and began to remember a broken childhood and the even more broken mental health system of the 1950s and 1960s.
Author: David Fajgenbaum
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 1524799629
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
LOS ANGELES TIMES AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER • The powerful memoir of a young doctor and former college athlete diagnosed with a rare disease who spearheaded the search for a cure—and became a champion for a new approach to medical research. “A wonderful and moving chronicle of a doctor’s relentless pursuit, this book serves both patients and physicians in demystifying the science that lies behind medicine.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, New York Times bestselling author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene David Fajgenbaum, a former Georgetown quarterback, was nicknamed the Beast in medical school, where he was also known for his unmatched mental stamina. But things changed dramatically when he began suffering from inexplicable fatigue. In a matter of weeks, his organs were failing and he was read his last rites. Doctors were baffled by his condition, which they had yet to even diagnose. Floating in and out of consciousness, Fajgenbaum prayed for a second chance, the equivalent of a dramatic play to second the game into overtime. Miraculously, Fajgenbaum survived—only to endure repeated near-death relapses from what would eventually be identified as a form of Castleman disease, an extremely deadly and rare condition that acts like a cross between cancer and an autoimmune disorder. When he relapsed while on the only drug in development and realized that the medical community was unlikely to make progress in time to save his life, Fajgenbaum turned his desperate hope for a cure into concrete action: Between hospitalizations he studied his own charts and tested his own blood samples, looking for clues that could unlock a new treatment. With the help of family, friends, and mentors, he also reached out to other Castleman disease patients and physicians, and eventually came up with an ambitious plan to crowdsource the most promising research questions and recruit world-class researchers to tackle them. Instead of waiting for the scientific stars to align, he would attempt to align them himself. More than five years later and now married to his college sweetheart, Fajgenbaum has seen his hard work pay off: A treatment he identified has induced a tentative remission and his novel approach to collaborative scientific inquiry has become a blueprint for advancing rare disease research. His incredible story demonstrates the potency of hope, and what can happen when the forces of determination, love, family, faith, and serendipity collide. Praise for Chasing My Cure “A page-turning chronicle of living, nearly dying, and discovering what it really means to be invincible in hope.”—Angela Duckworth, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Grit “[A] remarkable memoir . . . Fajgenbaum writes lucidly and movingly . . . Fajgenbaum’s stirring account of his illness will inspire readers.”—Publishers Weekly
Author: Susan Stachler
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 149263784X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
A heartwarming memoir of a family that refused to give up When twenty-two-year-old Susan Stachler was diagnosed with cancer, her mother, Laura, was struck by déjà vu: the same illness that took her sister's life was threatening to take her daughter's too. Heartbroken but steadfast, Laura pledged to help Susan through the worst of her treatments. When they discovered that Laura's homemade ginger cookies soothed the side effects of Susan's chemo, the mother-daughter duo soon found themselves opening Susansnaps and sharing their gourmet gingersnaps with the world. Told with admirable grace and infinite hope, The Cookie Cure is about more than baked goods and cancer—it's about fighting for your life and for your dreams.
Author: Rebekah Beddoe
Publisher: Random House Australia
ISBN: 1742754716
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
A powerful memoir of antidepressants, misdiagnosis and madness. There was that term again, depression, being tossed around. When had I received an official diagnosis, anyway? It had just been mentioned by my GP and now staff were picking it up and running with it. Things seemed to be getting blown out of proportion. I wanted to know why I couldn't be tested for this so-called imbalance in my brain before being put on medication, but I didn't want him to think I was questioning his expertise. He was the second doctor now to recommend the treatmen. "And these are the newer sort - the ones that aren't addictive or anything?" "Not addictive. They're very safe." Shortly after the birth of her daughter Rebekah Beddoe was diagnosed with post-natal depression. Two years later she was taking six different drugs, including lithium, a tranquilliser, an antipsychotic, and antidepressants. She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; given electric-shock therapy; made numerous attempts on her life; and was alternately manic and consumed by crippling despair during which she could barely move. She had a two-year-old daughter she hardly knew and a mother and partner who were at their wits' end, unable to recognise the formerly ambitious, vibrant and highly successful woman they loved. Australians have embraced antidepressants: twelve million prescriptions are written annually, mostly by GPs. But, what do we really know of the pills' effects? The idea that they correct a chemical imbalance in our brain is by no means proven - there is much evidence that contradicts this view. It is commonly thought such drugs are not addictive; in fact - as Rebekah found to her great distress - they are hard to come off and those who do may suffer debilitating side effects. This is a powerful memoir of the nightmarish three years Rebekah endured as she was repeatedly misdiagnosed, only to realise that her medication was the cause of her mental deterioration. Rebekah calls for better information from the pharmaceutical companies about the risks associated with antidepressants and similar classes of drugs - facts, rather than marketing dressed up as medical science - and for a re-examination of the ways some psychiatrists treat their patients.
