Recommendations based on "Do No Harm"

The bestselling author of Grain Brain uncovers the powerful role of gut bacteria in determining your brain's destiny.Debilitating brain disorders are on the rise-from children diagnosed with autism and ADHD to adults developing dementia at younger ages than ever before. But a medical revolution is underway that can solve this problem: Astonishing new research is revealing that the health of your brain is, to an extraordinary degree, dictated by the state of your microbiome - the vast population of organisms that live in your body and outnumber your own cells ten to one. What's taking place in your intestines today is determining your risk for any number of brain-related conditions.In Brain Maker, Dr. Perlmutter explains the potent interplay between intestinal microbes and the brain, describing how the microbiome develops from birth and evolves based on lifestyle choices, how it can become "sick," and how nurturing gut health through a few easy strategies can alter your brain's destiny for the better. With simple dietary recommendations and a highly practical program of six steps to improving gut ecology, Brain Maker opens the door to unprecedented brain health potential.

This lively history of childbirth begins with colonial days, when childbirth was a social event, and moves on to the gradual medicalization of childbirth in America as doctors forced midwives out of business and to the home-birth movement of the 1980’s. Widely praised when it was first published in 1977, the book has now been expanded to bring the story up to date. In a new chapter and epilogue, Richard and Dorothy Wertz discuss the recent focus on delivering perfect babies, with its emphasis on technology, prenatal testing, and Caesarean sections. They argue that there are many viable alternatives―including out-of-hospital births―in the search for the best birthing system.Review of the first edition:“Highly readable, extensively documented, and well illustrated…A welcome addition to American social history and women’s studies. It can also be read with profit by health planners, hospital administrators, ‘consumers’ of health care, and all those who are concerned with improving the circumstances associated with childbirth.”―Claire Elizabeth Fox, bulletin of the History of Medicine“A fascinating, brilliantly documented history not merely of childbirth, but of men’s attitudes towards women, the effect of a burgeoning medical profession on our very conception of maternity and motherhood, and the influence of religion on medical technology and science.”―Thomas J. Cottle, Boston Globe“This superb book…is both an impeccably documented recitation of the chronological history of medical intervention in American childbirth and a sociological analysis of the various meanings given to childbirth by individuals, interested groups, and American society as a whole.”―Barbara Howe, American Journal of SociologyRichard W. Wertz, a builder in Westport, Massachusetts, is formerly an associate professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Dorothy C. Wertz, is a research professor at the School of Public Health, Boston University

The inspiration for the PBS series Mysterious of Mental Illness, Shrinks brilliantly tells the "astonishing" story of psychiatry's origins, demise, and redemption (Siddhartha Mukherjee).Psychiatry has come a long way since the days of chaining "lunatics" in cold cells and parading them as freakish marvels before a gaping public.But, as Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, the former president of the American Psychiatric Association, reveals in his extraordinary and eye-opening book, the path to legitimacy for "the black sheep of medicine" has been anything but smooth.In Shrinks, Dr. Lieberman traces the field from its birth as a mystic pseudo-science through its adolescence as a cult of "shrinks" to its late blooming maturity — beginning after World War II — as a science-driven profession that saves lives. With fascinating case studies and portraits of the luminaries of the field — from Sigmund Freud to Eric Kandel — Shrinks is a gripping and illuminating read, and an urgent call-to-arms to dispel the stigma of mental illnesses by treating them as diseases rather than unfortunate states of mind.“A lucid popular history...At once skeptical and triumphalist. It shows just how far psychiatry has come.” —Julia M. Klein, Boston Globe

Gold Award Winner, 2024 Nonfiction Book Awards Runner-up, 2024 History category, San Francisco Book Festival Runner-up, 2024 General Non-Fiction, New York Book Festival For much of recorded history, people considered the heart to be the most important organ in the body. In cultures around the world, the heart—not the brain—was believed to be the location of intelligence, memory, emotion, and the soul. Over time, views on the purpose of the heart have transformed as people sought to understand the life forces it contains. Modern medicine and science dismissed what was once the king of the organs as a mere blood pump subservient to the brain, yet the heart remains a potent symbol of love and health and an important part of our cultural iconography. This book traces the evolution of our understanding of the heart from the dawn of civilization to the present. Vincent M. Figueredo—an accomplished cardiologist and expert on the history of the human heart—explores the role and significance of the heart in art, culture, religion, philosophy, and science across time and place. He examines how the heart really works, its many meanings in our emotional and daily lives, and what cutting-edge science is teaching us about this remarkable organ. Figueredo considers the science of heart disease, recent advancements in heart therapies, and what the future may hold. He highlights the emerging field of neurocardiology, which has found evidence of a “heart-brain connection” in mental and physical health, suggesting that ancient views hold more truth than moderns suspect. Ranging widely and deeply throughout human history, this book sheds new light on why the heart remains so central to our sense of self.

Psycho-Oncology was the first comprehensive text in the field of psychosocial oncology and remains the gold standard today. Written by 67 internationally known psychiatry and palliative care experts, the resource is truly an essential reference for all providers of palliative care.Joining Oxford Medicine Online this resource offers the best quality content in an easy-to-access format. Online only benefits include downloading images and figures to PowerPoint and downloading chapters to PDF.

From the international bestselling author of Gut, an entertaining and highly informative book about how the body's organs work in tandem to keep us as healthy as we can be. In a world that is becoming ever louder and more complex, sometimes the best perspective is to look inward--at our own physicality. For thousands of years, our bodies have faced challenges and found their own unique ways to overcome them. What can we learn from these extraordinarily complex beings? In her new book, internationally renowned medical expert and star of Netflix's Hack Your Health Giulia Enders embarks on a journey of discovery into our inner workings, raising fundamental questions: What can the immune system teach us about security? How does the process of wound-healing inform our understanding of emotional recovery? What do we truly need to thrive? What are we capable of when we achieve peak health? How do we truly want to treat one another? Our bodies offer fascinating answers to all these questions, transforming our perspective on life itself. With the latest scientific insights and her unmatched talent for making complex concepts vividly accessible, Giulia Enders inspires a deep appreciation for something that is both intimately familiar yet profoundly mysterious--the very basis for how we find our happiest selves.

Finalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction A chilling exposé of the international effort to minimize the health and environmental consequences of nuclear radiation in the wake of Chernobyl. Dear Comrades! Since the accident at the Chernobyl power plant, there has been a detailed analysis of the radioactivity of the food and territory of your population point. The results show that living and working in your village will cause no harm to adults or children. So began a pamphlet issued by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health—which, despite its optimistic beginnings, went on to warn its readers against consuming local milk, berries, or mushrooms, or going into the surrounding forest. This was only one of many misleading bureaucratic manuals that, with apparent good intentions, seriously underestimated the far-reaching consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between thirty-one and fifty-four people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone. No major international study tallied the damage, leaving Japanese leaders to repeat many of the same mistakes after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. Drawing on a decade of archival research and on-the-ground interviews in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Kate Brown unveils the full breadth of the devastation and the whitewash that followed. Her findings make clear the irreversible impact of man-made radioactivity on every living thing; and hauntingly, they force us to confront the untold legacy of decades of weapons-testing and other nuclear incidents, and the fact that we are emerging into a future for which the survival manual has yet to be written.

"This is a stunning book—comprehensive and perceptive. Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America is a major achievement in interdisciplinary scholarship and historical interpretation, and will remain the definitive work on this important subject for many years to come."—Theodore M. Brown, Ph.D., Professor of History, Community and Preventive Medicine, and Medical Humanities, University of Rochester"A landmark in the history and ethics of public health. Meticulously researched, it provides the first overarching account of the evolution of public health surveillance in the United States, from the debates over tuberculosis and venereal disease at the start of the 20th century to the tensions over AIDS and bioterrorism at century's end. Fairchild, Bayer, and Colgrove provide insights not only into how concerns about privacy shaped the politics of public health but also about how the need for protection and services could fuel the demand for extending surveillance. Searching Eyes is invaluable not only for those who want to understand the past but for those who will be called on to make and debate public health policy in the future."—Larry O. Gostin, author of Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint (2nd ed, forthcoming 2008)

Science journalist Sally Adee breaks open the field of bioelectricity—the electric currents that run through our bodies and every living thing—its misunderstood history, and why new discoveries will lead to new ways around antibiotic resistance, cleared arteries, and new ways to combat cancer. You may be familiar with the idea of our body's biome: the bacterial fauna that populate our gut and can so profoundly affect our health. In We Are Electric we cross into new scientific understanding: discovering your body's electrome. Every cell in our bodies—bones, skin, nerves, muscle—has a voltage, like a tiny battery. It is the reason our brain can send signals to the rest of our body, how we develop in the womb, and why our body knows to heal itself from injury. When bioelectricity goes awry, illness, deformity, and cancer can result. But if we can control or correct this bioelectricity, the implications for our health are remarkable: an undo switch for cancer that could flip malignant cells back into healthy ones; the ability to regenerate cells, organs, even limbs; to slow aging and so much more. The next scientific frontier might be decrypting the bioelectric code, much the way we did the genetic code. Yet the field is still emerging from two centuries of skepticism and entanglement with medical quackery, all stemming from an 18th-century scientific war about the nature of electricity between Luigi Galvani (father of bioelectricity, famous for shocking frogs) and Alessandro Volta (inventor of the battery). In We Are Electric, award-winning science writer Sally Adee takes readers through the thrilling history of bioelectricity and into the future: from the Victorian medical charlatans claiming to use electricity to cure everything from paralysis to diarrhea, to the advances helped along by the giant axons of squids, and finally to the brain implants and electric drugs that await us—and the moral implications therein.  The bioelectric revolution starts here.

This is a romp through the history of healthcare, hosted by the inimitable Dr Grimgrave. It includes chapters on ancient medicine - Stone Age trepanning, Chinese medicine, Romans, Greeks; the dodgy diagnostics of the Middle Ages; the bloody operations before anaesthetics and hygiene were implemented; Florence Nightingale's nursing revolution and development of public health; life-saving surgery available today, including plastic surgery and transplants; and modern miracles - new drugs and treatment.