The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a technique used to replicate specific pieces of DNA millions of times, which permits the detection and analysis of minute amounts of nucleic acids. Since its introduction in the late 1980s, this technique has been applied not only in molecular biology research but also in fields as diverse as anthropology, phylogeny, and forensics. However, despite the large impact of PCR, many of its applications remain within the confines of research and the academic environment. Now, in A Low-Cost Approach to PCR: Appropriate Transfer of Biomolecular Techniques, Dr. Eva Harris makes this elegantly simple technique more accessible to researchers, physicians, and laboratory workers throughout the world. She provides a description of the theoretical basis of the technique, the practical details of the method, and the philosophy behind the technology transfer program that she developed over the last ten years. The book serves as a guide for potential users in developing countries and for scientists in developed countries who may wish to work abroad. In addition, the low-cost approach outlined in this book can be useful for high school, undergraduate, or continuing education programs in the United States. While the specific applications of PCR outlined in the book are immediately useful to the study of infectious diseases, the approach presented can be generalized to a number of other technologies and situations. The book will help laboratories in many areas of the world generate information on site for use by physicians, epidemiologists, public health workers, and health policy professionals to develop new strategies for disease control.

This is not simply the memoir of a cancer survivor. Nor is it just the memoir of a respected senator. This is an unprecedented glimpse into a man who is both. It is inspiration for people of all political persuasions; of how to persevere and succeed---despite what the doctors may say, despite what the tests might show. In early 2004, Senator Specter was in the midst of a grueling primary race, facing significant opposition from the right as he worked to win his party's nomination to run for reelection for his Pennsylvania senate seat. It would be the most difficult election in his quarter-century career in the Senate. Following on its heels were two more challenges---the general-election race and opposition to his elevation as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, his lifelong ambition. He overcame all three challenges in time for his seventy-fifth birthday. But exhaustion and fatigue---initially thought to be the aftereffects of months of vigorous campaigning---were found to be far more serious. After a series of tests and consultation with several doctors, Specter was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, Stage IVB, the most advanced stage. He had received death sentences before and lived to tell about it. To Senator Specter, this diagnosis was another challenge. After all, he still had a job to do. His cancer treatments came as he reached the height of his power---surrounded by political storms that polarized Washington and threatened to shut the Senate down. His leadership positions made it his job to manage Supreme Court nominations and public- health appropriations as he faced his own illness. He had fought on public-health issues for years, but now it added potency to the message that the messenger was ailing himself. The phrase "Never give in" became Specter's mantra, invoking the famous words from Churchill in his battle with cancer. This moving book describes the treatment the Senator received and offers his advice on how to handle the side effects (both visible and private), hair loss, and of course, maintain a nearly daily squash regimen. So, how does one move forward when faced with mortality? It's simple. Work. "Never Give In brims with the singular tenacity and humor that have characterized Arlen Specter's nearly thirty years in the United States Senate. This book is both an entertaining read and an unflinching account of the experience of fighting an intensely personal battle on a highly public stage."---Michael J. Fox "Working with Arlen for many years on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I have witnessed firsthand his spirited battles on the political stage. Even while confronting his physical trials, Senator Specter continued to be a great asset to Pennsylvania, the Senate, and our country. Highlighted by insight that only Arlen could provide, Never Give In portrays a life of courage and fortitude." ---Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) "Understanding Arlen Specter's steely endurance is a key to understanding his success in the Senate and in life. Look up tenacity in the dictionary and you'll find Arlen's picture. Trial by fire has tempered him and made him stronger, and wiser."-- Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT, Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee) "Written in Senator Specter's trademark candor, Never Give In is a compelling tale of survival – both personal and political – from one of the Senate's most independent voices. Riding the train home with him now for almost 25 years, I count Arlen among my closest friends in the Senate. The words courageous and inspiring hardly do him justice – but trust me, he is both."-- Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) "I've been privileged to work side by side with Arlen for over 18 years. While I respect his intelligence and honesty, and value his friendship, perhaps most of all I have admired his toughness in the face of adversity. He just never gives up."—Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA)

Doubts about the reality of mental illness and the benefits of psychiatric treatment helped foment a revolution in the law's attitude toward mental disorders over the last 25 years. Legal reformers pushed for laws to make it more difficult to hospitalize and treat people with mental illness, and easier to punish them when they committed criminal acts. Advocates of reform promised vast changes in how our society deals with the mentally ill; opponents warily predicted chaos and mass suffering. Now, with the tide of reform ebbing, Paul Appelbaum examines what these changes have wrought. The message emerging from his careful review is a surprising one: less has changed than almost anyone predicted. When the law gets in the way of commonsense beliefs about the need to treat serious mental illness, it is often put aside. Judges, lawyers, mental health professionals, family members, and the general public collaborate in fashioning an extra-legal process to accomplish what they think is fair for persons with mental illness. Appelbaum demonstrates this thesis in analyses of four of the most important reforms in mental health law over the past two decades: involuntary hospitalization, liability of professionals for violent acts committed by their patients, the right to refuse treatment, and the insanity defense. This timely and important work will inform and enlighten the debate about mental health law and its implications and consequences. The book will be essential for psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, lawyers, and all those concerned with our policies toward people with mental illness.

This book will become the bible of regulatory reform. No broad, authoritative treatment of the subject has been available for many years except for Alfred Kahn’s Economics of Regulation (1970). And Stephen Breyer’s book is not merely a utilitarian analysis or a legal discussion of procedures; it employs the widest possible perspective to survey the full implications of government regulation—economic, legal, administrative, political—while addressing the complex problems of administering regulatory agencies. Only a scholar with Judge Breyer’s practical experience as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee could have accomplished this task. He develops an ingenious original system for classifying regulatory activities according to the kinds of problems that have called for, or have seemed to call for, regulation; he then examines how well or poorly various regulatory regimes remedy these market defects. This enables him to organize an enormous amount of material in a coherent way, and to make significant and useful generalizations about real-world problems. Among the regulatory areas he considers are health and safety; environmental pollution, trucking, airlines, natural gas, public utilities, and telecommunications. He further gives attention to related topics such as cost-of-service ratemaking, safety standards, antitrust, and property rights. Clearly this is a book whose time is here—a veritable how-to-do-it book for administration deregulators, legislators, and the judiciary; and because it is comprehensive and superbly organized, with a wealth of highly detailed examples, it is practical for use in law schools and in courses on economics and political science.

In this seminal work, Dr. Szasz examines the similarities between the inquisition and institutional psychiatry. His purpose is to show “that the belief in mental illness and the social actions to which it leads have the same moral implications and political consequences as had the belief in witchcraft and the social actions to which it led.”

The Voice of the Body is the first publication in a single volume of Alexander Lowen's public lectures known as The Lowen Monographs. This historical collection of twenty-two lectures by one of the founders of contemporary body psychotherapy embodies the groundbreaking principles of Bioenergetics and Bioenergetic Analysis. Presented between 1962 and 1982, these lectures document the depth and breadth of Lowen's work not otherwise detailed in his published work. Poignant and relevant to the challenges of today's world, the topics include: Stress and Illness: A Bioenergetic View; Breathing, Movement and Feeling; Thinking and Feeling: The Bioenergetic Analysis of Thought; Sex and Personality; Self Expression vs. Survival; Aggression and Violence in the Individual; and Psychopathic Behavior and the Psychopathic Personality.

Traces the history of the epidemic and examines its social, political, and psychological impact on society.

Reform of the welfare sector is an important yet difficult challenge for all countries in transition from socialist central planning to market-oriented democracies. Here a scholar of the economics of socialism and post-socialist transition and a health economist take on this challenge. This 2001 book offers health sector reform recommendations for ten countries of Eastern Europe, drawn consistently from a set of explicit guiding principles. After discussing sector-specific characteristics, lessons of international experience, and the main set of initial conditions, the authors advocate reforms based on organized public financing for basic care, private financing for supplementary care, pluralistic delivery of services, and managed competition. Policymakers need to achieve a balance, both assuring social solidarity through universal access to basic health services and expanding individual choice and responsibility through voluntary supplemental insurance. The authors also consider the problems that undermine effectiveness of market-based competition in the health sector.

Almost everything you know about heroin addiction is wrong. Not only is it wrong, but it is obviously wrong. Heroin is not highly addictive; withdrawal from it is not medically serious; addicts do not become criminals to feed their habit; addicts do not need any medical assistance to stop taking heroin; and contrary to received wisdom, heroin addiction most certainly IS a moral or spiritual problem. Based on his experience as a prison doctor and as a psychiatrist in a large general hospital in Birmingham, Dr. Dalrymple argues that addiction to heroin is not an illness at all, and that doctors only make it worse. They deceive both the addicts and themselves by pretending that they have something to offer. In this brilliant, entertaining and provocative book, Theodore Dalrymple explains how and why a literary tradition dating back to De Quincey and Coleridge, and continuing up to the deeply sociopathic William Burroughs and beyond, has misled all Western societies for generations about the nature of heroin addiction. These writers' self-dramatizing and dishonest accounts of their own addiction have been accepted uncritically, and have been more influential by far in forming public attitudes than the whole of pharmacological science. As a result, a self-serving, self-perpetuating and completely useless medical bureaucracy has been set up to deal with the problem. With scathing wit, implacable logic and savage denunciation, Dr. Dalrymple exposes the mythology surrounding heroin addiction. Moving seamlessly between literature, pharmacology, history and philosophy, he demonstrates what happens when the nature of a social problem is so thoroughly misunderstood, and when human beings are regarded as inanimate objects rather than as agents of their own destiny. His scintillating, iconoclastic little book has an importance far beyond its immediate subject matter.

Focus in the media on the risks posed to ordinary people has become increasingly strong in recent years - particularly on those risks popularly perceived to be posed by the mentally ill. But how justified is this concern? How do we best manage so-called dangerous people? In Will They Do It Again? Herschel Prins considers the issue of public protection within a broad context of risk in society generally, examining the concerns arising in contemporary society from dealing with uncertainty. It is argued that public fear over the danger posed by the mentally ill is at odds with the evidence, and that much of the concern is focused on a small number of high-profile cases. Prins goes on to examine such cases where management of the mentally ill has failed and sets out suggestions for improvements in practice. Will They Do It Again? cuts through popular misunderstanding and media hype over risk to give a clear, unbiased picture of the real risks to society from the mentally ill and how best they can be contained and managed, and will prove invaluable to a range of practitioners involved in the fields of criminal justice and psychiatry.

A fundamental tension in the American political and legal landscape is this: individual liberty v. the common good. When does one trump the other? This ongoing tension becomes particularly problematic when new threats to public health appear, such as HIV or pandemic influenza. Parmet explores this terrain by offering a population-based approach to legal analysis, claiming that law should seek, among other things, to protect and promote public health--something that has been badly neglected, she claims, in legal discourse and biomedical models of disease in our hyper-individualistic society. In the first few chapters she defines public health, establishing its importance to human activity, and lays out the basics of a population-based approach. In subsequent chapters she employs this approach to several issues: constitutional law, health law, tort law, international law and human rights, as well as specific controversial subjects such as obesity--to what degree should law govern the fast food industry?--the use of tobacco, toxic chemicals, global warming, and the emergence of new infections. Along the way she demonstrates how a population-based approach can better help us analyze, for example, the relationship between health and socioeconomic status. The book concludes with Parmet's musings on the future of population-based legal analysis and its central claim: that by recognizing the importance of public health law, and also recognizing the interests of the individual, we can not only better protect the health of communities but also enhance contemporary legal discourse.

If you thought the time of medical breakthroughs was over, brace yourself for the untold story of a doctor who singlehandedly, in the face of disdain from his colleagues and threats from government bureaucrats, made a breakthrough scientific discovery. Dr. Rader discovered how to apply fetal stem cell technology to humans and has saved the lives and eased the suffering of more than 1,500 patients with Autism, Epilepsy, Multiple Sclerosis, Stroke, Parkinson's disease, Muscular Dystrophy, and many other diseases. Blocked in the U.S.A. reveals the science behind Dr. Rader's breakthroughs, the struggles with the medical establishment, and, most important, the detailed successful results of his work. Now the truth can be told, and it reads like an adventure story, spanning three continents as one doctor dared to defy the FDA, the medical establishment and the drug companies.

This volume deals with the topic of health inequalities and health disparities. The volume is divided into five sections. The first section includes an introductory look at the issue of health care inequalities and disparities and also an introduction to the volume. One of the backdrops to this topic in the United States was The National Healthcare Disparities Report and its focus on the ability of Americans to access health care and variation in the quality of care. Disparities related to socioeconomic status were included, as were disparities linked to race and ethnicity and the report also tried to explore the relationship between race/ethnicity and socioeconomic position, as explained in more detail in the first article in the book.The second article discusses a newer overall approach to issues related to health inequalities and health disparities. The remaining four sections of the book address more specific topics relating to inequalities and disparities. The second section examines racial and ethnic inequalities and disparities. The third section includes articles that address the issue from the perspective of research about health care providers and health care facilities. The last two sections of the book focus on consumers and topics of health care disparities, with Section 4 focused on issues related to substance abuse, mental health and related concerns.Section 5 includes articles looking at issues of vulnerable women, women with breast cancer and people with colorectal cancer. "Inequalities and Disparities in Health Care and Health" is important reading for medical sociologists and people working in other social science disciplines studying health-related issues. The volume also provides vital information for health services researchers, policy analysts and public health researchers. It is a great resource for health services researchers, policy analysts and public health researchers. It offers an in-depth look at bioethics, focusing on health inequalities and disparities.

Do you ever wonder if there’s a connection between the corruption scandals in the news and the steady decline in the quality of life for millions of Americans? Do you ever wonder what corporations get for the millions of dollars they pour into the American political system? Do you ever think the government has been hijacked by forces hostile to average Americans? Do you ever want to fight back? Millions of Americans lack health care and millions more struggle to afford it. Politicians claim they care, then pass legislation that just sends more cash to the HMOs. Wages have been stagnant for thirty years, even as corporate profits skyrocket. Politicians say they want to fix the problem and then pass bills written by lobbyists that drive wages even lower and punish those crushed by debt. Jobs are being shipped overseas, pensions are being cut, and energy is becoming unaffordable. And our government, more concerned about maintaining its corporate sponsorship than protecting its citizens, does nothing about it. In Hostile Takeover , David Sirota, a major new voice in American politics, seeks to open the eyes of ordinary Americans to the fact that corporate interests have undermined democracy, aided and abetted by their lackeys in our allegedly representative government. At a time when more and more of America’s major political leaders are being indicted or investigated for corruption, Sirota takes readers on a journey that shows how all of this nefarious behavior happened right under our noses—and how the high-profile scandals are merely one product of a political system and debate wholly owned by Big Money interests. Sirota considers major public issues that feel intractable—like spiraling health care costs, the outsourcing of jobs, the inequities of the tax code, and out-of-control energy prices—and shows how in each case workable solutions are buried under the lies of lobbyists, the influence of campaign cash, and the ubiquitous spin machine financed by Big Business. With fiery passion, pinpoint wit, and lucid analysis, Hostile Takeover reveals the true enemies of reform and their increasingly sophisticated—and hostile—tactics. It’s an essential guidebook for those of us tired of the government selling us out—and determined to take our country back. Also available as an eBook

Public Hostage, Public Ransom starts with the autobiographical story of William Bronston, the activist physician whose early professional California training steels him with a deep moral, professional and cultural bond to the huge 6000 person disabled population he encounters incarcerated in Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, NY, on whose behalf he daily battles to humanize and ultimately catalyze a Federal Class Action Lawsuit against the state to close the deathmaking institution. Prior to the expose of Willowbrook, no small individualized community living arrangements existed across New York state in lieu of 30 massive state institutions. Medicaid funded, these institutions warehoused the 'different' population imposed on their stricken families. Having been closed to admission by public scandal and impossible overcrowding, families were blackmailed to have their dependent member submit to secret viral research whose impact was completely unknown, where rampant disease, gruesome sanitation, lack of adequate food, clothing, carloads of tranquilizing medicine and the most minimal care and supervision was the brutal norm. Ultimately, concerned parents, caring workers, top child development leaders in the field, local and national media were organized to expose and address the bureaucratic evil and ubiquitous violence that dominated the wretched lives inside. This passionate book documents the immense drama, and story arc, of the public mobilization, media expose and Federal judicial process Bronston helped arouse, that forged the path to what ultimately becomes the legal conviction for this systemic human abuse and Justice Ruth Ginsburg's subsequent, monumental Supreme Court Olmstead Decision that framed the rightful foundation for nationwide deinstitutional reform. Dr. Bronston draws the clear line to indict the self serving State bureaucracy and the strategic rationale to end Title 19 of the Social Security Act, the Medicaid system, in order to heal the deep societal wound that the nursing home and assisted living industry, the segregated norm, that compels our universal commoditized and paradigmatic terminus. The human rights movement in America has transformed the lives of all people with special needs as new politics, technology and a profound awareness of the dehumanization of this vast community reached a zenith in the late 1960s and 1970s. It leads to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act that emancipated the devalued and stigmatized populations of labeled people including Mental Retardation, Cerebral palsy, Autism, Epilepsy, Polio, sensory loss, neuromuscular degenerative conditions, on and on, "public hostages", who now age to become society's elders consigned again to profit driven, segregated and congregate institutional lives, funded by Medicaid's billions, America's "public ransom". _ us an artificially created domestic refugee population, torn from every community and devastating America's families has become an accepted paradigm that Dr. Bronston's story intimately charts and passionately indicts. Universal expanded and improved Medicare for all, single payer health care, is the clear solution and ultimate antidote to this crime against humanity we numbly tolerate.

The realities of mounting government debt, tax burdens, and an aging population raise serious concerns about the financial legacy confronting future generations. How great a fiscal burden will current policies leave to subsequent generations, and how might changes in those policies alter the intergenerational distribution of public welfare? Generational accounting has recently emerged as a robust new method of fiscal analysis and planning designed to assess the long-term sustainability of fiscal policy and to measure the extent of the financial load ultimately borne by present and future generations. A seminal contribution to public economics, generational accounting has already been adopted by 23 nations around the world. Combining the latest and most extensive country-by-country generational analyses with a comprehensive review of generational accounting's innovative methodology, these papers are a consummate resource for economists, political scientists, and policy makers concerned with fiscal health and responsibility.

In Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920 to 1950, Atina Grossmann reconstructs the complicated history of a movement that has been romanticized as the harbinger of 1960s sexual radicalism and demonized as a precursor to Nazi racial policy, but mostly buried and obscured by Nazi bookburnings and repression. Relying on a broad range of sources - from police reports, films and personal interviews to sex manuals unearthed from library basements and secondhand bookstores - the book analyzes a remarkable mass mobilization during the turbulent and innovative Weimar years of doctors and laypeople for women's rights to abortion and public access to birth control and sex education. Reforming Sex takes on questions of international context and comparison as well as continuity and discontinuity in twentieth century German history in a manner that other studies have not. The book follows Weimar sex reformers into the Third Reich, to exile around the world, and into both the Eastern and Western zones of postwar Germany. It demonstrates how deeply rooted eugenics ideology and American and Bolshevik models of modernity were in the Weimar movement. It also examines the drastic rupture between sex reform notions of social health and National Socialist population policy. The story of German sex reform provides a new perspective on post-World War II family planning programs; it sheds light on the long and lively background to current controversies about abortion, the role of doctors and the state in determining women's right to control their own bodies, and the possibilities for reforming and transforming sexual relations between men and women.

Three decades after the remarkable resurgence of feminism, gender issues have become ubiquitous in public debate. For some, feminism is the favorite scapegoat for multiple social ills; for others, the greatest success story of the closing century. The Janus face of feminism in the media reflects the competing images of women´s lives today. Feminists themselves hold sharply opposing views on the success or failures of three decades of women´s activism. Why Feminism? looks at the shifts in feminist thinking from the brash emergence of Women´s Liberation at the close of the 1960s to the diverse and discordant feminisms of recent decades. Exploring feminism´s troubled relations with psychology and psychoanalysis, the rise of new evolutionary theory, the impact of queer theorizing on gender categories, controversies over memory and trauma, and increasing anxieties about men and masculinity, Why Feminism? illustrates the continuing provocation and significance of feminist inquiry, laying out potentialities and pitfalls for the century ahead.

In this book Dorothy Baruch has presented as fiction the treatment of a seven-year-old boy and his parents. The author has charmingly portrayed the techniques employed in psychotherapy with children, for which the lay reader has little understanding when it is presented in a scientific form. This is indeed a service to a public surfeited with psychiatric trash and sensationalism. It presents a sincere picture of what goes on in the therapist's office in the treatment of a child.

Timely and provocative essays on bioethical questions brought to the forefront by the bioterrorist threat. The war on terrorism and the threat of chemical and biological weapons have brought a new urgency to already complex moral and bioethical questions. In the Wake of Terror presents thought-provoking essays on many of the troubling issues facing American society, written by experts from the fields of medicine, health care policy, law, political science, history, philosophy, and theology. One of the first potential casualties of catastrophic circumstances is civil liberties. In the past, medical experiments conducted for national security purposes have violated ethical standards, and this book questions whether current policy provides sufficient safeguards against further abuses. It also focuses on public health issues, offering contrasting views on the extent to which civil authorities should be allowed to restrict freedom of movement in the name of national security and debating whether aggressive public health interventions improve public confidence and cooperation or detract from them. A major area of concern is preparedness for future terrorist attacks. Chapters are devoted to ethical issues involved in the development, distribution, and rationing of vaccines and antidotes; resource allocation and medical triage; the moral duties of emergency health workers and other first responders; and the obligations of private entities such as managed care organizations and pharmaceutical companies. Contributors also address the implications of terrorism for our health insurance system and the role of genetic advances in bioterrorism. Underlying all of these issues, the authors argue, is the need to maintain a spirit of social solidarity, which can in turn only be achieved if preparations are publicly acknowledged and generally regarded as both prudent and fair.