9 results for "Medicine"

Better health care for less

Shulman, Neil
Did you know... that drug companies give free medicine to people who can't afford medicine? That medical exams and treatment are often free when done as part of an experimental study? That you can get a dental check-up and cleaning at a school of dental hygiene for about $10? That young children can have free immunization at many health departments and immunization drives? Facts like these can help the cost-conscious consumer save money on medical care. With tips like these Better Health Care for Less helps you sort through medical choices and directs you to new resources. This easy-to-use guide is arranged dictionary-style for quick reference. Some of the more than 350 topics covered are AIDs, allergies, arthritis, birth control, cancer treatment, diabetes, dermatology, diagnostic tests, emergencies, eye care, high blood pressure, HMOs, insurance, long term care, medications, Parkinson's disease, pregnancy, experimental treatment, surgery, testing, and x-rays.
Hippocrene Books 1993 464 pages

Medicine in translation: journeys with my patients

Ofri, Danielle
For two decades, Dr. Danielle Ofri has cared for patients at Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in the country and a crossroads for the world's cultures. In Medicine in Translation , she introduces us, in vivid, moving portraits, to the patients she has known. They have braved language barriers, religious and racial divides, and the emotional and practical difficulties of exile in order to access quality health care. Sharing their journeys with them over the years, Danielle has witnessed some of their best and worst moments, and come to admire their resilience and courageous spirit. Danielle introduces us to her patients: Samuel Nwanko, who was brutally attacked by a Nigerian cult in his homeland and is attempting to create a new life in America; Jade Collier, an Aussie who refuses to let a small thing like a wheelchair keep her from being a homegrown ambassador to New York City; Julia Barquero, a Guatemalan woman who migrated to the States to save her disabled son but cannot obtain the lifesaving heart transplant she needs because she is undocumented. We meet a young Muslim woman threatened at knifepoint for wearing her veil, and the spitfire Señora Estrella, one of Danielle's many Spanish-speaking patients, whose torrent of words helps seal Danielle's resolve to improve her own Spanish, an essential skill in today's urban hospitals. And so she, her husband, and their two young children and seventy-five-pound dog relocate to Costa Rica, where they discover potholes the size of their New York City apartment, a casual absence of street signs or even street names, tangy green-skinned limon dulce dangling in the playground, and sudden rains surging over the craggy edges of roadside ditches. Ultimately, Danielle experiences being a patient in a foreign country when she gives birth to their third child, a "Costarricense" girl. With controversy over immigrants in our society escalating, and debate surrounding health-care reform becoming increasingly urgent, Ofri's riveting stories about her patients could not be more timely. Living and dying in the foreign country we call home, they have much to teach us about the American way, in sickness and in health.
Beacon Press 2010 251 pages

The biomedical empire: lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic

Rothman, Barbara Katz
"We are all citizens of the Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Katz Rothman clarifies that critiques of biopower and the "medical industrial complex" have not gone far enough, and asserts that the medical industry is nothing short of an imperial power. Factors as fundamental as one's citizenship and sex identity-drivers of our access to basic goods and services-rely on approval and legitimation by biomedicine. Moreover, a vast and powerful global market has risen up around the empire making it one of the largest economic forces in the world. Katz Rothman shows that biomedicine has the key elements of an imperial power: economic leverage, the faith of its citizens, and governmental rule. She investigates the Western colonial underpinnings of the empire, and its rapid intrusion into everyday life focusing on the realms of birth and death. This provides her with a powerful vantage point from which to critically examine the current moment, when the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the power structures of the empire in unprecedented ways while sparking the most visible resistance it has ever seen. This short book will make the most of this moment: laying out what the Biomedical Empire is, how biomedicine has become an Imperial power, and what some of the key consequences have been. While much of the focus will be on the American situation, the argument that biomedicine has become an imperial power is inherently transnational. Indeed, Katz Rothman argues that it has permeated all nation-states"--
Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press 2021 153 pages

Medical nemesis: the expropriation of health

Illich, Ivan
"The medical establishment has become a major threat to health. The disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the proportions of an epidemic. Iatrogenesis, the name for this new epidemic, comes from iatros, the Greek word for physician, and genesis, meaning origin. Discussion of the disease of medical progress has moved up on the agendas of medical conferences, researchers concentrate on the sick-making powers of diagnosis and therapy, and reports on paradoxical damage caused by cures for sickness take up increasing space in medical dope-sheets ... The public has been alerted to the perplexity and uncertainty of the best among its hygienic caretakers ... This book argues that panic is out of place. Thoughtful public discussion of the iatrogenic pandemic, beginning with an insistence upon demystification of all medical matters, will not be dangerous to the commonweal."--Introduction.
Pantheon Books 1976 294 pages

Second opinion: a doctor's dispatches from the British inner city

Dalrymple, Theodore
"Theodore Dalrymple has spent 20 years working as a prison and hospital doctor in one of Britain's poorest inner cities - and chronicling his experiences in regular dispatches in some of Britain's best-selling magazines." "Drug addicts and desperate drunks, battered wives and suicidal burglars, elderly Alzheimer's sufferers and teenage stabbing victims they all pass through his surgery, and he uses the experience of treating them to examine life for those unfortunate enough to live at the bottom end of society. He writes with a combination of dry humour, compassion and, occasionally, anger - mostly at the inhuman bureaucracy of the system, which works against the doctors and nurses as they try to help their patients." "Second Opinion is a series of short, sharp pieces compiled from Dalrymple's regular and much-loved 'Second Opinion' and 'If Symptoms Persist' columns in The Spectator magazine - offers a compelling insight to what it's really like to work at the sharp end of modern --
Monday Books 2009 326 pages

Pharmacracy: medicine and politics in America

Szasz, Thomas
In recent decades, American medicine has become increasingly politicized and politics has become increasingly medicalized. Behaviors previously seen as virtuous or wicked, wise or unwise are now dealt with as healthy or sick--unwanted behaviors to be controlled as if they were health issues. The modern penchant for transforming human problems into diseases and judicial sanctions into treatments, replacing the rule of law with the rule of medical discretion, leads to the creation of a type of government social critic Thomas Szasz calls pharmacracy. Medicalizing troublesome behaviors and social problems is tempting to voters and politicians alike: it panders to the people by promising to satisfy their needs for dependence on medical authority and offers easy self-aggrandizement to politicians as the dispensers of more and better health care. Thus, the people gain a convenient scapegoat, enabling them to avoid personal responsibility for their behavior. The government gains a rationale for endless and politically expedient wars against social problems defined as public health emergencies. The health care system gains prestige, funding, and bureaucratic power that only an alliance with the political system can provide. However, Szasz warns, the creeping substitution of pharmacracy for democracy--private medical concerns increasingly perceived as requiring a political response--inexorably erodes personal freedom and dignity. Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America is a clear and convincing presentation of this hidden danger, all too often ignored in our health care debates and avoided in our political contests.
Praeger 2001-04-30 212 pages