Do We Still Need Doctors? is a personal account from the front lines of the moral and political battles that are reshaping America's health care system. Using compelling firsthand experiences, clinical vignettes, and moral arguments, John D. Lantos, a pediatrician, asks whether, as we proceed with the redesign of our health care system, doctors will - or should - continue to fulfill the roles and responsibilities that they have in the past. Interspersing moving personal stories of his young patients suffering from AIDS, cancer, and other chronic or terminal illnesses with his own stirring dilemmas of truth telling, creative navigation of HMO bureaucracy, and reflections on the identity crisis of medical education, Dr. Lantos reveals how changes in our health care system and new technologies are fostering new ways of understanding and responding to illness. He taps into the public's sense of wanting doctors and hospitals to do something other than what they do now and the frustrating disagreement about what they should do in the future. Do We Still Need Doctors? neither demonizes nor idealizes managed care or for-profit medicine. Instead, Dr. Lantos argues that managed care continues a trend toward rationalizing disease and streamlining treatment that doctors themselves have initiated and sustained over the last fifty years. Illness and death will always resist rationalizing, and in order to respond to them, doctors and patients alike need to re-imagine what healing is or ought to be.

When a powerful mystic steps on the hand of a radical young hippie doctor from Detroit, it changes lives and the world. Sometimes Brilliant chronicles the adventures of a philosopher, seeker, unconventional doctor, groundbreaking tech innovator, and key player in the eradication of one of the worst pandemics in human history. His story--about what happens when love, compassion, and determination meet the right circumstances to effect positive change--is the kind that keeps hope and the sense of possibility alive. After sitting at the feet of Martin Luther King Jr. at the University of Michigan in 1963, Larry Brilliant was swept up into the civil rights movement, marching and protesting across America and Europe. As a radical young doctor, he followed the Hippie Trail from London over the Khyber Pass with his wife Girija, Wavy Gravy, and the Hog Farm commune to India. There, he found himself in a Himalayan ashram wondering whether he had stumbled into a cult. Instead, one of India's greatest spiritual teachers, Neem Karoli Baba, opened Larry's heart and told him his destiny was to work for the World Health Organization to help eradicate deadly smallpox. He never would have believed he'd become a key player in eliminating a ten-thousand-year-old disease that killed more than half a billion people in the twentieth century alone. Brilliant's unlikely trajectory, chronicled in Sometimes Brilliant, has brought him into close proximity with political leaders, spiritual masters, cultural heroes, and titans of technology around the world--from the Grateful Dead to Mikhail Gorbachev, from Ram Dass, the Dalai Lama, Lama Govinda, and Karmapa to Steve Jobs and the founders of Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Microsoft, and eBay, and Presidents Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. Anchored by the engrossing account of the heroic efforts of the extraordinary people involved in smallpox eradication in India, this is a riveting and fascinating epidemiological expedition, an honest reckoning of an entire generation, and a deeply moving spiritual memoir. It is a testament to faith, love, service, and what it means to engage with life's most important questions in pursuit of a better, more brilliant existence.

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.