How do some birds, turtles, and insects possess navigational abilities that rival the best manmade navigational technologies? Who or what taught the honey bee its dance, or its hive mates how to read the complex message of the dance? How do blind mound-building termites master passive heating and cooling strategies that dazzle skilled human architects? In The Origin of Species Charles Darwin conceded that such instincts are "so wonderful" that the mystery of their origin would str...

Clearing the Path is a collection of clinical stories that illustrate practical, applicable communication tools for professionals in work with end-of-life patients and families. These vignettes from practice demonstrate how impending death, death itself, and the loss of a relationship affect the lives and grief of both patients and survivors. Written 13 years after its companion volume The Weeping Willow, the book brings even more complex encounters and nuanced emotions f...

The renewal of medical curricula generally arises from emerging pedagogies (e.g. problem-based learning), new technologies (e.g. high fidelity simulation), or prevailing sociocultural forces (e.g. complexity of health care delivery and team-based care). Approximately 15 years ago, a team of physicians and administrators sought to take this further: by considering the very nature of medical practice and the patient-physician relationship that is the context and conduit of caring and care, t...

Clinical medicine, as a thinking discipline, is concerned not only with what clinicians do, but why. When physicians act in medicine they have some purpose or goal in mind. What they actually do and how they go about it is in the service of their purposes and their goals. Such goals cover a wide range of topics centering on patients, the doctor-patient relationship, the acts of doctoring patients, and the goals involved in being a physician among other physicians working within the institu...

Clinical medicine, as a thinking discipline, is concerned not only with what clinicians do, but why. When physicians act in medicine they have some purpose or goal in mind. What they actually do and how they go about it is in the service of their purposes and their goals. Such goals cover a wide range of topics centering on patients, the doctor-patient relationship, the acts of doctoring patients, and the goals involved in being a physician among other physicians working within the institu...

American medicine attracts some of the brightest and most motivated people the country has to offer, and it boasts the most advanced medical technology in the world, a wondrous parade of machines and techniques such as PET scans, MRI, angioplasty, endoscopy, bypasses, organ transplants, and much more besides. And yet, writes Dr. Eric Cassell, what started out early in the century as the exciting conquest of disease, has evolved into an overly expensive, over technologized, uncaring medicin...

American medicine attracts some of the brightest and most motivated people the country has to offer, and it boasts the most advanced medical technology in the world, a wondrous parade of machines and techniques such as PET scans, MRI, angioplasty, endoscopy, bypasses, organ transplants, and much more besides. And yet, writes Dr. Eric Cassell, what started out early in the century as the exciting conquest of disease, has evolved into an overly expensive, over technologized, uncaring medicin...

This is a revised and expanded edtion of a classic in palliative medicine, originally published in 1991. With three added chapters and a new preface summarizing our progress in the area of pain management, this is a must-hve for those in palliative medicine and hospice care. The obligation of physicians to relieve human suffering stretches back into antiquity. But what exactly, is suffering? One patient with metastic cancer of the stomach, from which he knew he would shortly die, said he w...

The Language Gap provides an accessible review of the language gap research, illuminating what we know and what we do not know about the language development of youth from working and lower socioeconomic classes. Written to offer a balanced look at existing literature, this text analyzes how language gap research is portrayed in the media and how debatable research findings have been portrayed as common sense facts. This text additionally analyzes how language gap research has imp...

The third edition of Geriatric Medicine appears at a crucial time for health profession als, a time when the values and goals of our overall American health care system are being reoriented to those values and goals that have long been at the core of geriatrics. It is likely that the readership of this highly respected textbook will be even substan tially greater than that for the two previous editions or, for that matter, for any other textbook on geriatric medicine published in the Unite...

Since the publication of the third edition of Geriatric Medicine,extraordinary advances have occurred in the science of aging and the potential for biomedical research to give us answers to many, if not most, of the age-related disorders that threaten the quality of life in older years. At the most basic level, the successful mapping of the human genome was declared complete in the fall of 2000. Understanding the map of the human genome is as important as understanding the map of genomes o...