Award-winning physician Philip C. Hébert creates a brave and intimate portrait of the complex ethical imperatives at the heart of good medicine: doctors do not have all the answers; patients must be heard; and their needs, desires, fears, and experiences must be reflected in how practitioners look after them.Medical science continues to advance to previously unimagined heights in its diagnostic and treatment capabilities. With these advances, however, come unexpect...

**A riveting first-hand account of a physician who's suddenly a dying patient, In Shock "searches for a glimmer of hope in life’s darkest moments, and finds it.” —The Washington PostDr. Rana Awdish never imagined that an emergency trip to the hospital would result in hemorrhaging nearly all of her blood volume and losing her unborn first child. But after her first visit, Dr. Awdish spent months fighting for her life, enduring consecutive major surgeries a...

In 1991, the Institute of Medicine released a landmark report, which revealed that as many as 98,000 patients were dying every year owing to avoidable medical error. More recent research indicates that estimate was, if anything, a drastic understatement of the patient-safety epidemic in the US health care system.In Malpractice, neurosurgeon and attorney Dr. Larry Schlachter makes a case that most patients enter the system without any idea of the risks they face, due to a m...

See No Evil is based on the life story of a Jewish kid from the Bronx who, through his childhood defence of a bullied young boy, became a trusted friend and, later, physician to New York mafia dons, while simultaneously securing and maintaining a career as a high-flying surgeon at home among the city's chattering classes. The doctor was forced to lead a double life: a well-respected surgeon and socialite by day and hard-living mafia doctor by night. He was welcomed into a seductive underwo...

The story of two doctors, a father and son, who practiced in very different times and the evolution of the ethics that profoundly influence health careAs a practicing physician and longtime member of his hospital’s ethics committee, Dr. Barron Lerner thought he had heard it all. But in the mid-1990s, his father, an infectious diseases physician, told him a stunning story: he had physically placed his body over an end-stage patient who had stopped breathing, prevent...

Can refocusing conversations between doctors and their patients lead to better health?Despite modern medicine’s infatuation with high-tech gadgetry, the single most powerful diagnostic tool is the doctor-patient conversation, which can uncover the lion’s share of illnesses. However, what patients say and what doctors hear are often two vastly different things.Patients, anxious to convey their symptoms, feel an urgency to “make their case” to their doctors. ...

Despite the modern trend towards empowering patients and giving them more choice, the nuts and bolts of medical practice largely remain a mystery - a closed box. In fact, the more health information is available on the internet, the more patients can feel swamped and confused. The Appointment offers an intimate and honest account of how a typical GP tries to make sense of a patient's health problems and manage them within the constraints of their health system and the short ten mi...

Drawing upon real accounts of negligence, incompetence, and distrust, this book seeks to identify the key competencies of a good doctor, the ways in which medical care fails, and the roadblocks to ensuring that every licensed doctor is capable. Arguing that it is possible to improve patient care—by lifting the veils of secrecy and better informing patients, by establishing more effective ways of checking doctors' competence, and by ensuring that medical watchdogs protect the public—this di...

Progress in genetic and reproductive technology now offers us the possibility of choosing what kinds of children we do and don't have. Should we welcome this power, or should we fear its implications? There is no ethical question more urgent than this: we may be at a turning-point in the history of humanity. The renowned moral philosopher and best-selling author Jonathan Glover shows us how we might try to answer this question, and other provoking and disturbing questions to which it leads...

Poet, philosopher, novelist and former physician, Raymond Tallis is one of the world's foremost scientific philosophers. In this book, he brings together his diverse intellectual interests to address profoundly important questions about our well being. Hippocratic Oaths blends philosophy with public opinion, polemic and personal experience to bridge the disjunction between the health care we believe we are entitled to expect, and the difficult realities of what is possible.

For more than a century, the American medical profession insisted that doctors be rigorously trained in medical science and dedicated to professional ethics. Patients revered their doctors as representatives of a sacred vocation. Do we still trust doctors with the same conviction? In Trusting Doctors, Jonathan Imber attributes the development of patients' faith in doctors to the inspiration and influence of Protestant and Catholic clergymen during the nineteenth and early twentiet...

There is an excellent chance this book will save your life. You will see doctors, the practice of medicine, and community hospitals as you have never seen them before. You will learn about things you never could have believed existed before. For what is written in this book has never been told before in its entirety, anywhere and by anyone.Doctors with respectable credentials and good reputations are harming, maiming, and yes, murdering their patients. They are doing it with the su...