The inspiring story of how a leading innovator in patient safety found a simple way to save countless lives.First, do no harm-doctors, nurses and clinicians swear by this code of conduct. Yet in hospitals and doctors' offices across the country, errors are made every single day - avoidable, simple mistakes that often cost lives. Inspired by two medical mistakes that not only ended in unnecessary deaths but hit close to home, Dr. Peter Pronovost made it his personal...

Benjamin Daniels is angry. He is frustrated, confused, baffled and, quite frequently, very funny. He is also a GP. These are his confessions.A woman troubled by pornographic dreams about Tom Jones. An 80-year-old man who can't remember why he's come to see the doctor. A woman with a common cold demanding (but not receiving) antibiotics. A man with a sore knee. A young woman who has been trying to conceive for a while but now finds herself pregnant and isn't sure she wants to go thr...

WHEN THIS DOCTOR TALKS, YOU SHOULD LISTEN.Thousands of people make an early exit each year and arrive on medical examiner Jan Garavaglia’s table. What is particularly sad about this is that many of these deaths could easily have been prevented. Although Dr. Garavaglia, or Dr. G, as she’s known to many, could not tell these individuals how to avoid their fates, we can benefit from her experience and profound insight into the choices we make each day.In How Not to Die

**Victoria Sweet's new book, SLOW MEDICINE, is on sale now!For readers of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, a medical “page-turner” that traces one doctor’s “remarkable journey to the essence of medicine” (The San Francisco Chronicle).**San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God’s hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and ...

A startling and important exposé on the state of medicine, research, and healthcare today by the Chief Medical and Scientific Officer of the American Cancer SocietyHow We Do Harm exposes the underbelly of healthcare today—the overtreatment of the rich, the under treatment of the poor, the financial conflicts of interest that determine the care that physicians' provide, insurance companies that don't demand the best (or even the least expensive) care, and p...

In The Surprising Lives of Small-Town Doctors, physicians put down their stethoscopes and pick up their pens to share some of the most frightening and pivotal moments of their careers. From making igloo house calls to bandaging animal bites to performing surgeries they may have only read about in textbooks, these young doctors speak of the many rewards of practising medicine in small communities. They also detail the fears, failures, and challenges of providing health care in the ...

You Don't Look Sick chronicles one personís true-life story of illness and her physicians compassionate commentary as they journey through the four stages of chronic illness: Getting Sick, Being Sick, Grief and Acceptance and Living Well. The authors address such practical aspects as hiring a doctor, managing chronic pain, coping with grief and loss of function, winning battles with health and disability insurers, countering the social bias against the chronically ill, and recogni...

"Insightful and filled with verve...electrifying."—Wall Street JournalHailed as "an astute book of enormous importance" (Sherwin Nuland), The Surgeons follows the team at one of the world's premier cardiac surgery and transplant centers. Given unprecedented access, Charles R. Morris recounts in thrilling detail a late-night against-the-clock "harvest run" to secure a precious transplantable organ, the heartbreaking story of a child's failed transplant, and more. A...

3,000 Pulses Later: A Memoir of Surviving Depression Without Medication describes how, as a successful advertising executive, wife, and mother with a seemingly ideal life, Martha Rhodes succumbed to depression and overdosed on Xanax and alcohol in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. The memoir describes her challenges with untreated, drug-resistant depression and her struggle to find an alternative to the drugs that failed to relieve her symptoms. After a grueling stay in a psychiatric ward a...

Despite battling depression in his mid-teens, Rohit Kumar fulfilled his beloved parents’ dream of becoming a doctor in 1990. He was one of Canada’s first hospitalists before setting up a highly successful private practice, and acquired specialized expertise in treating patients with chronic pain and those needing palliative care. Dr. Kumar’s star began rising in both Canada and the United States. But, his increasingly erratic behaviour and mood swings began alienating his colleagues, wives an...

Jadwiga Lenartowicz Rylko, known as Jadzia (Yah′-jah), was a young Polish Catholic physician in Łódź at the start of World War II. Suspected of resistance activities, she was arrested in January 1944. For the next fifteen months, she endured three Nazi concentration camps and a forty-two-day death march, spending part of this time working as a prisoner-doctor to Jewish slave laborers. A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps follows Jadzia from her childhood and medical training, through...

As a surgical pathologist for more than twenty-five years, Spencer Nadler was not content with the distance between his lab and the patient. Meeting with those whose diseased cells he has diagnosed, he offers them a rare understanding.Hanna Baylan is a woman as determined as he is to confront the cancer cells biopsied from her breast. Comille, a young boy with Sickle Cell anemia, has frequent racking pain, but doesn’t let it interfere with his gusto for life. And 91-year old-conduct...