Medicine itself is sick. We hardly understand any disease and therefore need to chronically treat symptoms but not the causes. Consequently, drugs and other therapies help only very few patients; yet we are pumping more and more money into our healthcare system without any added value.Thus, the internationally renowned physician researcher, Harald Schmidt, predicts the end of medicine as we know it. On a positive note, digitization will radically change healthcare and lead to one of the gr...

Budgets of governments and private insurances are limited. Not all drugs and services that appear beneficial to patients or physicians can be covered. Is there a core set of benefits that everyone should be entitled to? If so, how should this set be determined? Are fair decisions just impossible, if we know from the outset than not all needs can be met? While early work in bioethics has focused on clinical issues and a narrow set of principles, in recent years there has been a marked shift...

Reforms and processes of change have become an increasingly pervasive characteristic of European Protestant churches in the last fifteen to twenty years. Driven by perceptions of crises, such as declining membership rates, dwindling finances, decreasing participation in church rituals, and less support of traditional church doctrine, but also changes of governance of religion more generally, many churches feel compelled to explore new forms of operations, activities, and organizational str...

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) have been implicated in almost every human disease phenotype, without much, if any, therapeutic consequence foremost exemplified by the failure of the so-called anti-oxidants. This book is a game changer for the field and many clinical areas such as cardiology and neurology. The term ‘oxidative stress’ is abandoned and replaced with a systems medicine and network pharmacology-based mechanistic approach to disease. The ROS-related drugs discussed here target ei...

Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality presents a variety of perspectives by leading thinkers on contemporary research into the brain, the mind and the spirit. This volumes aims at combining knowledge from neuroscience with approaches from the experiential perspective of the first person singular in order to arrive at an integrated understanding of consciousness. Individual chapters discuss new areas of research, such as near death studies and neuroscience research into spir...

This volume features a collection of essays on consciousness, which has become one of the hot topics at the crossroads between neuroscience, philosophy, and religious studies. Is consciousness something the brain produces? How can we study it? Is there just one type of consciousness or are there different states that can be discriminated? Are so called “higher states of consciousness” that some people report during meditation pointing towards a new understanding of consciousness?Me...

**How genomics, big data, and digital technology are revolutionizing every aspect of medicine, from physical exams to drug prescriptions to organ transplants“The Creative Destruction of Medicine should be required reading by all physicians and in all medical schools. It is simply that good.” —Forbes**Technology dominates our lives, and personal genomics is revolutionizing biology. But despite the availability of technologies that can provide virtual, perso...

In Realities of Canadian Nursing, influential scholars throughout Canada give voice to the unheard concerns of nurses and go to great lengths to ensure the text offers readers more than an update on current and pressing professional, legal, ethical, political, social, economic, and environmental issues in nursing and healthcare. In chapter 1 of the text, authors Carol McDonald PhD, RN and Marjorie McIntyre RN, PhD offer a Framework for Analysis, which gives students and educators a shared ...

Ever wondered what's going on inside your head?You are your brain. Everything that makes you you, and all your experiences of the world, are somehow conjured up by 1.4 kilograms of grey matter inside your skull. That might seem impossible, but science has advanced so much that we now understand not just its structures and inner workings but also how it can give rise to perception, consciousness, emotions, memories, intelligence, sleep and more.HOW YO...

Health Care in Canada examines the challenges faced by the Canadian health care system, a subject of much public debate. In this book Katherine Fierlbeck provides an in-depth discussion of how health care decisions are shaped by politics and why there is so much disagreement over how to fix the system.Many Canadians point to health care as a source of national pride; others are highly critical of the system's shortcomings and call for major reform. Yet meaningful debate ca...

"Alan Cassels strips layers of expectation, hype, jargon, false-starts, and conflicts of interest off the medical screening mantra." —Nortin M. Hadler, author of Worried SickWhy wouldn't you want to be screened to see if you're at risk for cancer, heart disease, or another potentially lethal condition? After all, better safe than sorry. Right?Not so fast, says Alan Cassels. His Seeking Sickness takes us inside the world of medical screening,...

Why medicine adopts ineffective or harmful medical practices only to abandon them—sometimes too late.Medications such as Vioxx and procedures such as vertebroplasty for back pain are among the medical "advances" that turned out to be dangerous or useless. What Dr. Vinayak K. Prasad and Dr. Adam S. Cifu call medical reversal happens when doctors start using a medication, procedure, or diagnostic tool without a robust evidence base—and then stop using it when it is f...