Showing titles in Policy & Administration

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all too aware of the urgent health inequalities that plague our world. But these inequalities have always been urgent: modern medicine has a colonial and racist history. Here, in an essential and searingly truthful account, Annabel Sowemimo unravels the colonial roots of modern medicine. Tackling systemic racism, hidden histories and healthcare myths, Sowemimo recounts her own experiences as a doctor, patient and activist.

As revelatory as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson’s Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. For more than 5,000 years, 'old' has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we’ve made old age into a disease.

The Inner Consultation, Second Edition sets out the author’s thoughts on how consulting skills, and methods of teaching them, have evolved in the 17 years since the book’s first publication. It also develops the theme of "curiosity" as the key requirement for patient-centered consulting and provides a practical consultation model with five checkpoints to work to, advice for developing skills, and suggestions for doctors to ensure they know the cues in the consultation that require their full attention.

Building on the foundation laid by Moshe Feldenkrais, Thomas Hanna's groundbreaking work completely redefines the body's potential for withstanding decline. His gentle program for the mind and body proves once and for all that so many problems we accept as inevitable over time - chronic stiffness, bad back, chronic pain, fatigue, and, at times, even high blood pressure - need never occur if we maintain conscious control of nerve and muscle, replacing Sensory-Motor Amnesia with Sensory-Motor Awareness.

Author Cory Franklin, MD, who headed the hospital's intensive care unit from the 1970s through the 1990s, shares his most unique and bizarre experiences, including the deadly Chicago heatwave of 1995, treating the first AIDS patients in the country before the disease was diagnosed, the nurse with rare Munchausen syndrome, the only surviving ricin victim, and the professor with Alzheimer's hiding the effects of the wrong medication.

There are dramatic differences in health between countries and within countries. But this is not a simple matter of rich and poor. These health inequalities defy usual explanations. Conventional approaches to improving health have emphasised access to technical solutions – improved medical care, sanitation, and control of disease vectors; or behaviours – smoking, drinking – obesity, linked to diabetes, heart disease and cancer. These approaches only go so far.

Both memoir and self-help book, this is the remarkable chronicle of a passage from terminal diagnosis to exuberant wellness in just a few months. The Cancer Whisperer reverses our traditional adversarial relationship with cancer by teaching us how to listen to it; how to be healed by it as well as seek to cure it; and how to be emotionally free of illness even when physically curtailed.

In the spirit of Oliver Sacks Awakenings and the TV series House, Dr. Eric Manheimer's Twelve Patients is a memoir from the medical director of Bellevue Hospital that uses the plights of 12 very different patients - from dignitaries at the nearby UN, to supermax prisoners from Riker's Island, to illegal immigrants, and Wall Street tycoons - to illustrate larger societal issues.

Science doesn't speak for itself. Neck-deep in work that can be messy and confounding and naïve in the ways of public communication, scientists are often unable to package their insights into the neat narratives that the public requires. Enter celebrities, advocates, lobbyists, and the funders behind them, who take advantage of scientists' reluctance to provide easy answers, flooding the media with misleading or incorrect claims about health risks. In Bad Advice, Paul A. Offit shares hard-earned wisdom on the dos and don'ts of battling misinformation.

Going against the conventional wisdom reinforced by the medical establishment and Big Pharma that more screening is the best preventative medicine, Dr. Gilbert Welch builds a compelling counterargument that what we need are fewer, not more, diagnoses. Documenting the excesses of American medical practice that labels far too many of us as sick, Welch examines the social, ethical, and economic ramifications of a health-care system that unnecessarily diagnoses and treats patients.

The coronavirus pandemic has devastated lives and livelihoods around the world - and continues to do so. These personal tragedies will, and must, be told and heard. There is, however, also a truthful and objective scientific narrative to be written about how the virus played out and how the world set about dealing with it. Spike is that story - from the inside. Its author, Jeremy Farrar, is one of the UK's leading scientists and a - member of the SAGE emergency committee.

The NHS is at crisis point. In the 75 years since it was founded on the dream of making healthcare accessible to everyone, its principles have been chipped away at and disregarded by successive political leaders.

In Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence That Caring Makes a Difference, physician scientists Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli uncover the eye-opening data that compassion could be a wonder drug for the 21st century. Now, for the first time ever, a rigorous review of the science - coupled with captivating stories from the front lines of medicine - demonstrates that human connection in health care matters in astonishing ways. Never before has all the evidence been synthesized together in one place.

By 2030, the world will be short of approximately 15 million health workers - a fifth of the workforce needed to keep healthcare systems going. Global healthcare leader and award-winning author, Dr. Mark Britnell, uses his unique insights from advising governments, executives, and clinicians in more than 70 countries to present solutions to this impending crisis.

Cancer strikes fear in people’s hearts around globe. So the appearance of a vaccine to prevent cancer - as we are assured the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine will - seemed like a game-changer. Since 2006, over 80 countries have approved the vaccine, with glowing endorsements from the world’s foremost medical authorities. Bringing in over $2.5 billion in annual sales, the HPV vaccine is a pharmaceutical juggernaut. Yet scandal now engulfs it worldwide. The HPV Vaccine on Trial is a shocking tale, chronicling the global efforts to sell and compel this alleged miracle.

Through five editions, The 36-Hour Day has been an essential resource for families who love and care for people with Alzheimer disease. Whether a person has Alzheimer disease or another form of dementia, he or she will face a host of problems. The 36-Hour Day will help family members and caregivers address these challenges and simultaneously cope with their own emotions and needs. Featuring useful takeaway messages and informed by recent research into the causes of and the search for therapies to prevent or cure dementia, this edition includes new information.

When the phone rings in the middle of the night, Dr Arthur Jackson leaves the warmth of his bed without hesitation. Tending to his peculiar flock of patients - including the blind cobbler with a surprising taste for hard liquor, the accident-prone butcher, and the young woman with an unusual phobia - is his first priority, whether their illness is critical or they simply need a comforting hand to hold. The whole community turns to the young doctor for advice...and not all of it medical.

Since its birth in 1948, the powers that be have chipped away at the NHS. Now, Britain's best-loved institution is under greater threat than ever, besieged by a deadly combination of underfunding, understaffing and the predatory private sector. In the wake of the pandemic, we have come to accept a 'new normal' of permanent crisis and years-long waiting lists. But, as Gavin Francis reveals in this short, vital book - it doesn't have to be this way, and until recently, it wasn't.

While modern medicine produces miracles, it also delivers care that is too often unsafe, unreliable, unsatisfying, and impossibly expensive. For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare's ills. But medicine stubbornly resisted computerization - until now. Over the past five years, thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, health care has finally gone digital.

Is your healthcare organization spending too much time on strategy—with too little to show for it? If you read (or listen to) nothing else on strategy, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones for healthcare professionals to help you catalyze your organization's strategy development and execution.