Download or read book Bloodletting Miraculous Cures written by Vincent Lam and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2009-03-16 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize An astonishing literary debut centred around four students as they apply to medical school, qualify as doctors and face the realities of working in medicine, from a powerful voice in fiction. Following the interlinked stories of a group of medical students and the unique challenges they face, from the med school to the intense world of emergency rooms, evac missions, and terrifying new viruses. Riveting, convincing and precise, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures looks with rigorous honesty at the lives of doctors and their patients, bringing us to a deeper understanding of the challenges and temptations that surge around us all. In this masterful collection, Vincent Lam weaves together black humour, investigations of both common and extraordinary moral dilemmas, and a sometimes shockingly realistic portrait of today’s medical profession.

Download or read book The Headmaster s Wager written by Vincent Lam and published by Random House. This book was released on 2024-07-09 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Giller Prize winner, internationally acclaimed, and bestselling author Vincent Lam comes a superbly crafted, highly suspenseful, and deeply affecting novel set against the turmoil of the Vietnam War. Percival Chen is the headmaster of the most respected English school in Saigon. He is also a bon vivant, a compulsive gambler and an incorrigible womanizer. He is well accustomed to bribing a forever-changing list of government officials in order to maintain the elite status of the Chen Academy. He is fiercely proud of his Chinese heritage, and quick to spot the business opportunities rife in a divided country. He devotedly ignores all news of the fighting that swirls around him, choosing instead to read the faces of his opponents at high-stakes mahjong tables. But when his only son gets in trouble with the Vietnamese authorities, Percival faces the limits of his connections and wealth and is forced to send him away. In the loneliness that follows, Percival finds solace in Jacqueline, a beautiful woman of mixed French and Vietnamese heritage, and Laing Jai, a son born to them on the eve of the Tet offensive. Percival's new-found happiness is precarious, and as the complexities of war encroach further and further into his world, he must confront the tragedy of all he has refused to see. Blessed with intriguingly flawed characters moving through a richly drawn historical and physical landscape, The Headmaster's Wager is a riveting story of love, betrayal and sacrifice.

Download or read book Every Patient Tells a Story written by Lisa Sanders and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2010-09-21 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting exploration of the most difficult and important part of what doctors do, by Yale School of Medicine physician Dr. Lisa Sanders, author of the monthly New York Times Magazine column "Diagnosis," the inspiration for the hit Fox TV series House, M.D. "The experience of being ill can be like waking up in a foreign country. Life, as you formerly knew it, is on hold while you travel through this other world as unknown as it is unexpected. When I see patients in the hospital or in my office who are suddenly, surprisingly ill, what they really want to know is, ‘What is wrong with me?’ They want a road map that will help them manage their new surroundings. The ability to give this unnerving and unfamiliar place a name, to know it—on some level—restores a measure of control, independent of whether or not that diagnosis comes attached to a cure. Because, even today, a diagnosis is frequently all a good doctor has to offer." A healthy young man suddenly loses his memory—making him unable to remember the events of each passing hour. Two patients diagnosed with Lyme disease improve after antibiotic treatment—only to have their symptoms mysteriously return. A young woman lies dying in the ICU—bleeding, jaundiced, incoherent—and none of her doctors know what is killing her. In Every Patient Tells a Story, Dr. Lisa Sanders takes us bedside to witness the process of solving these and other diagnostic dilemmas, providing a firsthand account of the expertise and intuition that lead a doctor to make the right diagnosis. Never in human history have doctors had the knowledge, the tools, and the skills that they have today to diagnose illness and disease. And yet mistakes are made, diagnoses missed, symptoms or tests misunderstood. In this high-tech world of modern medicine, Sanders shows us that knowledge, while essential, is not sufficient to unravel the complexities of illness. She presents an unflinching look inside the detective story that marks nearly every illness—the diagnosis—revealing the combination of uncertainty and intrigue that doctors face when confronting patients who are sick or dying. Through dramatic stories of patients with baffling symptoms, Sanders portrays the absolute necessity and surprising difficulties of getting the patient’s story, the challenges of the physical exam, the pitfalls of doctor-to-doctor communication, the vagaries of tests, and the near calamity of diagnostic errors. In Every Patient Tells a Story, Dr. Sanders chronicles the real-life drama of doctors solving these difficult medical mysteries that not only illustrate the art and science of diagnosis, but often save the patients’ lives.

Download or read book The Flu Pandemic and You written by Vincent Lam and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2009-11-17 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential survival guide—both to pandemic influenza, and to the hype surrounding it. Written by an emergency physician and a public health physician, The Flu Pandemic and You is a timely and forthright guide on how to prepare for an influenza pandemic, and how to understand the broader context in which this health threat exists. With cool heads and professional expertise, Drs. Lam and Lee carefully explain how readers can assess their level of risk, and set out practical advice on how to contend with a pandemic, addressing such issues as: • How the flu virus works and what level of threat Canadians really face • How to help protect yourself and your family from contracting influenza • How to identify symptoms • What you need to know about antiviral drugs • What to do in a worst-case scenario The Flu Pandemic and You develops a lucid framework to help people understand the current anxiety about influenza in the context of the risks we all face in our daily lives. This crucially important book, full of reasoned, knowledgeable advice, is an indispensable resource for fearful times.

Download or read book Cutting for Stone written by Abraham Verghese and published by Random House India. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

Download or read book The Blood of Strangers written by Frank Huyler and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-09 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reminiscent of Chekhov's stories, The Blood of Strangers is a visceral portrayal of a physician's encounters with the highly charged world of an emergency room. In this collection of spare and elegant stories, Dr. Frank Huyler reveals a side of medicine where small moments—the intricacy of suturing a facial wound, the bath a patient receives from her husband and daughter—interweave with the lives and deaths of the desperately sick and injured. The author presents an array of fascinating characters, both patients and doctors—a neurosurgeon who practices witchcraft, a trauma surgeon who unexpectedly commits suicide, a wounded murderer, a man chased across the New Mexico desert by a heat-seeking missile. At times surreal, at times lyrical, at times brutal and terrifying, The Blood of Strangers is a literary work that emerges from one of the most dramatic specialties of modern medicine. This deeply affecting first book has been described by one early reader as "the best doctor collection I have seen since William Carlos Williams's The Doctor Stories."

Download or read book Nine Pints written by Rose George and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening exploration of blood, the lifegiving substance with the power of taboo, the value of diamonds and the promise of breakthrough science Blood carries life, yet the sight of it makes people faint. It is a waste product and a commodity pricier than oil. It can save lives and transmit deadly infections. Each one of us has roughly nine pints of it, yet many don’t even know their own blood type. And for all its ubiquitousness, the few tablespoons of blood discharged by 800 million women are still regarded as taboo: menstruation is perhaps the single most demonized biological event. Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, is renowned for her intrepid work on topics that are invisible but vitally important. In Nine Pints, she takes us from ancient practices of bloodletting to the breakthough of the "liquid biopsy," which promises to diagnose cancer and other diseases with a simple blood test. She introduces Janet Vaughan, who set up the world’s first system of mass blood donation during the Blitz, and Arunachalam Muruganantham, known as “Menstrual Man” for his work on sanitary pads for developing countries. She probes the lucrative business of plasma transfusions, in which the US is known as the “OPEC of plasma.” And she looks to the future, as researchers seek to bring synthetic blood to a hospital near you. Spanning science and politics, stories and global epidemics, Nine Pints reveals our life's blood in an entirely new light. Nine Pints was named one of Bill Gates recommended summer reading titles for 2019.

Download or read book A Strong and Steady Pulse written by Gregory D Chapman and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A seasoned cardiologist shares his experiences, opinions, and recommendations about heart disease and other cardiac problems A Strong and Steady Pulse: Stories from a Cardiologist provides an insider’s perspective on the field of cardiovascular medicine told through vignettes and insights drawn from Gregory D. Chapman’s three decades as a cardiologist and professor of medicine. In twenty-six bite-sized chapters based on real-life patients and experiences, Chapman provides an overview of contemporary cardiovascular diseases and treatments, illuminating the art and science of medical practice for lay audiences and professionals alike. With A Strong and Steady Pulse, Chapman provides medical students and general readers with a better understanding of cardiac disease and its contributing factors in modern life, and he also provides insights on the diagnostic process, medical decision making, and patient care. Each chapter presents a patient and their initial appearance, described in clear detail as Chapman gently walks us through his evaluation and the steps he and his associates take to determine the underlying problem. Chapman’s stories are about real people dealing with life and death situations—including the physicians, nurses, medical students, and other team members who try to save lives in emergent, confusing conditions. The sometimes hard-won solutions to these medical challenges combine new technology and cutting-edge research together with insights drawn from Chapman’s past experiences as an intern and resident in Manhattan during the AIDS epidemic, as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University in the 1990s, and in practice in Nashville, Tennessee, and Birmingham, Alabama. Conditions addressed include the recognition and management of heart attack, heart failure, arrhythmia, valvular heart disease, cardiac transplantation, broken heart syndrome, hypertension, and the depression some people experience after a heart attack, as well as related topics like statin drugs, the Apple Watch ECG feature, and oral anticoagulants. Finally, the emergence of the COVID-19 virus and its disruption of normal hospital routines as the pandemic unfolded is addressed in an epilogue.

Download or read book Barnacle Love written by Anthony De Sa and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Immense emotional and truthful power.”— Colm Tóibín, author of Nora Webster Anthony De Sa makes his fiction debut with this stunning collection of interlinked stories that explore the innocent dreams and bitter disappointments of the immigrant experience. Hailed as “tender and raw, morbid and surprisingly gentle” by the Vancouver Sun, Barnacle Love was a finalist for Canada’s highly prestigious Giller Prize. Moving from a small Portuguese fishing village in the Azores to the shores of Newfoundland, Barnacle Love then takes us into the dark alleys of Toronto’s Portuguese community in the 1970s. The first half of the book is told by Manuel Rebelo, who has fled his homeland—and the crushing weight of his mother’s expectations—to build a future for himself in a new land. Manuel struggles hard to adjust, but fulfilling the promise of his adopted home is not as simple as he had hoped. The second half of the book is told with candor by Manuel’s son Antonio, who—along with his sister and mother—lives in the shadows cast by Manuel’s failures. With fantastic, sometimes magical details and passionate empathy, Anthony De Sa invites readers into the lives of the Rebelo family. The results are, in the words of writer Nino Ricci, “haunting and elegiac.”

Download or read book Strange Blood written by Boel Berner and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2020-05-31 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra and anemia; proposed it as a means to reanimate seemingly dead soldiers on the battlefield. It was a contested therapy because it meant crossing boundaries and challenging taboos. Was the transfusion of lamb blood into desperately sick humans really defensible? The book takes the reader on a journey into hospital wards and lunatic asylums, physiological laboratories and 19th century wars. It presents a fascinating story of medical knowledge, ambitions and concerns - a story that provides lessons for current debates on the morality of medical experimentation and care.

Download or read book Diabetes Epidemic You written by Joseph R. Kraft MD MS. FCAP and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2008-05-07 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revised 04/2011 DIABETES EPIDEMIC and YOU is not a cliché! It is a mandate for the awakening of the "silent" millions worldwide with "normal" fasting blood sugars and undiagnosed diabetes. If you have a "normal" fasting blood sugar, YOU may be one of the undiagnosed millions. YES, I do mean YOU. Since Hippocrates' time, earliest diagnosis provided the greatest opportunity for treatment and cure. This book highlights the earliest identification of type 2 diabetes by utilizing the insulin assay with the oral glucose tolerance. My cumulative experience of 14,384 oral glucose tolerances with insulin assays established the earliest diagnosis of prediabetes and diabetes when the blood sugars were normal. Prediabetes is type 2 diabetes. The tolerances were separated according to age groups, from 3Ð13 years to 81Ð90+ years. Each group was further divided into normal glucose tolerances, impaired glucose tolerances, and diabetes mellitus glucose tolerances. YOU, upon testing by oral glucose tolerance, will be in one of these categories. This resource of oral glucose tolerance with insulin assay is unequaled in world medical literature. The importance of early diagnosis is that the clinical pathology of diabetes – mainly heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, cataracts, erectile dysfunction, and other metabolic disorders – occurs not only in those with advanced diabetes, but also in those with "normal" blood sugars. YES, this could happen to YOU! When early diagnosis is coupled with specific therapy, the DIABETES EPIDEMIC will be arrested and then reversed. Early diagnosis is the goal of this book – beginning with YOU.

Download or read book Moral Disorder written by Margaret Atwood and published by Emblem Editions. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these ten dazzling interrelated stories Atwood traces the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with it, while evoking the drama and the humour that colour common experiences—the birth of a baby, divorce and remarriage, old age and death. With settings ranging from Toronto, northern Quebec, and rural Ontario, the stories begin in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. Then the narrative goes back in time to the forties and moves chronologically forward toward the present. In “The Art of Cooking and Serving,” the twelve-year-old narrator does her best to accommodate the arrival of a baby sister. After she boldly declares her independence, we follow the narrator into young adulthood and then through a complex relationship. In “The Entities,” the story of two women haunted by the past unfolds. The magnificent last two stories reveal the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle. By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. This is vintage Atwood, writing at the height of her powers.

Download or read book The Doctor Stories written by William Carlos Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1984 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not only for students and doctors, this volume contains Williams's thirteen doctor stories, several of his most famous poems on medical matters, and The Practice from The Autobiography.

Download or read book The Parabolist written by Nicholas Ruddock and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parabolist: noun (1) one who speaks in parables. (2) a member of a splinter group of disaffected young poets in Mexico City c. 1975. (3) a practitioner of the art of concentrating multiple sources of energy into a single focus, illuminating or, if left unchecked, destroying everything in its path. Part comedy, part mystery, The Parabolist is a novel about murder, sex, the medical establishment, poetry and vigilante justice on the streets of Toronto in 1975. Told through interlacing narratives, the story funnels towards the eye of an unsolved crime: on a rainy summer night, a woman is raped and very nearly murdered, but for the intervention of two drunken vigilantes who kill her attacker before fleeing the scene. The only clue the police have about their identities is a slab of Crisco shortening found on the victim. The unforgettable cast of characters includes a charismatic Mexican poet, a libido-driven first-year medical student, a runaway teen turned prostitute, a raven-haired beauty, a sinister psychiatrist, and a donated corpse that is dissected - from skin to muscle to bone - as layer by layer, the inscrutable mysteries of anatomy, love, literature and life are poignantly revealed. This is a funny, satirical, searing, dangerous and tender story of earnest youth and their ardent desire for love, acceptance and fulfillment.

Download or read book Doctors written by Sherwin B. Nuland and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-19 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of How We Die, the extraordinary story of the development of modern medicine, told through the lives of the physician-scientists who paved the way. How does medical science advance? Popular historians would have us believe that a few heroic individuals, possessing superhuman talents, lead an unselfish quest to better the human condition. But as renowned Yale surgeon and medical historian Sherwin B. Nuland shows in this brilliant collection of linked life portraits, the theory bears little resemblance to the truth. Through the centuries, the men and women who have shaped the world of medicine have been not only very human, but also very much the products of their own times and places. Presenting compelling studies of great medical innovators and pioneers, Doctors gives us a fascinating history of modern medicine. Ranging from the legendary Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, to Andreas Vesalius, whose Renaissance masterwork on anatomy offered invaluable new insight into the human body, to Helen Taussig, founder of pediatric cardiology and co-inventor of the original "blue baby" operation, here is a volume filled with the spirit of ideas and the thrill of discovery.

Download or read book Bearers of Risk written by Neta Gordon and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The short story and the short story cycle have long been considered a marginal genre, free to make room for fresh or risk-taking voices. But in thematizing masculinity in crisis, the genre uses the premise of the marginal to elevate recuperative masculinity politics and nostalgia for traditional patriarchy. Despite the scholarly tendency to link marginal genres and marginalized voices, features of the CanLit infrastructure – including genre criticism and literary prize culture – are complicit in normalizing hegemonic masculinity and the Settler colonial project. Bearers of Risk examines how male Canadian writers mobilize the early twenty-first-century short story cycle as an illustration of post-9/11 recuperative masculinity politics, exposing the tendency to position White, heteronormative men’s viewpoints as objective. Neta Gordon introduces the civil bearer of risk, a figure who comprehends the position of men as being marked by or for failure, and who reasserts masculine authority as civil duty towards community. This book looks at contemporary experimental short story cycles, debut cycles by ethnically minoritized and immigrant writers, and cycles unified by setting, whether suburban, urban, or rural. Bearers of Risk unsettles popular notions of the inherent outsider status of the short story cycle while also scrutinizing expressions of recuperative masculinity politics through which men assert their right to reclaim the centre.

Download or read book Cured written by Jeffrey Rediger, M.D. and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to disease, who beats the odds — and why? When it comes to spontaneous healing, skepticism abounds. Doctors are taught that “miraculous” recoveries are flukes, and as a result they don’t study those cases or take them into account when treating patients. Enter Dr. Jeff Rediger, who has spent over 15 years studying spontaneous healing, pioneering the use of scientific tools to investigate recoveries from incurable illnesses. Dr. Rediger’s research has taken him from America’s top hospitals to healing centers around the world—and along the way he’s uncovered insights into why some people beat the odds. In Cured, Dr. Rediger digs down to the root causes of illness, showing how to create an environment that sets the stage for healing. He reveals the patterns behind healing and lays out the physical and mental principles associated with recovery: first, we need to physically heal our diet and our immune systems. Next, we need to mentally heal our stress response and our identities. Through rigorous research, Dr. Rediger shows that much of our physical reality is created in our minds. Our perception changes our experience, even to the point of changing our physical bodies—and thus the healing of our identity may be our greatest tool to recovery. Ultimately, miracles only contradict what we know of nature at this point in time. Cured leads the way in explaining the science behind these miracles, and provides a first-of-its-kind guidebook to both healing and preventing disease.