"Public health expert Leana Wen gives an insider's account of public health and its crucial role--from opioid addiction to global pandemic--and tells an inspiring story of her journey from homeless immigrant to being named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People."--

With employers offering free flu shots and pharmacies expanding into one-stop shops to prevent everything from shingles to tetanus, vaccines are ubiquitous in contemporary life. The past fifty years have witnessed an enormous upsurge in vaccines and immunization in the United States: American children now receive more vaccines than any previous generation, and laws requiring their immunization against a litany of diseases are standard. Yet, while...

Leaving his middle-class practice and taking his family to an inner-city neighborhood in Washington, D.C., a doctor explores the disturbing difference between the medical worlds of poverty and privilege, and experiences the pain of his own limitations.

"A comprehensive portrait of a uniquely American epidemic--devastating in its findings and damning in its conclusions. The opioid epidemic has been described as 'one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine.' But calling it a mistake is a generous rewriting of the history of greed, corruption, and indifference that pushed the US into consuming more than 80 percent of the world's opioid painkillers. Journeying through lives and communities wrecked...

"Drawing on vast source materials, and with an ambitious narrative scope that transcends national borders, Eric D. Carter offers the first comprehensive intellectual and political history of the social medicine movement in Latin America, from the early twentieth century to the present day"--

On July 1, 2003, work-hour reforms were enacted nationally for the roughly 129,000 resident physicians in the United States. The reforms limit weekly work hours (a maximum of eighty per week) and in-hospital call (no more than once every three nights), mandate days free of clinical and educational obligations (one day in seven), and regulate other aspects of resident work life. Why Surgeons Struggle with Work-Hour Reforms focuses on general surgeons,...

Based on more than 60 personal interviews and supported by scholarly research, this book shows the varied attitudes and approaches that make up the rich experience of living with disability in a changing society. Covering Down syndrome from conception to old age, this historical analysis touches upon a variety of themes, including education, friendship, health, recreation, sexuality, employment, and independence. This moving, partly autobiographical...

This book is a companion to Clinical Ethics on Film and deals specifically with the myriad of healthcare ethics dilemmas. While Clinical Ethics on Film focuses on bedside ethics dilemmas that affect the healthcare provider-patient relationship, Healthcare Ethics on Film provides a wider lens on ethics dilemmas that interfere with healthcare delivery, such as healthcare access, discrimination, organizational ethics, or resource allocation. The book...

From the Castro bathhouses to AZT and the denial of AIDS in South Africa, this sweeping look at AIDS covers the epidemic from all angles and across the world. Engel seamlessly weaves together science, politics, and culture, writing with an even hand-noting the excesses of the more radical edges of the ACT UP movement as well as the conservative religious leaders who thought AIDS victims deserved what they got. The story of AIDS is one of the most...

An eye-opening and compelling ethnography about how doctors make decisions The oath that doctors take to "do no harm" suggests that patient welfare is at the center of what it means to be a successful medical professional. It is also understood, however, that hospitals are not only vessels for medical care-they are businesses, educational institutions, and complex bureaucracies with intricate codes of etiquette that dictate how each staff member...