Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

A New Yorker staff writer, best-selling author, and professor at Harvard Medical School unravels the ultimate medical mystery: how doctors figure out the best treatments -- or fail to do so. On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within twelve seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are... (more)

Grace for Each Hour: Through the Breast Cancer Journey

Grace for Each Hour: Through the Breast Cancer Journey

by Mary J. Nelson

Mary J. Nelson writes to women like herself who are traveling through the breast cancer journey. This book will be a companion for those women beginning with the diagnosis, then through treatment, and then looking at life as a cancer survivor. The short devotional readings encourage, support, and comfort as they point the woman toward God, helping her grow, not just cope, during this difficult experience. The... (more)

Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (Inside Technology)

Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (Inside Technology)

by Shobita Parthasarathy

In Building Genetic Medicine, Shobita Parthasarathy shows how, even in an era of globalization, national context is playing an important role in the development and use of genetic technologies. Focusing on the development and deployment of genetic testing for breast and ovarian cancer (known as BRCA testing) in the United States and Britain, Parthasarathy develops a comparative analysis framework in order to... (more)

Back Pain

by Andrew J. Haig

For all their exposure to the problem, primary care physicians often have little formal education on the management of back pain. Most medical students are not required to take a rotation in physical medicine and rehabilitation. Additionally, and for good reason, most patients are not convinced that their family physician is the person to see for back problems and seek out specialist care as soon as practicable.... (more)

Cutting for Stone: A Novel

by Abraham Verghese

A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel—an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home. Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural... (more)

The Locked Garden

by Gloria Whelan

It's the year 1900, the dawn of a new century and a chance for a new beginning for Verna and Carlie, whose mother died two years ago. They are headed to their new home—the grounds of an asylum for the mentally ill. Their father, a doctor, has been hired to treat its patients while the girls are under the strict and watchful eye of their aunt Maude. The towering asylum, the murmuring patients with their tormented... (more)

The Doctor's DilemmaBernard Shaw

The Doctor's Dilemma

by Bernard Shaw

The Blood of Strangers

by Frank Huyler

This collection of stories reveals a side of medicine where small moments interweave with the lives and deaths of the desperately sick and injured. It presents an array of characters - a trauma surgeon who unexpectedly commits suidice, and a man chased across the desert by a heat-seeking missile.

Bedpan BanterBrenda Elsagher

Bedpan Banter

by Brenda Elsagher

Bedpan Banter, Medical Stories of Humor and Inspiration is an anthology comprised of stories from doctors, nurses, patients and caregivers. Each story is either funny or uplifting and in some cases, both. There are 110 stories and 81 contributors. Great for gifts for the general public or anyone recovering from time in the hospital.

Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Philosophical Psychopathology)

Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Philosophical Psychopathology)

by William Hirstein

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2005 Some neurological patients exhibit a striking tendency to confabulate—to construct false answers to a question while genuinely believing that they are telling the truth. A stroke victim, for example, will describe in detail a conference he attended over the weekend when in fact he has not left the hospital. Normal people, too, sometimes have a tendency to... (more)

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Tags: patients

How Doctors Think

by Jerome E. Groopman