Health Care Crisis

Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis reveals hard truths—powerful findings on the role of racism, coercion, inadequate prenatal care, the pressures undermining breastfeeding, and the lack of access to alternatives to a broken maternal health-care system as key threads of black women's birth experiences.

Some of the cruelest deeds of Japan's war in Asia did not occur on the battlefield, but in quiet, antiseptic medical wards in obscure parts of China. Far from front lines and prying eyes, Japanese doctors and their assistants subjected human guinea pigs to gruesome medical experiments in the name of science and Japan's wartime chemical and biological warfare research. Author Hal Gold draws upon a wealth of sources to construct a portrait of the Imperial Japanese Army's most notorious medical unit, giving an overview of its history and detailing its most shocking activities.

The opioid crisis is not an anomaly. Instead, it's a self-inflicted wound, driven by a catastrophically dysfunctional health care system, leading to what has become the largest public health crisis in 100 years. Fortunately, proven antidotes exist--all created and spearheaded by forward-looking citizen leaders and employers. It's time to scale these solutions nationwide, stop the crisis in its tracks and move us light years closer to solving the larger disaster that is our health care system. As you read this, countless people are leaving clinics and hospitals with over 30-day supplies of ...

The Opioid Epidemic: What Everyone Needs to Know is an accessible, nonpartisan overview of the causes, politics, and treatments tied to the most devastating health crisis of our time. Its comprehensive approach and Q&A format offer listeners a practical path to understanding the epidemic from all sides: the basic science of opioids; the nature of addiction; the underlying reasons for the opioid epidemic; effective approaches to helping individuals, families, communities, and national policy; and common myths related to opioid addiction.

Here is the inspiring story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water - and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. Paced like a scientific thriller, What the Eyes Don’t See reveals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk.

Sandra Lindsay immigrated to the United States from Jamaica with ambitions of becoming a nurse and living the American Dream. In December 2020, she became the first person to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and was subsequently honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In First in Line Lindsay lays out her triumphs and setbacks as a single mother and working student who overcomes barriers. Her beginnings as a four-dollar-an-hour grocery store worker fortified her with the resilience to persevere over decades to become an executive at a globally recognized nationally known healthcare system.

In Make America Healthy Again, Nicole Saphier, a Memorial Sloan Kettering physician, nationally recognized patient advocate, and media personality, reveals how individual negligence and big government incompetence have destroyed America's health care system. Combining historical events, economic trends, and essential lifestyle advice, with her unique perspective, she offers concrete solutions to address this epic problem.

The first major bioterror event in the United States - the anthrax attacks in October 2001 - was a clarion call for scientists who work with "hot" agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, his first nonfiction book since The Hot Zone, a number-one New York Times best seller, Richard Preston takes us into the heart of USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

In The Long Fix, physician and health-care CEO Vivian S. Lee, MD, cuts to the heart of the health-care crisis. The problem with the way medicine is practiced, she explains, is not so much who's paying, it's what we are paying for. Insurers, employers, the government, and individuals pay for every procedure, prescription, and lab test, whether or not it makes us better - and that is both backward and dangerous.

No one could believe the handsome young doctor might be a serial killer. Wherever he was hired - in Ohio, Illinois, New York, South Dakota - Michael Swango at first seemed the model physician. Then his patients began dying under suspicious circumstances.

For Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King, surviving in San Francisco meant a life in the shadows. His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn't noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin - a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown while doctors examined Wong's tissue for telltale bacteria. If the devastating disease was not contained, San Francisco would become the American epicenter of an outbreak that had already claimed 10 million lives worldwide.

In 2017, seven-year-old Ava in South Carolina wrote a letter to Tyshaun, an eight-year-old boy from Washington, DC. She asked him to be her pen pal; Ava thought they could help each other. The kids had a tragic connection - both were traumatized by gun violence. Ava’s best friend had been killed in a campus shooting at her elementary school, and Tyshaun’s father had been shot to death outside of the boy’s elementary school. Ava’s and Tyshaun’s stories are extraordinary, but not unique.

In this "meticulously researched" account (New York Times Book Review), a Pulitzer Prize-winning author examines the dangers of a failing public health system unequipped to handle large-scale global risks like a coronavirus pandemic.

By the mid 1980s, AIDS hysteria was so rampant that a fearful and prejudiced public ignored stories of gay men falling ill with lesions and mouth ulcers. President Reagan avoided mentioning the disease entirely. Then, as chronicled in Blood Farm, a new HIV-positive population emerged, one that included kids like Ken Dixon, Brad Cross, and Ryan White who had been infected as young as ten years old. But how?

In 2020, an estimated 5.8 million Americans had Alzheimer’s, and more than half a million died because of the disease and its devastating complications. Sixteen million caregivers are responsible for paying as much as half of the $226 billion annual costs of their care. As more people live beyond their 70s and 80s, the number of patients will rise to an estimated 13.8 million by 2025. Part case studies, part meditation on the past, present and future of the disease, The Problem of Alzheimer's traces Alzheimer’s from its beginnings to its recognition as a crisis.

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.

Working in A&E is a challenging job, but nurse Louise Curtis loves it. She was newly qualified as an advanced clinical practitioner, responsible for life or death decisions about the patients she saw, when the unthinkable happened and the country was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. The stress on the NHS was huge and for the first time in her life, the job was going to take a toll on Louise herself.

The first major bioterror event in the United States - the anthrax attacks in October 2001 - was a clarion call for scientists who work with “hot” agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, Richard Preston takes us into the heart of USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the headquarters of the US biological weapons program and now the epicenter of national biodefense.

From the author of The Epidemic of Empathy in Healthcare and The Good Doctor comes a book that explores how the persistent pandemic has revealed what excellence in healthcare truly means and presents an action plan to achieve it.

The introduction of new medicines has dramatically improved the quantity and quality of individual and public health, while contributing trillions of dollars to the global economy. In spite of these past successes - and indeed because of them - our ability to deliver new medicines may be quickly coming to an end. Moving from the 20th century to the present, A Prescription for Change reveals how changing business strategies combined with scientific hubris have altered the way new medicines are discovered, with dire implications for both health and the economy.