Showing titles in Medical

It takes courage to love the things of this world when all of them, without fail, are fleeting. Yet when everything you have been and done and meant to the world is being prised from your grasp, human connections are the vital medicine. It is other people who make the difference. Rachel Clarke grew up spellbound by her father's stories of practising medicine. Then, as a doctor herself, one who specialised in palliative medicine, she found herself contemplating all her training had taught her in the face of her own beloved father's mortality. 

Here is an unbelievable journey to the truth of life as a GP, through spilt urine bottles, the patients who should have been in hospital months ago, existential crises, utterly unexplainable health problems and awkward silences. Being a GP is a job that requires you to be a detective, relationship counsellor, social worker, friend, sex therapist, parent-figure and sometimes, just sometimes, a doctor. Find out why you only get 10 minutes with a GP, why you can never see the same doctor and why they are always running late. 

Having worked in the emergency services for more than 15 years, Dan Farnworth has seen it all. There was the time he was called to take away a dead body - only for the 'corpse' to jolt back into life and demand to know what he was doing in her house. Earlier in his career, he unwittingly disturbed a crime scene as he shared the sad news of the victim's death with her son. 

On the eighth of February, Dr Dominic Pimenta encountered his first suspected case of coronavirus. Within a week, he began wearing a mask on the tube and within a month, he was moved over to the Intensive Care Unit to help fight the virus. Duty of Care is the first book to tell the full story of the COVID-19 pandemic from someone on the front line, working in one of the NHS's hardest hit areas. 

He's into his second year of medicine, but this time Max is out of the wards and onto the streets, working for the Phoenix Outreach Project. Fuelled by tea and more enthusiasm than experience, he attempts to locate and treat a wide and colourful range of patients that somehow his first year on the wards didn't prepare him for...from Molly the 80-year-old drugs mule and God in a Tesco car park to middle-class mums addicted to appearances and pain killers in equal measure. 

Life on the NHS front line, working within a system at breaking point, is more extreme than you could ever imagine. From the bloody to the beautiful, from moments of utter vulnerability to remarkable displays of strength, from camaraderie to raw desperation, from heart-wrenching grief to the pure, perfect joy of a newborn baby, midwife Leah Hazard has seen it all. 

Grief. Anger. Joy. Fear. Distraction. Disgust. Hope. All emotions we expect to encounter over our lifetime. But what if this was every day? And what if your ability to manage them was the difference between life and death? For a doctor in intensive care, this is part of the job. Fear in the eyes of a terminally ill patient who pleads with you to not let them die. Grief when you make a potentially fatal mistake. Disgust at caring for a convicted rapist. 

Suffering from severe neck and back injuries, Kerry was unemployed and housebound, struggling with depression and even thoughts of suicide. He went from cycling over 600 miles a month to becoming a prisoner in his own home. In the face of unbearable pain and overwhelming panic, he persevered, and along the way, met an adorable yard dog named Max. This is their remarkable, inspiring story.

A young man has stopped breathing in a supermarket toilet. A pedestrian with a nasty head injury won't let the crew near him on a busy road. A newborn baby is worryingly silent. An addict urinates on the ambulance floor when denied a fix. This is the life of an ambulance paramedic. Jake Jones has worked in the UK ambulance service for 10 years: every day, he sees a dozen of the scenes we hope to see only once in a lifetime. 

There are two ways to open a child's head. The pretty way and the quick way. Usually I shave the hair, use a scalpel to nick the skain then apply an electro-cautery device to burn down to bone level. It's a slow, precise method and it leaves almost no scarring. But it takes time. Time, the interminable single note of the heart monitor reminds me, I don't have....

When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Jew and a medical doctor, the prisoner Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared death for a grimmer fate: to perform "scientific research" on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the man who became known as the infamous "Angel of Death" - Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele's personal research pathologist. In that capacity he also served as physician to the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who worked exclusively in the crematoriums and were routinely executed after four months.

My Name'5 Doddie is a humbling, courageous and very funny celebration of a remarkable man. The extraordinary, life-affirming autobiography of Doddie Weir is an absolute must-listen – rugby fan or not. Rugby legend and MND campaigner Doddie Weir has always lived life to the full. On the pitch, Doddie's irresistible talent took him to the heart of every team he graced and brought him 61 caps for Scotland. He won fans all over the world with his sportsmanship, humour and boundless energy. Then, in June 2017, Doddie made the announcement that he had been diagnosed with MND. 

This is the shocking story of a doctor who was addicted to murder: a man who wickedly abused the trust of his patients with horrifying results. He was a pillar of the community: attentive, kind, never too busy to chat. Yet behind this charming facade lay the world's most prolific serial killer, with at least 200 victims. Small, bespectacled Dr Shipman was making house calls - and then committing murder with bloodcurdling expertise and professionalism. He saw himself as playing God. 

Internationally acclaimed neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander always considered himself a man of science. His unwavering belief in evidence-based medicine fuelled a career in the top medical institutions of the world. But all this was set to change. One morning in 2008 he fell into a coma after suffering a rare form of bacterial meningitis. Scans of his brain revealed massive damage. Death was deemed the most likely outcome.

The junior doctor...back on the wards. After a year on the streets treating outreach patients, Max Pemberton is back in the relative comfort of hospital. This time running between elderly care and the dementia clinic to A&E and outpatients. No longer inexperienced (Max and his doctor friends can now tell when someone is actually dead), they are on the front line of patient care, for better or worse. 

In The Courage to Care best-selling author Christie Watson reveals the remarkable extent of nurses’ work. A community mental-health nurse choreographs support for a man suffering from severe depression. A teen with stab wounds is treated by the critical-care team; his school nurse visits and he drops the bravado. A pregnant woman loses frightening amounts of blood following a car accident; it is a military nurse who synchronises the emergency department into immaculate order and focus.

Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of every type - from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to diabetes and sickle cell anemia. Told from the perspectives of the patients, families, physicians, scientists, and philanthropists fighting on the front lines, Breath from Salt is a remarkable story of unlikely scientific and medical firsts, of setbacks and successes, and of people who refused to give up hope....

A hysterical and sometimes tragic portrayal of a doctor’s interactions with a captivating array of patients contrasted against the frustrations and humdrum of being a junior doctor in the National Health Service. From being the savior of a man’s anus to being mistaken for the milkman, Tom describes the complexity and absurdity of today’s medical practice with humor and aplomb.

These are the extraordinary realities of the NHS front line. From the historic junior doctor strikes to the 'humanitarian crisis' declared by the Red Cross, the overstretched health service is on the precipice. This is a powerful polemic on its systematic degradation and a letter of optimism to that same health service and those who support it. It captures with tenderness a new doctor's experiences of an NHS at breaking point.

In this compelling memoir, Jane Hawking relates the inside story of her extraordinary marriage. As Stephen's academic renown soared, his body was collapsing under the assaults of motor neurone disease, and Jane's candid account of trying to balance his 24-hour care with the needs of their growing family is inspirational. This is a book about optimism, love and change that will resonate with listeners everywhere.