Uncaring


Book Description

Doctors are taught how to cure people. But they don’t always know how to care for them. Hardly anyone is happy with American healthcare these days. Patients are getting sicker and going bankrupt from medical bills. Doctors are burning out and making dangerous mistakes. Both parties blame our nation’s outdated and dysfunctional healthcare system. But that’s only part of the problem. In this important and timely book, Dr. Robert Pearl shines a light on the unseen and often toxic culture of medicine. Today’s physicians have a surprising disdain for technology, an unhealthy obsession with status, and an increasingly complicated relationship with their patients. All of this can be traced back to their earliest experiences in medical school, where doctors inherit a set of norms, beliefs, and expectations that shape almost every decision they make, with profound consequences for the rest of us. Uncaring draws an original and revealing portrait of what it’s actually like to be a doctor. It illuminates the complex and intimidating world of medicine for readers, and in the end offers a clear plan to save American healthcare.




Stolen


Book Description

A gripping chronicle of psychological manipulation and abuse at a “therapeutic” boarding school for troubled teens, and how one young woman fought to heal in the aftermath. At fifteen, Elizabeth Gilpin was an honor student, a state-ranked swimmer and a rising soccer star, but behind closed doors her undiagnosed depression was wreaking havoc on her life. Growing angrier by the day, she began skipping practices and drinking to excess. At a loss, her parents turned to an educational consultant who suggested Elizabeth be enrolled in a behavioral modification program. That recommendation would change her life forever. The nightmare began when she was abducted from her bed in the middle of the night by hired professionals and dropped off deep in the woods of Appalachia. Living with no real shelter was only the beginning of her ordeal: she was strip-searched, force-fed, her name was changed to a number and every moment was a test of physical survival. After three brutal months, Elizabeth was transferred to a boarding school in Southern Virginia that in reality functioned more like a prison. Its curriculum revolved around a perverse form of group therapy where students were psychologically abused and humiliated. Finally, at seventeen, Elizabeth convinced them she was rehabilitated enough to “graduate” and was released. In this eye-opening and unflinching book, Elizabeth recalls the horrors she endured, the friends she lost to suicide and addiction, and—years later—how she was finally able to pick up the pieces of her life and reclaim her identity.




Mistreated


Book Description

The biggest problem in American health care is us Do you know how to tell good health care from bad health care? Guess again. As patients, we wrongly assume the "best" care is dependent mainly on the newest medications, the most complex treatments, and the smartest doctors. But Americans look for health-care solutions in the wrong places. For example, hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved each year if doctors reduced common errors and maximized preventive medicine. For Dr. Robert Pearl, these kinds of mistakes are a matter of professional importance, but also personal significance: he lost his own father due in part to poor communication and treatment planning by doctors. And consumers make costly mistakes too: we demand modern information technology from our banks, airlines, and retailers, but we passively accept last century's technology in our health care. Solving the challenges of health care starts with understanding these problems. Mistreated explains why subconscious misperceptions are so common in medicine, and shows how modifying the structure, technology, financing, and leadership of American health care could radically improve quality outcomes. This important book proves we can overcome our fears and faulty assumptions, and provides a roadmap for a better, healthier future.




Enough About Me


Book Description

What if your path to a more successful, healthy, and satisfying life is actually not about you? Enough About Me equips you with practical tools to find meaning and compassion in even the smallest of everyday choices. When his father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, Richard Lui made a tough decision. The award-winning news anchor decided to set aside his growing career to care for his family. At first, this new caregiving lifestyle did not come easily for Lui, and what followed was a seven-year exercise in what it really means to be selfless. Enough About Me also takes a behind-the-scenes look at some of the world's most difficult moments from a journalist's point of view. From survivors of terrorist attacks to victims of racial strife, Lui shares the lessons he learned from those who rose above the fray to be helpful, self-sacrificing, and generous in the face of monumental tragedy and loss. Lui shares practical tips, tools, and mnemonics learned along the way to help shift the way we think and live, including: Selfless decision methods and practices for work, home, relationships, and community Studies and research that show the personal benefits of being selfless The lasting impact of sharing your story Practical, bite-sized ways to be more engaging and inclusive in your day-to-day life How to train our decision-making muscles to choose others over ourselves Choice by choice, step by step, the path to a more satisfying and fulfilling journey is right here in the people around us. Praise for Enough About Me: "Richard Lui underscores the importance of sharing stories to bring people together through selfless acts for the greater good." Beth Kallmyer, Vice President of Care and Support, Alzheimer's Association "Richard is living a life of service. This is a jewel of a book, a celebration of the best of the human spirit and of the good that emerges from sacrifice. Richard Lui is a beacon of light in these dark times." José Díaz-Balart, Anchor, NBC Nightly News Saturday; Anchor, Noticias Telemundo




Performing Care


Book Description

Performing care explores the relation between socially-engaged performance and care and care ethics. It questions how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring and how care might be viewed as an embodied or aesthetic practice --arguing for more careful art and artful care.




Subtractive Schooling


Book Description

Winner of the 2000 Outstanding Book Award presented by the American Educational Research Association Winner of the 2001 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award Honorable Mention, 2000 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards Subtractive Schooling provides a framework for understanding the patterns of immigrant achievement and U.S.-born underachievement frequently noted in the literature and observed by the author in her ethnographic account of regular-track youth attending a comprehensive, virtually all-Mexican, inner-city high school in Houston. Valenzuela argues that schools subtract resources from youth in two major ways: firstly by dismissing their definition of education and secondly, through assimilationist policies and practices that minimize their culture and language. A key consequence is the erosion of students' social capital evident in the absence of academically oriented networks among acculturated, U.S.-born youth.




The Virtuous Physician


Book Description

Although modern medicine enjoys unprecedented success in providing excellent technical care, many patients are dissatisfied with the poor quality of care or the unprofessional manner in which physicians sometimes deliver it. Recently, this patient dissatisfaction has led to quality-of-care and professionalism crises in medicine. In this book, the author proposes a notion of virtuous physician to address these crises. He discusses the nature of the two crises and efforts by the medical profession to resolve them and then he briefly introduces the notion of virtuous physician and outlines its basic features. Further, virtue theory is discussed, along with virtue ethics and virtue epistemology, and specific virtues, especially as they relate to medicine. The author also explores the ontological priority of caring as the metaphysical virtue for grounding the notion of virtuous physician, and two essential ontic virtues—care and competence. In addition to this, he examines the transformation of competence into prudent wisdom and care into personal radical love to forge the compound virtue of prudent love, which is sufficient for defining the virtuous physician. Lastly, two clinical case stories are reconstructed which illustrate the various virtues associated with medical practice, and it is discussed how the notion of virtuous physician addresses the quality-of-care and professionalism crises.




Fathering and Poverty


Book Description

This book offers a critique of the popular claim that more data equals better health. In a study that redefines the public, academic, and policy debates around health, bodies, information and data, the authors consider the ways in which the phenomenon of self-diagnosis has created alternative worlds of knowledge and practices which are often at odds with professional medical advice. With a focus on data that concerns significant life changes, this book explores the potential challenges related to people's changing relationships with traditional health systems as access to, and control over, data continues to evolve.




We Do Our Part


Book Description

The legendary editor who founded the Washington Monthly explores “the resentful, unequal, uncaring parts of today’s American culture that Trump has inflamed and that have made Trump possible—and how to cope with them” (The Atlantic). Foreword by Jon Meacham With clarity and wit, the legendary editor Charles Peters explains the chasm that defines us today: the split between the educated elite and the working-class, rural, and religious voters who live in what's condescendingly—but tellingly—known as flyover country. The beginning of the end of Trumpism will come when blue-state sophisticates confront their role in creating the political, economic, and cultural resentments that propelled the forty-fifth president into office. Too many Democrats lost touch with the average American, Peters argues, when the liberal elite became more concerned with being smarter, having better taste, and making more money than with understanding why workers were earning less and hated being regarded with contempt. It was this hatred of being looked down on as bigoted boobs in polyester that united working-class, rural, and evangelical voters, and helped set the stage for the culturally populist backlash of 2016 and beyond. In We Do Our Part, Peters shows us where we have been and where we are going, drawing on his invaluable perspective as a man who has seen America's better days and still believes in the promise that lies ahead. Praise for We Do Our Part “[Peters] weaves a synthesis of mainstream and progressive, centrist and popular thought that would re-anchor the Democratic Party, both in its own traditions and in outreach to the restless, angry swath of the country that elected President Trump. . . . Peters is an American original.”—The Washington Post “A great book about modern American history.”—Chris Matthews, Hardball




Applied Ethics


Book Description