Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine
This is a revised and expanded edtion of a classic in palliative medicine, originally published in 1991. With three added chapters and a new preface summarizing our progress in the area of pain management, this is a must-hve for those in palliative medicine and hospice care. The obligation of physicians to relieve human suffering stretches back into antiquity. But what exactly, is suffering? One patient with metastic cancer of the stomach, from which he knew he would shortly die, said he was not suffering. Another, someone who had been operated on for a mior problem--in little pain and not seemingly distressed--said that even coming into the hospital had been a source of pain and not sufferi...
Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts
How do some birds, turtles, and insects possess navigational abilities that rival the best manmade navigational technologies? Who or what taught the honey bee its dance, or its hive mates how to read the complex message of the dance? How do blind mound-building termites master passive heating and cooling strategies that dazzle skilled human architects? In The Origin of Species Charles Darwin conceded that such instincts are "so wonderful" that the mystery of their origin would strike many "as a difficulty sufficient to overthrow my whole theory." In Animal Algorithms, Eric Cassell surveys recent evidence and concludes that the difficulty remains, and indeed, is a far more potent challenge to evolutionary theory than Darwin imagined.
The Healer's Art
Beyond drugs, beyond technology, there will always be the human element, the healer's art. Dr. Cassell discusses the world of the sick, the healing connection and healer's battle, the role of omnipotence in the healer's art, illness and disease, and overcoming the fear of death. Eric J. Cassell, M.D., is an internist and clinical director of the Program for the Study of Ethics and Values in Medicine at Cornell Medical School. His two-volume work Talking with Patients: The Theory of Doctor-Patient Communication, and Clinical Technique, is available from The MIT Press in cloth and paperback.
The Nature of Healing
Currently and for centuries past, sickness has been understood to be primarily the physical result of bodily disease. Yet this definition of illness is out-of-date and untrue to life at a time when chronic illness and the problems of disability and aging are increasingly common. When persons are sick, it pervades their whole being. The Nature of Healing is based on a different definition of sickness, one that recognizes persons as sick when they cannot achieve their goals and purposes because of impairments of function, ranging from the molecular to the spiritual, which they believe to fall under the scope of medicine. Such impairments may result from disease, but certainly not all. As the s...
Doctoring
Addressing the problems facing medicine and medical education Cassell discusses the new generalism and the skills that physicians-in-training must be taught in order to practice the art of doctoring which centres on the person not the disease.
The Nature of Clinical Medicine
Clinical medicine, as a thinking discipline, is concerned not only with what clinicians do, but why. When physicians act in medicine they have some purpose or goal in mind. What they actually do and how they go about it is in the service of their purposes and their goals. Such goals cover a wide range of topics centering on patients, the doctor-patient relationship, the acts of doctoring patients, and the goals involved in being a physician among other physicians working within the institutions of medicine. The Nature of Clinical Medicine takes its direction from a catalog of goals of medicine that range from the expected diagnosis and treatment of diseases to wider concerns for patients, fo...
Clearing the Path
"I was flown in by the Health Committee of the small town. They wanted me to meet with a family in distress. They felt the family, who was well loved in their town, was in turmoil while facing the impending death of the father. Right off the plane, I was brought to the patient's private hospital room. The father of the family, Benny, aged 64, was dying of cancer. I was told that neither his family nor he recognized that he was dying. The battle was already lost, according to the health professionals. Yet the family wanted to keep fighting for his life in every possible way"--
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into h...
The Goals of Medicine
Debates over health care have focused for so long on economics that the proper goals for medicine seem to be taken for granted; yet problems in health care stem as much from a lack of agreement about the goals and priorities of medicine as from the way systems function. This book asks basic questions about the purposes and ends of medicine and shows that the answers have practical implications for future health care delivery, medical research, and the education of medical students. The Hastings Center coordinated teams of physicians, nurses, public health experts, philosophers, theologians, politicians, health care administrators, social workers, and lawyers in fourteen countries to explore ...
Talking with Patients, Volume 2
Spoken language is the most important diagnostic and therapeutic tool in medicine, and, according to Dr. Cassell, "we must be as precise with it as a surgeon with a scalpel." In these two volumes, he analyzes doctor-patient communication and shows how doctors can use language for the maximum benefit of their patients. Throughout, Dr. Cassell stresses that patients are complex, changing, psychological, social and physical beings whose illnesses are well represented by their own communication. He proposes that both listening and speaking are arts that can be learned best when they are based on the way that spoken language functions in medicine. Accordingly, Volume I focuses on the workings of ...
