In 'A Different Medicine', Joseph Calabrese presents a case study that challenges many deeply ingrained cultural assumptions and attempts to mediate a centuries-old clash of cultural paradigms. The book explores a controversial Native American ritual and healthcare practice: ceremonial consumption of the psychedelic Peyote cactus in the context of a postcolonial healing movement called the Native American Church. Calabrese argues against the War on Drugs and the Supreme Court decision that jeopardized the right of Native Americans to use this medicine. He urges us to recognize the multiplicity of the normal and the therapeutic.

The complete home reference to over 2,500 medicines - fully revised and updated. The BMA New Guide to Medicine & Drugs Ninth Edition is the fully updated, quick-reference guide to drugs for anyone wanting to know more about the medication they're taking, from Britain's leading authority. Jargon-free and easy-to-follow, get all the vital information you need on 2,500 of today's prescription and over-the-counter drugs fast. Find advice on understanding and using medicines and learn how they work, what they treat, their risks, benefits, side effects, and how to use them safely and effectively. Plus, get detailed full-page profiles of 276 commonly used medicines and information about drugs new to the market. Essential guidance for anyone taking medication, or wanting to know more about the major drugs used in common medical practice. The BMA New Guide to Medicine and Drugs Ninth Edition is perfect for the family bookshelf and for healthcare professionals.

An in-depth study of traditional folk medicine in Vermont, written by a formally trained doctor. Folk medicine is an imperative aspect of many Vermonters’ lives and health. Trained medical doctor D. C. Jarvis set out to investigate this traditional approach to herbal medicine and produced this little guide to provide knowledge and understanding of the nature and long-successful uses of folk medicine. An invaluable read for anyone interested in daily increased vitality. The chapters featured in this volume include: - Vermont Environment and the Life Span - The Animal Laws - Your Beginning - Your Racial Pattern and Vermont Folk Medicine - The First Yardstick of Your Health - The Instincts of Childhood - Potassium and Its Uses - The Usefulness of Honey - The Usefulness of Kelp - The Importance of Iodine - Castor Oil and Corn Oil - Medical Reasoning Behind Vermont Folk Medicine

“The stories are skillfully told and entirely entertaining . . . An expert, mostly feel-good book about modern medicine” from the award-winning author (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Behind every landmark drug is a story. It could be an oddball researcher’s genius insight, a catalyzing moment in geopolitical history, a new breakthrough technology, or an unexpected but welcome side effect discovered during clinical trials. Piece together these stories, as Thomas Hager does in this remarkable, century-spanning history, and you can trace the evolution of our culture and the practice of medicine. Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book. “[An] absorbing new book.” —The New York Times Book Review “[A] well-written and engaging chronicle.” —The Wall Street Journal “Lucidly informative and compulsively readable.” —Publishers Weekly “Entertaining [and] insightful.” —Booklist “Well-written, well-researched and fascinating to read Ten Drugs provides an insightful look at how drugs have shaped modern medical practices. Towards the end of the book Hager writes that he ‘came away surprised by some of the things he had learned.’ I had the very same reaction.” —Penny Le Couteur, coauthor of Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History

Today we live longer, healthier lives than ever before in history—a transformation due almost entirely to tremendous advances in medicine. This change is so profound, with many major illnesses nearly wiped out, that its hard now to imagine what the world was like in 1851, when the New York Times began publishing. Treatments for depression, blood pressure, heart disease, ulcers, and diabetes came later; antibiotics were nonexistent, viruses unheard of, and no one realized yet that DNA carried blueprints for life or the importance of stem cells. Edited by award-winning writer Gina Kolata, this eye-opening collection of 150 articles from the New York Times archive charts the developing scientific insights and breakthroughs into diagnosing and treating conditions like typhoid, tuberculosis, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimers, and AIDS, and chronicles the struggles to treat mental illness and the enormous success of vaccines. It also reveals medical mistakes, lapses in ethics, and wrong paths taken in hopes of curing disease. Every illness, every landmark has a tale, and the newspapers top reporters tell each one with perceptiveness and skill.

At the time of his death in 1995, Georges Canguilhem was a highly respected historian of science and medicine, whose engagement with questions of normality, the ideologization of scientific thought, and the conceptual history of biology had marked the thought of philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and Gilles Deleuze. This collection of short, incisive, and highly accessible essays on the major concepts of modern medicine shows Canguilhem at the peak of his use of historical practice for philosophical engagement. In order to elaborate a philosophy of medicine, Canguilhem examines paramount problems such as the definition and uses of health, the decline of the Hippocratic understanding of nature, the experience of disease, the limits of psychology in medicine, myths and realities of therapeutic practices, the difference between cure and healing, the organism's self-regulation, and medical metaphors linking the organism to society. Writings on Medicine is at once an excellent introduction to Canguilhem's work and a forceful, insightful, and accessible engagement with elemental concepts in medicine. The book is certain to leave its imprint on anthropology, history, philosophy, bioethics, and the social studies of medicine.

Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in American History, this is a landmark history of how the entire American health care system of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs has evolved over the last two centuries. "The definitive social history of the medical profession in America....A monumental achievement."—H. Jack Geiger, M.D., New York Times Book Review