AV2 Fiction Readalong by Weigl brings you timeless tales of mystery, suspense, adventure, and the lessons learned while growing up. These celebrated children’s stories are sure to entertain and educate while captivating even the most reluctant readers. Log on to www.av2books.com, and enter the unique book code found on page 2 of this book to unlock an extra dimension to these beloved tales. Hear the story come to life as you read along in your own book.

“A fascinating journey into the heart and mind of a physician” that explores the doctor-patient relationship, the flaws in our health care system, and how doctors’ emotions impact medical care (Boston Globe) While much has been written about the minds and methods of the medical professionals who save our lives, precious little has been said about their emotions. Physicians are assumed to be objective, rational beings, easily able to detach as they guide patients and families through some of life’s most challenging moments. But understanding doctors’ emotional responses to the life-and-death dramas of everyday practice can make all the difference on giving and getting the best medical care. Digging deep into the lives of doctors, Dr. Danielle Ofri examines the daunting range of emotions—shame, anger, empathy, frustration, hope, pride, occasionally despair, and sometimes even love—that permeate the contemporary doctor-patient connection. Drawing on scientific studies, including some surprising research, Dr. Ofri offers up an unflinching look at the impact of emotions on health care. Dr. Ofri takes us into the swirling heart of patient care, telling stories of caregivers caught up and occasionally torn down by the whirlwind life of doctoring. She admits to the humiliation of an error that nearly killed one of her patients. She mourns when a beloved patient is denied a heart transplant. She tells the riveting stories of an intern traumatized when she is forced to let a newborn die in her arms, and of a doctor whose daily glass of wine to handle the frustrations of the ER escalates into a destructive addiction. Ofri also reveals that doctors cope through gallows humor, find hope in impossible situations, and surrender to ecstatic happiness when they triumph over illness.

On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong—with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can—with our help—avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses. How Doctors Think offers direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country’s best doctors, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.

The medical world creates its own culture. This culture, however, would not continue if it were not for our participation. As consumers of health care, the way in which we talk, too, maintains the medical culture as it is. This culture frequently dismisses the wisdom of parents and talks them out of their own sense. We, as parents, co-create a culture that continually diminishes us. This collaboration has disastrous consequences for our children. How many times have you heard about a parent having a particular insight into his/her child only to be dissuaded from the truth by the doctor? What Do the Doctors Say? provides stories from the authors own experience as a mother. As a scholar of communication, she has identified twelve language patterns that are used to create medical culture. The book is written particularly for parents of children with disabilities but may be a useful tool for all consumers of health care.

For many doctors, their role as powerful healer precludes thoughts of ever getting sick themselves. When they do, it initiates a profound shift of awareness-- not only in their sense of their selves, which is invariably bound up with the "invincible doctor" role, but in the way that they view their patients and the doctor-patient relationship. While some books have been written from first-person perspectives on doctors who get sick-- by Oliver Sacks among them-- and TV shows like "House" touch on the topic, never has there been a "systematic, integrated look" at what the experience is like for doctors who get sick, and what it can teach us about our current health care system and more broadly, the experience of becoming ill.The psychiatrist Robert Klitzman here weaves together gripping first-person accounts of the experience of doctors who fall ill and see the other side of the coin, as a patient. The accounts reveal how dramatic this transformation can be-- a spiritual journey for some, a radical change of identity for others, and for some a new way of looking at the risks and benefits of treatment options. For most however it forever changes the way they treat their own patients. These questions are important not just on a human interest level, but for what they teach us about medicine in America today. While medical technology advances, the health care system itself has become more complex and frustrating, and physician-patient trust is at an all-time low. The experiences offered here are unique resource that point the way to a more humane future.

Most people would consider a knife wound to the stomach a serious health risk, but a similar scalpel wound in an operating room is often shrugged off. In Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs, Dr. Harvey Bigelsen explains how today’s medical doctors overprescribe surgery and ignore its long-term health implications. Any invasive medical procedure, he argues—including colonoscopies and root canals—creates inflammation in the body, leading to serious and long-lasting health problems. Inflammation, according to Dr. Bigelsen, is the real cause of all chronic disease (persistent or long-lasting illness). Noting that Western medicine has yet to “cure” a single chronic disease, Bigelsen points to a new paradigm: one that treats each patient as an individual (rather than as a set of symptoms), avoids further damage to the body through surgery, and looks for the root cause of chronic disease in past damage done to the patient’s body—whether caused by a bad fall or a scalpel. Provocatively written and radical in its approach, Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs challenges readers to rethink everything they believe about illness and how to treat it.

Discusses how to avoid harmful medical mistakes, offering advice on such topics as working with a busy doctor, communicating the full story of an illness, evaluating test risks, and obtaining a working diagnosis.