Medical Investigation 101 invites you to try out a career in medical science. Learn about medical specialties and the wide array of healthcare team careers. Try your hand at solving the sort of medical mysteries doctors confront each day. Learn some basic medical terminology and discover how doctors analyze and solve medical puzzles. Play the role of the physician as you read the realistic case histories and learn about the applicable physiology and pathophysiology. These medical investigations stress a methodical way of thinking applicable to a wide array of decision making in life. Finally, we introduce current concepts in gene editing and medical therapy that promise the emergency of new frontiers in health science careers for today’s students. Together, Drs. Hill and Griffith share over fifty years of medical and teaching experience. Our students have endorsed the experience with remarkable enthusiasm. Whether you are searching for a career or simply wanting to better understand how doctors think, we hope you enjoy your adventure into the world of medicine.

How the hidden trade in our sensitive medical information became a multibillion-dollar business, but has done little to improve our health-care outcomes Hidden to consumers, patient medical data has become a multibillion-dollar worldwide trade industry between our health-care providers, drug companies, and a complex web of middlemen. This great medical-data bazaar sells copies of the prescription you recently filled, your hospital records, insurance claims, blood-test results, and more, stripped of your name but possibly with identifiers such as year of birth, gender, and doctor. As computing grows ever more sophisticated, patient dossiers become increasingly vulnerable to reidentification and the possibility of being targeted by identity thieves or hackers. Paradoxically, comprehensive electronic files for patient treatment—the reason medical data exists in the first place—remain an elusive goal. Even today, patients or their doctors rarely have easy access to comprehensive records that could improve care. In the evolution of medical data, the instinct for profit has outstripped patient needs. This book tells the human, behind-the-scenes story of how such a system evolved internationally. It begins with New York advertising man Ludwig Wolfgang Frohlich, who founded IMS Health, the world’s dominant health-data miner, in the 1950s. IMS Health now gathers patient medical data from more than 45 billion transactions annually from 780,000 data feeds in more than 100 countries. Our Bodies, Our Data uncovers some of Frohlich’s hidden past and follows the story of what happened in the following decades. This is both a story about medicine and medical practice, and about big business and maximizing profits, and the places these meet, places most patients would like to believe are off-limits. Our Bodies, Our Data seeks to spark debate on how we can best balance the promise big data offers to advance medicine and improve lives while preserving the rights and interests of every patient. We, the public, deserve a say in this discussion. After all, it’s our data.

Leading experts illustrate how sophisticated computational data mining techniques can impact contemporary drug discovery and development In the era of post-genomic drug development, extracting and applying knowledge from chemical, biological, and clinical data is one of the greatest challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical Data Mining brings together contributions from leading academic and industrial scientists, who address both the implementation of new data mining technologies and application issues in the industry. This accessible, comprehensive collection discusses important theoretical and practical aspects of pharmaceutical data mining, focusing on diverse approaches for drug discovery—including chemogenomics, toxicogenomics, and individual drug response prediction. The five main sections of this volume cover: A general overview of the discipline, from its foundations to contemporary industrial applications Chemoinformatics-based applications Bioinformatics-based applications Data mining methods in clinical development Data mining algorithms, technologies, and software tools, with emphasis on advanced algorithms and software that are currently used in the industry or represent promising approaches In one concentrated reference, Pharmaceutical Data Mining reveals the role and possibilities of these sophisticated techniques in contemporary drug discovery and development. It is ideal for graduate-level courses covering pharmaceutical science, computational chemistry, and bioinformatics. In addition, it provides insight to pharmaceutical scientists, principal investigators, principal scientists, research directors, and all scientists working in the field of drug discovery and development and associated industries.

Thanks to remarkable advances in modern health care attributable to science, engineering, and medicine, it is now possible to cure or manage illnesses that were long deemed untreatable. At the same time, however, the United States is facing the vexing challenge of a seemingly uncontrolled rise in the cost of health care. Total medical expenditures are rapidly approaching 20 percent of the gross domestic product and are crowding out other priorities of national importance. The use of increasingly expensive prescription drugs is a significant part of this problem, making the cost of biopharmaceuticals a serious national concern with broad political implications. Especially with the highly visible and very large price increases for prescription drugs that have occurred in recent years, finding a way to make prescription medicinesâ€"and health care at largeâ€"more affordable for everyone has become a socioeconomic imperative. Affordability is a complex function of factors, including not just the prices of the drugs themselves, but also the details of an individual's insurance coverage and the number of medical conditions that an individual or family confronts. Therefore, any solution to the affordability issue will require considering all of these factors together. The current high and increasing costs of prescription drugsâ€"coupled with the broader trends in overall health care costsâ€"is unsustainable to society as a whole. Making Medicines Affordable examines patient access to affordable and effective therapies, with emphasis on drug pricing, inflation in the cost of drugs, and insurance design. This report explores structural and policy factors influencing drug pricing, drug access programs, the emerging role of comparative effectiveness assessments in payment policies, changing finances of medical practice with regard to drug costs and reimbursement, and measures to prevent drug shortages and foster continued innovation in drug development. It makes recommendations for policy actions that could address drug price trends, improve patient access to affordable and effective treatments, and encourage innovations that address significant needs in health care.