What is good bedside manner? How do you tell patients they have a terminal illness? What do you do after you have told them? How do you deal with the family after a patient dies? How do you foster good relationships with patients, nurses and other physicians? How do you avoid burnout? Your answers to these and similar questions will prove crucial to your medical career. Yet during my seven years of medical school and residency, these issues were never mentioned, much less dealt with. Some programs are now making efforts to teach the human side of medicine, but medical training today is not much different from mine. I intended Medicine with a Human Touch to be a guide for medical students and residents in dealing with these and similar non-technical problems. Yet numerous practicing physicians who reviewed it remarked that we would all do well to reexamine periodically how we are behaving in our everyday practice.

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.

Why we need a daily dose of touch: an investigation of the effects of touch on our physical and mental well-being. Although the therapeutic benefits of touch have become increasingly clear, American society, claims Tiffany Field, is dangerously touch-deprived. Many schools have “no touch” policies; the isolating effects of Internet-driven work and life can leave us hungry for tactile experience. In this book Field explains why we may need a daily dose of touch. The first sensory input in life comes from the sense of touch while a baby is still in the womb, and touch continues to be the primary means of learning about the world throughout infancy and well into childhood. Touch is critical, too, for adults' physical and mental health. Field describes studies showing that touch therapy can benefit everyone, from premature infants to children with asthma to patients with conditions that range from cancer to eating disorders. This second edition of Touch, revised and updated with the latest research, reports on new studies that show the role of touch in early development, in communication (including the reading of others' emotions), in personal relationships, and even in sports. It describes the physiological and biological effects of touch, including areas of the brain affected by touch, and the effects of massage therapy on prematurity, attentiveness, depression, pain, and immune functions. Touch has been shown to have positive effects on growth, brain waves, breathing, and heart rate, and to decrease stress and anxiety. As Field makes clear, we enforce our society's touch taboo at our peril.

The secret history of our most vital organ: the human heart. The Man Who Touched His Own Heart tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first "explorers" who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts' chambers, through the first heart surgeries -- which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived -- to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts' lives, almost defying nature in the process. Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion, effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? Why do we often undergo expensive procedures when cheaper ones are just as effective? What do Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, and contemporary Egyptian archaeologists have in common? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest? Rob Dunn's fascinating history of our hearts brings us deep inside the science, history, and stories of the four chambers we depend on most.

Can You Help Me?: Living in the Turbulent World of Huntington Disease shares the surprising, insightful, challenging, and even encouraging stories of patients and their families who live with Huntington Disease. Having seen patients for more than 40 years, Dr Thomas Bird, a pioneer neurogeneticist, adds a human touch to this genetic brain disease that devastates persons during mid-life when they can least afford it. With a brief history of Huntington Disease and the occasional scientific detail, the true heart of the book is the human experience of the disorder: � The man who cannot stay out of prison because he is addicted to being a burglar. � Another man shoots and kills his roommate while watching television and cannot explain why he did it. � The woman with Huntington Disease copes with her depression by using Texas line dancing. � A twelve year old girl with juvenile Huntington Disease who can barely walk and talk, but her classmates rally around with touching and heartfelt support. � And the 72 year old man with late onset Huntington Disease and severe depression is made worse by ECT, but improved (for a while) with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. These are just some of the compelling stories of people of all ages and in all walks of life who feel trapped by a progressive degenerative brain disease from which there is no escape.

A Science Friday pick for book of the year, 2019 One of America's top doctors reveals how AI will empower physicians and revolutionize patient care Medicine has become inhuman, to disastrous effect. The doctor-patient relationship--the heart of medicine--is broken: doctors are too distracted and overwhelmed to truly connect with their patients, and medical errors and misdiagnoses abound. In Deep Medicine, leading physician Eric Topol reveals how artificial intelligence can help. AI has the potential to transform everything doctors do, from notetaking and medical scans to diagnosis and treatment, greatly cutting down the cost of medicine and reducing human mortality. By freeing physicians from the tasks that interfere with human connection, AI will create space for the real healing that takes place between a doctor who can listen and a patient who needs to be heard. Innovative, provocative, and hopeful, Deep Medicine shows us how the awesome power of AI can make medicine better, for all the humans involved.