Doctors and patients alike trust the medical profession and its therapeutic powers; yet this trust has often been misplaced. Whether prescribing opium or thalidomide, aspirin or antidepressants, doctors have persistently failed to test their favourite ideas - often with catastrophic results. From revolutionary America to Nazi Germany and modern big-pharmaceuticals, this is the unexpected story of just how bad medicine has been, and of its remarkably recent effort to improve. It is the history of well-meaning doctors misled by intuition, of the startling human cost of their mistakes and of the exceptional individuals who have helped make things better. Alarming and optimistic, Taking the Medicine is essential reading for anyone interested in how and why to trust the pills they swallow.

Provides information about the different types of medicines and how to take them safely.

Based on more than eight years of research, Dr. Cohen offers vital advice on how to reduce dosages to prevent reactions, tells which commonly used drugs often cause side effects, provides guidelines on choosing a particular drug, and lists effective dosage recommendations for over 150 prescription and nonprescription medications.

A bestselling history of medicine, enriched with a new foreword, concluding essay, and bibliographic essay. Erwin H. Ackerknecht’s A Short History of Medicine is a concise narrative, long appreciated by students in the history of medicine, medical students, historians, and medical professionals as well as all those seeking to understand the history of medicine. Covering the broad sweep of discoveries from parasitic worms to bacilli and x-rays, and highlighting physicians and scientists from Hippocrates and Galen to Pasteur, Koch, and Roentgen, Ackerknecht narrates Western and Eastern civilization’s work at identifying and curing disease. He follows these discoveries from the library to the bedside, hospital, and laboratory, illuminating how basic biological sciences interacted with clinical practice over time. But his story is more than one of laudable scientific and therapeutic achievement. Ackerknecht also points toward the social, ecological, economic, and political conditions that shape the incidence of disease. Improvements in health, Ackerknecht argues, depend on more than laboratory knowledge: they also require that we improve the lives of ordinary men and women by altering social conditions such as poverty and hunger. This revised and expanded edition includes a new foreword and concluding biographical essay by Charles E. Rosenberg, Ackerknecht’s former student and a distinguished historian of medicine. A new bibliographic essay by Lisa Haushofer explores recent scholarship in the history of medicine.

USA TODAY bestselling author Pamela Crane brings her trademark twists to laugh-out-loud women's fiction in this unputdownable new novel. Doused with humor, fortified with women empowerment, and starring an irresistibly quirky leading lady, Lessons in Chemistry meets Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine as one woman refuses orders to take her medicine (like a man) and overthrows convention instead. When Sam Stanton’s father dies from prescription complications, she pulls up her big-girl undies and demands to hold the drug company responsible. As her father always said, if you want to take down the man, you’ve got to fight like one. So she converts her great room into a greenhouse and becomes the first holistic advice columnist to challenge modern medicine. But it’s 1970, and Sam’s readers are wary to accept health advice from anyone but a man. Except one person takes an obsessive interest in Sam’s herbal remedies: Thomas Cook, her pharmaceutical adversary with more money than J. Paul Getty, and a reach long enough to squash Sam’s unconventional ways…like the way she cures marital dry spells with horny goat weed—it’s not called that for nothing! But Sam is about to dose him with a tough pill to swallow: her column is upheaving the medical industry, along with women’s roles in it. Thomas isn’t the only jilted ego out to get Sam as her old flame reemerges, bringing a warning. When a disturbing detail mysteriously surfaces about her father’s death, she becomes a target scandalized, risking everything she’s spoken out to save. WHAT READERS ARE SAYING: "If there's one book you absolutely must read, this is it. Hilarious, original, and page-turning entertainment, I laughed until I cried and cried until I laughed. Every woman (and man, if he knows what's good for him) must read this." - reader review ★★★★★ "Superbly written, deliciously feminist, and darkly witty! It's a whole new genre of women's fiction blended with mystery that we've been waiting for." - reader review ★★★★★

A comprehensive history of the concept of freedom of therapeutic choice in the United States that presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American policy and law from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The country's history is also, however, brimming with social movements that have condemned such restrictions as violations of fundamental American liberties. This fierce conflict is one of the defining features of the social history of medicine in the United States. In Choose Your Medicine, Lewis A. Grossman presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American health policy, law, and regulation from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Grossman grounds his analysis in historical examples ranging from unschooled supporters of botanical medicine in the early nineteenth century to sophisticated cancer patient advocacy groups in the twenty-first. He vividly describes how activists and lawyers have resisted a wide variety of legal constraints on therapeutic choice, including medical licensing statutes, FDA limitations on unapproved drugs and alternative remedies, abortion restrictions, and prohibitions against medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide. Grossman also considers the relationship between these campaigns for desired treatments and widespread opposition to state-compelled health measures such as vaccines and face masks. From the streets of San Francisco to the US Supreme Court, Choose Your Medicine examines an underexplored theme of American history, politics, and law that is more relevant today than ever.