There is no doubt that the NHS is very sick, possibly terminally ill. The cause of this illness is that it has a huge cancerous growth inside, sapping it of all its strength. This malignant mass is the management system.Just as a patient with cancer does not know for a long time that a disease is present, the vast majority of the British public is unaware of the true cause and extent of the sickness within the NHS.A cancer grows at the expense of the healthy tissues around it without serving any useful function. To the detriment of doctors, nurses and surgeons, the administration has grown bigger and bigger, and it has not served any useful purpose, as the shocking stories in this important book show.Cancer grows until it sometimes becomes bigger than the organ from which it has arisen. Twenty years ago there were just a handful of administrators, but now there are many thousands. Cancer eventually kills its host by an insidious process of infiltration and spread. By their own exorbitant salaries and continuing mismanagement and misuse of money, administrators have diverted precious funds and made our once thriving Health Service into an emaciated shadow of its former self. Sometimes cancer causes bleeding. The blood then flows away and cannot be replaced quickly enough by the ailing body. Doctors and nurses -- the life blood of the NHS -- have never before been leaving or taking early retirement in such unprecedented numbers. And they are going because of the administration, which has made many feel absolutely and utterly unvalued.The only treatment for a cancer is to completely get rid of it. If this were done, there would be an immediate and overwhelming increase in morale not only by the clinical staff, but by everyone else in the hospital, plus immense savings. This book is a vital expose of the crisis at the heart of the NHS and a rallying cry to save it before it's too late.

An engaging history of the role that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin played in the origins of public health in America. Before the advent of modern antibiotics, one’s life could be abruptly shattered by contagion and death, and debility from infectious diseases and epidemics was commonplace for early Americans, regardless of social status. Concerns over health affected the Founding Fathers and their families as it did slaves, merchants, immigrants, and everyone else in North America. As both victims of illness and national leaders, the Founders occupied a unique position regarding the development of public health in America. Historian Jeanne E. Abrams’s Revolutionary Medicine refocuses the study of the lives of George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and James and Dolley Madison away from politics to the perspective of sickness, health, and medicine. For the Founders, republican ideals fostered a reciprocal connection between individual health and the “health” of the nation. Studying the encounters of these American Founders with illness and disease, as well as their viewpoints about good health, not only provides a richer and more nuanced insight into their lives, but also opens a window into the practice of medicine in the eighteenth century, which is at once intimate, personal, and first hand. Today’s American public health initiatives have their roots in the work of America’s Founders, for they recognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some new responsibilities with respect to ensuring the health and well-being of its citizenry—beginning the conversation about the country’s state of medicine and public healthcare that continues to be a work in progress.

Challenging many of the assumptions scholars have made about the Cuban Revolution's impact on healthcare, this volume recounts one anthropologist's quest to discover the truth behind the complicated relationship between Cuba's revolution, politics, and healthcare system. Katherine Hirschfeld became interested in Cuba in the mid-1990s, after reading numerous laudatory books and articles describing the Castro regime's achievements in health and medicine. Cuba's population health indicators seemed to be far superior to those of neighboring countries, the national health costs low, and medical care free at point-of-service to the entire people. Historical records indicated that most of these positive health trends resulted from the changes instituted by Castro in 1959. Few of these authors, however, had actually spent time on the island. Thus, Hirschfeld found that academic writing on Cuba was often long on praise, but short on empirical research about what exactly had changed in Cuban medicine since 1959.After much bureaucratic wrangling, Hirschfeld managed to secure permission to conduct long-term ethnographic research in Cuba, where she lived with families from Havana and Santiago, conducted clinic observations, interviewed doctors and patients, and was treated in a Cuban hospital during an epidemic of dengue fever. The reality of the Cuban healthcare system turned out to be different than the scholarly ideal: it was bureaucratized, authoritarian, and repressive, and most people preferred to seek healthcare in the informal economy rather than endure the material shortages, red tape, and political surveillance of the public sector. Written in the form of a first-person narrative, Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 not only critically reevaluates Cuban healthcare after the 1959 revolution; it includes chapters detailing Cuban health trends from the Spanish-American War (1898) through the fall of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and into the

Examines current health-care issues, developments, and problems and offers recommendations for improving services and curbing costs.

Cutting-edge science is coming to a startling realization. The bulk of our most lethal diseases have a common underlying cause: persistent inflammation, an over-active reaction of our natural immune system function resulting in cell and tissue destruction. This persistent inflammation is triggered by our industrial lifestyles, including exposure to chemicals, synthetic food ingredients, pollution and processed foods. "Researchers are linking inflammation to an ever-wider array of chronic illnesses," reports Newsweek's Anne Underwood. "Suddenly medical puzzles seem to be fitting together, such as why hypertension puts patients at increased risk of Alzheimer's, or why rheumatoid-arthritis sufferers have higher rates of sudden cardiac death. They're all connected on some fundamental level." But inflammation, and the risks of chronic diseases it brings, can be managed. Lifestyle and nutritional change is part of the answer. But the other part of the answer lies with ground-breaking information from the newest field of science—nutrigenomics. Nutrigenomics is the science of how your genes interact with nutrients. It is the study of how DNA and the genetic code affect a person's need for certain nutrients and help maintain optimal health throughout life. The Optimal Health Revolution combines leading-edge science — including 600 scientific references — with an easy to read, conversational writing style that make this critical information accessible to every reader. Relevant to both the researcher and medical doctor interested in the latest science and the casual reader looking to improve his or her health, The Optimal Health Revolution makes a critical contribution to our understanding of health.

A prismatic examination of the evolution of medicine, from a trade to a science, through the exemplary lives of ten men and women. Johns Hopkins University, one of the preeminent medical schools in the nation today, has played a unique role in the history of medicine. When it first opened its doors in 1893, medicine was a rough-and-ready trade. It would soon evolve into a rigorous science. It was nothing short of a revolution. This transition might seem inevitable from our vantage point today. In recent years, medical science has mapped the human genome, deployed robotic tools to perform delicate surgeries, and developed effective vaccines against a host of deadly pathogens. But this transformation could not have happened without the game-changing vision, talent, and dedication of a small cadre of individuals who were willing to commit body and soul to the advancement of medical science, education, and treatment. A Scientific Revolution recounts the stories of John Shaw Billings, Max Brödel, Mary Elizabeth Garrett, William Halsted, Jesse Lazear, Dorothy Reed Mendenhall, William Osler, Helen Taussig, Vivien Thomas, and William Welch. This chorus of lives tells a compelling tale not just of their individual struggles, but how personal and societal issues went hand-in-hand with the advancement of medicine.