Kategoria BISAC: Health & Fitness >> Health Care Issues

How do smokers evaluate evidence that smoking harms health? Some evidence suggests that smokers overestimate health risks from smoking. This book challenges this conclusion. The authors find that smokers tend to be overly optimistic about their longevity and future health if they quit later in life.

Older adults' decisions to quit smoking require personal experience with the serious health impacts associated with smoking. Smokers over fifty revise their risk perceptions only after experiencing a major health shock--such as a heart attack. But less serious symptoms, such as shortness...

Chronic pain is the leading cause of disability in the United States, affecting as many as 48 million people in this country alone. It can demoralize and depress both patient and family, especially when there is no effective pain control and no hope for relief. Improperly managed, chronic pain can lead to substance abuse (usually painkillers) and to acute psychological and emotional distress. Pain begets stress and stress begets pain in a wretched downward spiral.

Silver reviews the causes and characteristics of chronic pain and explores its impact on individual family relationships...

A young woman suffers a stroke; she rebuilds her career and personal life, but not before her marriage falls apart. An eighty-year-old man dies unexpectedly of stroke, leaving his grown sons to wonder whether they are genetically predisposed to stroke. A recently retired woman confronts her future with a husband suddenly disabled by stroke. How can she help her husband? Will he ever recover? How will she cope with her own emotional stress?

In Stroke and the Family: A New Guide, Joel Stein shows the many faces of stroke and the people it strikes. To the family just beginning...

By the millennium Americans were spending more than 12 billion dollars yearly on antidepressant medications. Currently, millions of people in the U.S. routinely use these pills. Are these miracle drugs, quickly curing depression? Or is their popularity a sign that we now inappropriately redefine normal life problems as diseases? Are they prescribed too often or too seldom? How do they affect self-images?

David Karp approaches these questions from the inside, having suffered from clinical depression for most of his adult life. In this book he explores the relationship between pills...

A mere "symbol" of medicine--the sugar pill, saline injection, doctor in a white lab coat--the placebo nonetheless sometimes produces "real" results. Medical science has largely managed its discomfort with this phenomenon by discounting the placebo effect, subtracting it as an impurity in its data through double-blind tests of new treatments and drugs. This book is committed to a different perspective--namely, that the placebo effect is a "real" entity in its own right, one that has much to teach us about how symbols, settings, and human relationships literally get under our...

Funigiello unlocks the puzzle of why the United States has never guaranteed its citizens health security comparable to that enjoyed by people of other first-world nations--and he tells what needs to happen for policy...

Now, Cosmetic Surgery For Dummies is here to guide you through today's top procedures, candidly addressing both the benefits and the risks. R. Merrel...

A riveting work of investigative journalism that charts the rise of the dietary supplement craze and reveals the dangerous and sometimes deadly side of these highly popular and completely unregulated products.
Over 60 percent of Americans buy and take herbal and dietary supplements for all sorts of reasons to prevent illness (vitamin C), to ease depression (St. John s wort), to aid weight loss (ephedra), to boost the memory (ginkgo biloba), and even to cure cancer (shark cartilage, bloodroot) despite the fact that few of these natural supplements have been proven to be safe or...