Now with a new Afterword from the author

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down explores the clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy.

Lia's parents and her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award, Anne Fadiman's compassionate account of this cultural impasse is literary journalism at its finest.

______

Lia Lee 1982-2012

Lia Lee died on August 31, 2012. She was thirty years old and had been in a vegetative state since the age of four. Until the day of her death, her family cared for her lovingly at home.

Big Pharma and health agencies cry, Don't take ivermectin! A media storm follows. Why then, does the science say the opposite?

Ivermectin is a dirty word in the media. It doesn't work. It's a deadly horse dewormer. Prescribe or promote it and you'll be called a right-wing quack, be banned from social media, or lose your license to practice medicine. And yet, entire countries wiped out the virus with it, and more than ninety-five studies now show it to be unequivocally effective in preventing and treating Covid-19. If it didn't work, why was there a coordinated global campaign to cancel it? What's the truth about this decades-old, Nobel Prize-winning medication?

The War on Ivermectin is the personal and professional narrative of Dr. Pierre Kory and his crusade to recommend a safe, inexpensive, generic medicine as the key to ending the pandemic.

Written with Jenna McCarthy, Dr. Kory's story chronicles the personal attacks, professional setbacks, and nefarious efforts of the world's major health agencies and medical journals to dismiss and deny ivermectin's efficacy. Part personal narrative, part scathing expose, The War on Ivermectin highlights the catastrophic impacts of the mass media censorship and relentless propaganda that led to the greatest humanitarian crisis in history.

Although numerous studies and epidemiologic data have shown that millions of lives were saved globally with the systematic use of ivermectin, many more millions perished. This carnage was the direct result of what Dr. Kory eventually discovered to be the pharmaceutical industry's silent but deadly war on generic medicines and the corrupt, captured medical and media systems that allow it to continue. For anyone who thought Covid-19 was the enemy, Dr. Kory's book will leave no doubt that the true adversary in this war is a collective cabal of power-hungry elites who put profits over people and will stop at nothing in their quest for control.

The War on Ivermectin is published through ICAN PRESS, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing. ICAN (Informed Consent Action Network) is a nonprofit organization investigating the safety of medical procedures, pharmaceutical drugs, and vaccines while advocating for people's right to informed consent.

With 25 years in end-of-life care and firsthand experience with death, dying, and MAiD, David Maginley explores the unaddressed issues at the heart of our effort to control the final human experience.

What drives most requests for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD)? Surprisingly, it's not physical pain but existential distress-the fear of suffering, the loss of dignity, and the struggle to find meaning and purpose as life draws to a close. Yet these very struggles are functional in a process few recognize: the deconstruction of the personal self (the ego), which prepares us for our final and most significant state of being-transcendence. In Early Exits, David Maginley offers a radical reinterpretation of MAiD as an attempt to preserve the ego in the face of this transformation. This is a reflection of our culture's spiritual poverty and reveals MAiD as a medical procedure being used to treat what is, fundamentally, a spiritual condition.

Early Exits goes beyond discussions of autonomy, ethics, and dignity to explore the fundamental human experience of dying. Each chapter begins with a real-world case example and ends with practical tools to help readers live-and die-more fully informed. Drawing on decades of research into end-of-life phenomena and over 25 years of experience providing spiritual care to cancer and palliative patients, Maginley illuminates the inner dimensions of dying and how to address the distress that drives MAiD requests. With compelling research, personal stories, and profound spiritual insights, Early Exits reframes dying as a transformative process that leads us beyond grief and despair to a state of grace and growth.

Central topics explored:

• Why existential suffering-not physical pain-is at the heart of requests for assisted death, and how to best address it.
• How the deconstruction of identity accelerates spiritual growth and calibrates us for transcendence.
• The importance of addressing both physical and psycho-spiritual needs in palliative care.
• How MAiD compromises the mystical, expansive states of consciousness experienced by most dying people, regardless of culture or belief.

Maginley's insights are shaped not only by decades of experience supporting those facing mortality but also by his own journey as a four-time cancer survivor. Whether you are navigating a terminal diagnosis, supporting a loved one, or providing care as a professional in hospice or palliative settings, this book offers hope and clarity. Early Exits is an essential resource for understanding-and transforming-the most profound and ultimate event in life. It offers a way forward to a better society, a better tomorrow, and a better end to our days.

When his teenaged son Christopher, brain-damaged in an auto accident, developed a 106-degree fever following weeks of unconsciousness, John Campbell asked the attending physician for help. The doctor refused. Why bother? The boy's life was effectively over. Campbell refused to accept this verdict. He demanded treatment and threatened legal action. The doctor finally relented. With treatment, Christopher's temperature subsided almost immediately. Soon afterwards he regained consciousness and today he is learning to walk again. This story is one of many Wesley J. Smith recounts in his groundbreaking new book, Culture of Death. Smith believes that American medicine is changing from a system based on the sanctity of human life into a starkly utilitarian model in which the medically defenseless are seen as having not just a 'right' but a 'duty' to die. Going behind the current scenes of our health care system, he shows how doctors withdraw desired care based on Futile Care Theory rather than providing it as required by the Hippocratic Oath. And how bioethicists influence policy by considering questions such as whether organs may be harvested from the terminally ill and disabled. This is a passionate, yet coolly reasoned book about the current crisis in medical ethics by an author who has made the new thanatology his consuming interest.

The issues of medical ethics, from moral quandaries of euthanasia and the morality of killing to political dilemmas like fair healthcare distribution, are rarely out of today's media. This area of ethics covers a wide range of issues, from mental health to reproductive medicine, as well as including management issues such as resource allocation, and has proven to hold enduring interest for the general public as well as the medical practitioner. This Very Short Introduction provides an invaluable tool with which to think about the ethical values that lie at the heart of medicine.

This new edition explores the ethical reasoning we can use to approach medical ethics, introducing the most important 'tools' of ethical reasoning, and discussing how argument, thought experiments, and intuition can be combined in the consideration of medical ethics. Considering its practical application, Tony Hope and Michael Dunn explore how medical ethics supports health professionals through the growing use of ethics expertise in clinical settings. They also contemplate the increasingly important place of medical ethics in the wider social context, particularly in this age of globalization, not only in healthcare practice, but also policy, discussions in the media, pressure group and activism settings, and in legal judgments.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Essential, required reading for doctors and patients alike: A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one of the world's premiere cancer researchers reveals an urgent philosophy on the little-known principles that govern medicine--and how understanding these principles can empower us all.

Over a decade ago, when Siddhartha Mukherjee was a young, exhausted, and isolated medical resident, he discovered a book that would forever change the way he understood the medical profession. The book, The Youngest Science, forced Dr. Mukherjee to ask himself an urgent, fundamental question: Is medicine a science? Sciences must have laws--statements of truth based on repeated experiments that describe some universal attribute of nature. But does medicine have laws like other sciences?

Dr. Mukherjee has spent his career pondering this question--a question that would ultimately produce some of most serious thinking he would do around the tenets of his discipline--culminating in The Laws of Medicine. In this important treatise, he investigates the most perplexing and illuminating cases of his career that ultimately led him to identify the three key principles that govern medicine.

Brimming with fascinating historical details and modern medical wonders, this important book is a fascinating glimpse into the struggles and Eureka! moments that people outside of the medical profession rarely see. Written with Dr. Mukherjee's signature eloquence and passionate prose, The Laws of Medicine is a critical read, not just for those in the medical profession, but for everyone who is moved to better understand how their health and well-being is being treated. Ultimately, this book lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding medicine, now and into the future.

Unlike many individuals who enter medicine, it was not something I contemplated from the beginning. I wanted to be a scientist...until I became disillusioned with that enterprise. Currently I'm a physician executive recently retired. Following medical school, I trained in Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine. It's the latter that I practiced clinically.

Through an exploration of great thinkers and philosophers, coupled with my own interactions with patients and colleagues, I've come to understand that medicine is a social, moral, philosophical, and existential enterprise, of which science is only one aspect.

I respect science, but don't worship it. Science is about facts that can be tested; philosophy and the humanities are about ideas that can be imagined, and stories that can be told.

Through the presentation of philosophical and normative issues, elucidated through stories, my goal in writing this book is to inspire tomorrow's physicians, medical ethicists, and other healers and thinkers to reject the roles we've been assigned, become more authentic in our everyday lives, and transcend the inadequacy of science through imagination and improvisation.

This is how the Soul of Medicine will be restored.

The medical environment has become a labyrinth of interlocking corporate, hospital, and governmental boards of directors, infiltrated by the drug companies. Drug company representatives write glowing articles about pharmaceuticals, which are then signed by physicians paid handsomely for their cooperation, though they may not know the adverse side effects of the drugs they promote. The most toxic substances are often approved first, while milder and more natural alternatives are ignored for financial reasons. Its death by medicine.

Who should have access to assisted reproductive technologies? Which one of many seriously ill patients should be offered the next available transplant organ? When may a surrogate decision maker decide to withdraw life-prolonging measures from an unconscious patient? Questions like these feature prominently in the field of health care ethics and in the education of health care professionals. This book provides a concise introduction to the major concepts, principles and issues in health care ethics, using case studies throughout to illustrate and analyse challenging ethical issues in contemporary health care. Topics range widely, from confidentiality and truthfulness to end-of-life care and research on human subjects. Ethics and Health Care will be a vital resource for students of applied ethics, bioethics, professional ethics, health law and medical sociology, as well as students of medicine, nursing and other health care professions.

A timely look at the ethical, legal, and policy issues surrounding brain injury and collision sports.

American tackle football is an industry like any other. And like many industries, it sells a product that is dangerous to those who use it--or, in this case, those who play it. In Tackle Football and Traumatic Brain Injuries, Daniel S. Goldberg explores the connections among traumatic brain injury, collision sports, and the industry's continuing efforts to manufacture doubt. Focusing especially on youths and adolescents--the most vulnerable population that comprises over 99% of tackle football players in the US--Goldberg addresses the ethical and social implications of their participation in tackle football.

Goldberg discusses the true scope of the danger and the costs to society and individuals of caring for injured participants. If these risks were to become widespread public knowledge, the profitability and perhaps even the viability of American football would be at risk. As the tackle football industry has consistently worked to mask the health hazards involved in playing football, it has used a particular tool that has proved highly effective in achieving this subterfuge: the manufacture of doubt. Goldberg advocates for using public health laws as a tool for countering these efforts at obfuscation, and he outlines specific policy proposals intended to address the population health and ethical problems presented by tackle football.

The book draws on public health ethics, public health law, and the histories of occupational and public health to assess the limits of parental choice to expose their children to risks of injury. Should kids play tackle football at all--and who decides if they should? Goldberg offers practical answers to these critical legal, ethical, and social questions. Chris Nowinski, former Harvard football player and WWE wrestler, provides a timely and insider's perspective on these critical issues in the foreword.

In order to provide the highest level of care to patients and clients, health professionals need a sound knowledge and understanding of healthcare ethics. Foundations of Healthcare Ethics: theory to practice focuses on the philosophical concepts underpinning contemporary ethical discourse for health professionals, and arms both students and professionals with the knowledge to tackle situations of moral uncertainty in clinical practice. Specially written to provide an in-depth study into the theoretical foundations of healthcare ethics, it covers a range of normative ethical theories, from virtue ethics to utilitarianism, while also investigating their application to contemporary issues in health care and society. It provides opportunities for self-directed learning, and presents questions and case studies to facilitate engagement and discussion. Foundations of Healthcare Ethics provides both students and professionals with an understanding of the philosophy governing healthcare ethics in order to help provide a better level of care to all patients and clients.

Sandel explores a paramount question of our era: how to extend the power and promise of biomedical science to overcome debility without compromising our humanity. His arguments are acute and penetrating, melding sound logic with compassion.
--Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think

Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to manipulate our nature--to enhance our genetic traits and those of our children. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why. What is wrong with re-engineering our nature?

The Case against Perfection explores these and other moral quandaries connected with the quest to perfect ourselves and our children. Michael Sandel argues that the pursuit of perfection is flawed for reasons that go beyond safety and fairness. The drive to enhance human nature through genetic technologies is objectionable because it represents a bid for mastery and dominion that fails to appreciate the gifted character of human powers and achievements. Carrying us beyond familiar terms of political discourse, this book contends that the genetic revolution will change the way philosophers discuss ethics and will force spiritual questions back onto the political agenda.

In order to grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions largely lost from view in the modern world. Since these questions verge on theology, modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them. But our new powers of biotechnology make these questions unavoidable. Addressing them is the task of this book, by one of America's preeminent moral and political thinkers.

In the complex and rapidly evolving field of healthcare, ethical dilemmas are as common as they are challenging. Basic Ethics is an essential guide that navigates through these complexities by illuminating the foundational ethical concepts that both budding and seasoned professionals must know. Through a detailed exploration of both theoretical frameworks and practical applications, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the most pressing ethical issues faced in today's medical and healthcare environments.

From the intricacies of patient confidentiality and informed consent to the debates surrounding end-of-life care and genetic engineering, this book provides clear, concise explanations and thoughtful discussions. Whether you're a medical student, a practicing clinician, or a healthcare policymaker, this book will equip you with the knowledge and tools to make informed ethical decisions that adhere to both legal standards and moral imperatives.

Bioethics and the Human Goods offers students and general readers a brief introduction to bioethics from a natural law philosophical perspective. This perspective, which traces its origins to classical antiquity, has profoundly shaped Western ethics and law and is enjoying an exciting renaissance. While compatible with much in the ethical thought of the great religions, it is grounded in reason, not religion. In contrast to the currently dominant bioethical theories of utilitarianism and principlism, the natural law approach offers an understanding of human flourishing grounded in basic human goods, including life, health, friendship, and knowledge, and in the wrongness of intentionally turning against, or neglecting, these goods.

The book is divided into two sections: Foundations and Issues. Foundations sketches a natural law understanding of the important ethical principles of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice and explores different understandings of personhood and whether human embryos are persons. Issues applies a natural law perspective to some of the most controversial debates in contemporary bioethics at the beginning and end of life: research on human embryos, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the withdrawal of tube-feeding from patients in a persistent vegetative state, and the definition of death. The text is completed by appendices featuring personal statements by Alfonso Gómez-Lobo on the status of the human embryo and on the definition and determination of death.

A physician says, I have an ethical obligation never to cause the death of a patient, another responds, My ethical obligation is to relieve pain even if the patient dies. The current argument over the role of physicians in assisting patients to die constantly refers to the ethical duties of the profession. References to the Hippocratic Oath are often heard. Many modern problems, from assisted suicide to accessible health care, raise questions about the traditional ethics of medicine and the medical profession. However, few know what the traditional ethics are and how they came into being. This book provides a brief tour of the complex story of medical ethics evolved over centuries in both Western and Eastern cultures. It sets this story in the social and cultural contexts in which the work of healing was practiced and suggests that, behind the many different perceptions about the ethical duties of physicians, certain themes appear constantly, and may be relevant to modern debates. The book begins with the Hippocratic Medicine of ancient Greece, moves throught the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe, and the long history of Indian and Chinese medicine, ending as the problems raised modern medical science and technology challenge the settled ethics of the long tradition.

Today's medicine is spiritually deflated and morally adrift; this book explains why and offers an ethical framework to renew and guide practitioners in fulfilling their profession to heal.

What is medicine and what is it for? What does it mean to be a good doctor? Answers to these questions are essential both to the practice of medicine and to understanding the moral norms that shape that practice. The Way of Medicine articulates and defends an account of medicine and medical ethics meant to challenge the reigning provider of services model, in which clinicians eschew any claim to know what is good for a patient and instead offer an array of health care services for the sake of the patient's subjective well-being. Against this trend, Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen call for practitioners to recover what they call the Way of Medicine, which offers physicians both a path out of the provider of services model and also the moral resources necessary to resist the various political, institutional, and cultural forces that constantly push practitioners and patients into thinking of their relationship in terms of economic exchange.

Curlin and Tollefsen offer an accessible account of the ancient ethical tradition from which contemporary medicine and bioethics has departed. Their investigation, drawing on the scholarship of Leon Kass, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Finnis, leads them to explore the nature of medicine as a practice, health as the end of medicine, the doctor-patient relationship, the rule of double effect in medical practice, and a number of clinical ethical issues from the beginning of life to its end. In the final chapter, the authors take up debates about conscience in medicine, arguing that rather than pretending to not know what is good for patients, physicians should contend conscientiously for the patient's health and, in so doing, contend conscientiously for good medicine. The Way of Medicine is an intellectually serious yet accessible exploration of medical practice written for medical students, health care professionals, and students and scholars of bioethics and medical ethics.

Raises and considers common issues, cutting through the moral fog in medical science

Christianity and Modern Medicine raises moral questions that were merely hypothetical just decades ago. Moreover, traditional moral models are incessantly challenged by the medical community at large, shifting the conversation to patient and societal rights within a framework of moral relativism and rendering the decision-making process morally vague and confusing.

In Christianity and Modern Medicine, bioethicist Mark Wesley Foreman and attorney Lindsay C. Leonard delve into the major ethical issues facing today's medical professionals with the purpose of providing principles and guidelines for making critical ethical decisions where medical knowledge, technologies, and capabilities are constantly evolving. Topics covered include:

- procreational ethics

- genetic ethics

- abortion

- medical research

- infanticide

- clinical ethics

- physician-assisted suicide

- legal issues

While Christianity and Modern Medicine is designed specifically for students planning careers in the medical field, it is accessible to any Christian interested in steering through the moral fog in the practice of medicine today.

Paul Scherz explores the ethical challenges raised by precision medicine and its focus on medical risk as opposed to current disease.

Genetic technologies and artificial intelligence are rapidly changing the landscape of medical practice and patient care. In the emerging field of precision medicine, a patient's risk factors--especially genetic risk factors--are incorporated into an all-encompassing plan to prevent future disease. But identifying at-risk individuals through technologies such as wearable devices and direct-to-consumer genetic sequencing can undermine the overall experience of health. The potential for overdiagnosis and overtreatment grows as patients are prescribed medications and receive prophylactic surgeries that carry inherent risks. Also, as the medical industry shifts its attention from individuals to trends in the general population, the one-to-one practitioner-patient relationship becomes strained.

Using the lens of virtue ethics and theological bioethics, The Ethics of Precision Medicine offers suggestions for better implementing precision medicine to treat those currently suffering from or at high risk of disease, while also recognizing that effectively preventing disease depends, ultimately, on addressing the social determinants of health. The book provides a new perspective on the problems of contemporary healthcare, proposing practical steps that individuals and institutions can take to ensure that the advanced technologies of precision medicine can be used to promote human flourishing.

Professional Ethics for Midwives: Conscious Practice is an applied ethics book designed for both students and practicing midwives to build ethical thinking in the context of daily practice. This unique text uses an accessible writing style and includes chapters on diversity and justice, informed consent, multiple relationships, confidentiality and privacy, scope of practice, and others. Realistic case examples throughout the text encourage critical thinking in applied ethics. The authors present a unique model for midwives' ethical thinking and appendices include widely used codes of ethics in the field.