The Bellevue Guide to Health Care represents a collaboration among primary care and specialist physicians in the Department of Medicine at New York School of Medicine. It is intended for use by teachers, students and practitioners of primary care and in the hospital outpatient department. The Guide presents data about prevalence of disease, accuracy and diagnosis from congestive heart failure to domestic violence. Advice about patient management is interwoven with annotated references in a unique two column format providing the actual data upon which recommendations are based. (For example, recommendations to use statin drugs to treat hypermlipidemia are accompanied by literature based estimates of live-saving potential by statins among various patient groups.) Readers of The Guide are encouraged to use this data to tailor clinical decisions to meet the needs of their individual patients.

A collection of riveting and compassionate stories about the triumphs and trials of medicine, from a doctor and “gifted storyteller” on the front lines (The Washington Post) This eBook original exhibits Danielle Ofri's range and skill as a storyteller as well as her empathy and astuteness as a doctor. Her vivid prose brings the reader into bustling hospitals, tense exam rooms, and Ofri's own life, giving an up-close look at the fast-paced, life-and-death drama of becoming a doctor. She tells of a young man uncertain of his future who comes into the clinic with a stomach complaint but for whom Dr. Ofri sees that the most useful “treatment” she can offer him is SAT tutoring. She writes of a desperate struggle to communicate with a critically ill patient who only speaks Mandarin, of a doctor whose experience in the NICU leaves her paralyzed with PTSD, and of her own struggles with the fear of making fatal errors, the dangers of overconfidence, and the impossible attempts to balance the empathy necessary for good care with the distance necessary for self-preservation. Through these stories of her patients, colleagues, and her own experiences, Intensive Care offers poignant insight into the medical world, and into the hearts and minds of doctors and their patients. These stories are drawn from the author’s previous books.

This book examines the phenomenon of physician-authors. Focusing on the books that contemporary doctors write--the stories that they tell--with contributors critically engaging their work. A selection of original chapters from leading scholars in medical and health humanities analyze the literary output of doctors, including Oliver Sacks, Danielle Ofri, Atul Gawande, Louise Aronson, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Abraham Verghese. Discussing issues of moral meaning in the works of contemporary doctor-writers, from memoir to poetry, this collection reflects some of the diversity of medicine today. A key reference for all students and scholars of medical and health humanities, the book will be especially useful for those interested in the relationship between literature and practising medicine.

A NATION IN DISTRESS America has enjoyed an enviable life. Yet, in recent years, there have been unmistakable signs of chronic illness. Our economic progress has fallen off its once-blistering pace, our ability to shape world events has been checked, and our vaunted democratic institutions have begun to collapse around us. America is ailing. Now, here we are, nearly forty years into a chronic illness that has resisted our best efforts at diagnosis. Is this the cancer of our advancing age? The long, slow, terminal decline that will defy the best approaches of modern Medicine? Our fitful end? Not necessarily. In the past four decades, American hospitals have garnered principles of safety from the aviation industry, gathered tips about quality from automobile manufacturers, and gleaned insights into customer service from the hotel trade. These interstellar innovations launched American healthcare into a continuously self-improving model of advancing performance. As such, the world of Medicine has valuable assets to offer the political multiverse: A culture of excellence. Intellectual tools to diagnose and treat difficult problems. A systematic approach that guides almost everything we say and do, yet is seldom employed in the chambers of government. And now it is time to pay it forward. In this collection of riveting stories from patient narratives and leadership challenges - from heartbreaking tales of AIDS, to a harrowing evacuation during Superstorm Sandy, to the exhilarating conquest of Ebola - Dr. Nate Link translates a lifetime of experience into useful lessons for our nation's leaders. To review these examples, he takes us to the bedside of his most memorable cases. We will learn from Natalie, the well-meaning ICU nurse who ignored the ventilator alarm, Juan, the irrepressible AIDS patient who had nine lives, Gerry, the bemused accountant whose brain could not store new memories, and Thomas, the accidental tourist who was raised from the dead. Two dozen other notable patients will teach us additional lessons in leadership. In the final chapter, our lessons will jointly lead us to a most unexpected conclusion and a prescription for the cure of our nation's mysterious malady. Dr. Link is the Chief Medical Officer of Bellevue, America's oldest public hospital, and has practiced there since arriving as a lowly intern at the onset of the AIDS epidemic. He earned his MD from Washington University School of Medicine in 1983, then completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at NYU School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital in 1986. Dr. Link was Co-Chief Editor of the "Bellevue Guide to Outpatient Medicine," winner of the American Medical Writers Association award as Book of the Year for Physicians in 2001.

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a riveting history of New York's iconic public hospital that charts the turbulent rise of American medicine. Bellevue Hospital, on New York City's East Side, occupies a colorful and horrifying place in the public imagination: a den of mangled crime victims, vicious psychopaths, assorted derelicts, lunatics, and exotic-disease sufferers. In its two and a half centuries of service, there was hardly an epidemic or social catastrophe—or groundbreaking scientific advance—that did not touch Bellevue. David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution. From its origins in 1738 as an almshouse and pesthouse, Bellevue today is a revered public hospital bringing first-class care to anyone in need. With its diverse, ailing, and unprotesting patient population, the hospital was a natural laboratory for the nation's first clinical research. It treated tens of thousands of Civil War soldiers, launched the first civilian ambulance corps and the first nursing school for women, pioneered medical photography and psychiatric treatment, and spurred New York City to establish the country's first official Board of Health. As medical technology advanced, "voluntary" hospitals began to seek out patients willing to pay for their care. For charity cases, it was left to Bellevue to fill the void. The latter decades of the twentieth century brought rampant crime, drug addiction, and homelessness to the nation's struggling cities—problems that called a public hospital's very survival into question. It took the AIDS crisis to cement Bellevue's enduring place as New York's ultimate safety net, the iconic hospital of last resort. Lively, page-turning, fascinating, Bellevue is essential American history.