“Alan Cassels strips layers of expectation, hype, jargon, false-starts, and conflicts of interest off the medical screening mantra.” —Nortin M. Hadler, author of Worried Sick Why wouldn’t you want to be screened to see if you’re at risk for cancer, heart disease, or another potentially lethal condition? After all, better safe than sorry. Right? Not so fast, says Alan Cassels. His Seeking Sickness takes us inside the world of medical screening, where well-meaning practitioners and a profit-motivated industry offer to save our lives by exploiting our fears. He writes that promoters of screening overpromise on its benefits and downplay its harms, which can range from the merely annoying to the life threatening. If you’re facing a screening test for breast or prostate cancer, high cholesterol, or low testosterone, someone is about to turn you into a patient. You need to ask yourself one simple question: Am I ready for all the things that could go wrong? “With engaging clarity backed by academic rigor, Cassels discusses a variety of popular investigational procedures . . . an excellent way to start the important process of self-education.” —Quill & Quire “Smartly written and very readable.” —Brian Goldman, MD, author of The Secret Language of Doctors “Cassels tackles this touchy topic, looking at it test by test. His overarching message is that modern medicine has ‘overpromised’ with claims that screening will save our lives. He contends that with the lack of hard evidence on benefits, the evidence of harm from by such screening, as well as the multi-billion dollar interests at stake, we should approach this kind of screening with great precaution.” —Canadian Women’s Health Network

Estimates indicate that as many as 1 in 4 Americans will experience a mental health problem or will misuse alcohol or drugs in their lifetimes. These disorders are among the most highly stigmatized health conditions in the United States, and they remain barriers to full participation in society in areas as basic as education, housing, and employment. Improving the lives of people with mental health and substance abuse disorders has been a priority in the United States for more than 50 years. The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 is considered a major turning point in America's efforts to improve behavioral healthcare. It ushered in an era of optimism and hope and laid the groundwork for the consumer movement and new models of recovery. The consumer movement gave voice to people with mental and substance use disorders and brought their perspectives and experience into national discussions about mental health. However over the same 50-year period, positive change in American public attitudes and beliefs about mental and substance use disorders has lagged behind these advances. Stigma is a complex social phenomenon based on a relationship between an attribute and a stereotype that assigns undesirable labels, qualities, and behaviors to a person with that attribute. Labeled individuals are then socially devalued, which leads to inequality and discrimination. This report contributes to national efforts to understand and change attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that can lead to stigma and discrimination. Changing stigma in a lasting way will require coordinated efforts, which are based on the best possible evidence, supported at the national level with multiyear funding, and planned and implemented by an effective coalition of representative stakeholders. Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders: The Evidence for Stigma Change explores stigma and discrimination faced by individuals with mental or substance use disorders and recommends effective strategies for reducing stigma and encouraging people to seek treatment and other supportive services. It offers a set of conclusions and recommendations about successful stigma change strategies and the research needed to inform and evaluate these efforts in the United States.

"... For six months in 1980 and for three months in 1981 I lived in Samoan villages and studied healing practices. I observed and interviewed both traditional healers and western trained health professionals in Western Samoa. Now, based on my experiences both in New Zealand and in Western Samoa, I present some of my insights -- gained from observation, interview, group discussions and reflection -- as they relate to the New Zealand scene ... The book should be read as an introduction to cross-cultureal communication and health as well as to Samoan and to other non-western health practices. Enough information is provided so that western health professionals can have a sensible conversation with their Samoan patients, and vice versa. Some health professionals will, I hope, stop to reflect on the existence of cultural differences in talking health and in doing sickness. Where a western health professional reads this book and reflects on the nature of medical practice and the usage/provision of health care and begins to talk about western ways of doing sickness as only one possible way, a breakthrough will have occurred. This would amount to the recognition that what it means to be sick is culturally defined, that medical treatment and health services are cultural practices and culturally specific forms ..." -- Introduction.

In this hard-hitting indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, Ray Moynihan and Allan Cassels show how drug companies are systematically using their dominating influence in the world of medical science, drug companies are working to widen the very boundaries that define illness. Mild problems are redefined as serious illness, and common complaints are labeled as medical conditions requiring drug treatments. Runny noses are now allergic rhinitis, PMS has become a psychiatric disorder, and hyperactive children have ADD. Selling Sickness reveals how expanding the boundaries of illness and lowering the threshold for treatments is creating millions of new patients and billions in new profits, in turn threatening to bankrupt national healthcare systems all over the world. This Canadian edition includes an introduction placing the issue in a Canadian context and describing why Canadians should be concerned about the problem.

Seeing Sickness takes us inside the world of medical screening, where well-meaning practitioners and a profit-motivated industry offer to save our lives by exploiting our fears. Author Alan Cassels writes that promoters of screening overcompromise on its benefits and downplay its harms. If you're facing screening for breast or prostate cancer, high cholesterol, or low testosterone, someone is about to turn you into a patient. You need to ask yourself one question: Am I ready for all the things that could go wrong? [From back cover].

A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast? Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.

Evolution of Sickness and Healing is a theoretical work on the grand scale, an original synthesis of many disciplines in social studies of medicine. Looking at human sickness and healing through the lens of evolutionary theory, Horacio Fàbrega, Jr. presents not only the vulnerability to disease and injury but also the need to show and communicate sickness and to seek and provide healing as innate biological traits grounded in evolution. This linking of sickness and healing, as inseparable facets of a unique human adaptation developed during the evolution of the hominid line, offers a new vantage point from which to examine the institution of medicine. To show how this complex, integrated adaptation for sickness and healing lies at the root of medicine, and how it is expressed culturally in relation to the changing historical contingencies of human societies, Fàbrega traces the characteristics of sickness and healing through the early and later stages of social evolution. Besides offering a new conceptual structure and a methodology for analyzing medicine in evolutionary terms, he shows the relevance of this approach and its implications for the social sciences and for medical policy. Health scientists and medical practitioners, along with medical historians, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists, now have the opportunity to consider every essential aspect of medicine within an integrated framework. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Evolution of Sickness and Healing is a theoretical work on the grand scale, an original synthesis of many disciplines in social studies of medicine. Looking at human sickness and healing through the lens of evolutionary theory, Horacio Fàbrega, Jr. presents not only the vulnerability to disease and injury but also the need to show and communicate sickness and to seek and provide healing as innate biological traits grounded in evolution. This linking of sickness and healing, as inseparable facets of a unique human adaptation developed during the evolution of the hominid line, offers a new vantage point from which to examine the institution of medicine. To show how this complex, integrated adaptation for sickness and healing lies at the root of medicine, and how it is expressed culturally in relation to the changing historical contingencies of human societies, Fàbrega traces the characteristics of sickness and healing through the early and later stages of social evolution. Besides offering a new conceptual structure and a methodology for analyzing medicine in evolutionary terms, he shows the relevance of this approach and its implications for the social sciences and for medical policy. Health scientists and medical practitioners, along with medical historians, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists, now have the opportunity to consider every essential aspect of medicine within an integrated framework. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

God Wants You Healed!This is a powerful book—so powerful that tens of thousands have been healed just by reading and acting upon the scriptural truths it contains. A living classic that continues to be one of the body of Christ's foremost teachings on healing, Healing the Sick is written in clear, simple language that blesses...