Focused on Botswana's only dedicated oncology ward, Improvising Medicine renders the experiences of patients, their relatives, and clinical staff during a cancer epidemic.

Deliver quality healthcare in the most challenging field conditions Full of practical clinical pearls and proven strategies, this indispensible guide shows you how to operate outside your comfort zone and devise effective treatment solutions when the traditional tools (medications, equipment, and staff) are unavailable—or when you need to provide care outside of your specialty. Improvised Medicine is a must for anyone who plans to work in global, disaster, or other resource-poor settings. FEATURES: Simple-to-follow directions, diagrams, and illustrations describe practical techniques and the improvised equipment necessary to provide quality care during crises. Contains improvisations in anesthesia and airway management, dentistry, gynecology/obstetrics, infectious disease/laboratory diagnosis, internal medicine, otolaryngology, pediatrics and malnutrition, orthopedics, psychiatry, and surgery. Also includes basic disaster communication techniques, post-disaster forensics, a model hospital disaster plan, and innovative patient-transport methods. LEARN HOW TO: Make an endotracheal tube in seconds Perform digital-oral and blind-nasotracheal intubations Make plaster bandages for splints/casts Give open-drop ether, ketamine drips, and halothane Use subcutaneous/intraperitoneal rehydration/transfusion Make ORS and standard nutrition formulas Clean, disinfect, and sterilize equipment for reuse Warm blood units in seconds inexpensively Take/view stereoscopic x-rays with standard equipment Quickly and easily stop postpartum hemorrhage Fashion surgical equipment from common items Evacuate patients easily for high-rise hospitals Make esophageal and precordial stethoscopes Quickly improvise a saline lock Make ECG electrode/defibrillator pads and ultrasound gel

An ambitious and shocking exposé of America’s hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadow In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic. Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America’s rubber empire. Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war. A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present.

The ability to improvise represents one of the highest levels of musical achievement. Yet what musical knowledge is 3equired for improvisation? How does a musician learn to improvise? What are the neural correlates of improvised performance? These are some of the questions explored in this unique and fascinating new book.

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa were once dismissed by Western experts as being too poor and chaotic to benefit from the antiretroviral drugs that transformed the AIDS epidemic in the United States and Europe. Today, however, the region is courted by some of the most prestigious research universities in the world as they search for "resource-poor" hospitals in which to base their international HIV research and global health programs. In Scrambling for Africa, Johanna Tayloe Crane reveals how, in the space of merely a decade, Africa went from being a continent largely excluded from advancements in HIV medicine to an area of central concern and knowledge production within the increasingly popular field of global health science. Drawing on research conducted in the U.S. and Uganda during the mid-2000s, Crane provides a fascinating ethnographic account of the transnational flow of knowledge, politics, and research money—as well as blood samples, viruses, and drugs. She takes readers to underfunded Ugandan HIV clinics as well as to laboratories and conference rooms in wealthy American cities like San Francisco and Seattle where American and Ugandan experts struggle to forge shared knowledge about the AIDS epidemic. The resulting uncomfortable mix of preventable suffering, humanitarian sentiment, and scientific ambition shows how global health research partnerships may paradoxically benefit from the very inequalities they aspire to redress. A work of outstanding interdisciplinary scholarship, Scrambling for Africa will be of interest to audiences in anthropology, science and technology studies, African studies, and the medical humanities.

Based on Dr. Auerbach’s renowned Wilderness Medicine text, Field Guide to Wilderness Medicine, 5th Edition, is your portable, authoritative guide to the full range of medical and emergency situations that occur in non-traditional settings. Useful for experienced physicians as well as advanced practice providers, this unique medical guide covers an indispensable range of topics in a well-illustrated, highly condensed format – in print or on any mobile device – for quick access anytime, anywhere. An easy-access presentation ensures rapid retrieval and comprehension of wilderness medical information, with "Signs and Symptoms" and "Treatment" sections, bulleted lists, and quick-reference text boxes in every chapter. All chapters are thoroughly up to date, including new information on travel medicine, medications, immunizations, and field treatment of common conditions. Step-by-step explanations from wilderness medicine experts cover the clinical presentation and treatment of a full range of wilderness emergencies and show you how to improvise with available materials. Comprehensive coverage includes dive medicine and water-related emergencies, mountain medicine and wilderness survival, global humanitarian relief and disaster medicine, high-altitude medicine, pain management, and much more. Line drawings and color plates help you quickly an accurately identify skin manifestations, plants, poisonous mushrooms, snakes, insects, and more. Useful appendices address everything from environment-specific situations to lists of essential supplies, medicines, and many additional topics of care.

In this unusual volume, Bradford Keeney depicts psychotherapy as a performing art. Emphasizing the advantages of improvising one's own therapeutic style, he presents a host of tried-and-true strategic interventions, a short course on brief intervention design, a way of "scoring' conversations with clients much like one would score music, a collection of therapeutic moves, and chapters on creating one's own clinical design. As such, IMPROVISATIONAL THERAPY is a book that will be valued by all who do clinical work.

In a work that spans the twentieth century, Nancy Tomes questions the popular--and largely unexamined--idea that in order to get good health care, people must learn to shop for it. Remaking the American Patient explores the consequences of the consumer economy and American medicine having come of age at exactly the same time. Tracing the robust development of advertising, marketing, and public relations within the medical profession and the vast realm we now think of as "health care," Tomes considers what it means to be a "good" patient. As she shows, this history of the coevolution of medicine and consumer culture tells us much about our current predicament over health care in the United States. Understanding where the shopping model came from, why it was so long resisted in medicine, and why it finally triumphed in the late twentieth century helps explain why, despite striking changes that seem to empower patients, so many Americans remain unhappy and confused about their status as patients today.

In most places on the African continent, multiple health care options exist and patients draw on a therapeutic continuum that ranges from traditional medicine and religious healing to the latest in biomedical technology. The ethnographically based essays in this volume highlight African ways of perceiving sickness, making sense of and treating suffering, and thinking about health care to reveal the range and practice of everyday medicine in Africa through historical, political, and economic contexts.

"Will ever-more sensitive screening tests for cancer lead to longer, better lives? Will anticipating and trying to prevent the future complications of chronic disease lead to better health? Not always, says Robert Aronowitz. In fact, it often is hurting us... Drawing on such controversial examples as HPV vaccines, cancer screening programs, and the cancer survivorship movement, Aronowitz demonstrates that patients and their doctors have come to believe, perilously, that far too many medical interventions are worthwhile because they promise to control our fears and reduce uncertainty." -- Taken from book flyleaf.