Medical Related Non-Fiction

An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back is a book on the American healthcare system by Elisabeth Rosenthal. The author explains how our system of healthcare went from a caring endeavor to a convoluted and highly profitable industry in a few short decades. Rosenthal breaks down this behemoth system into its various components--hospitals, doctors, and insurance and pharmaceutical companies. She discusses how hospital systems that are managed by business executives act like predatory lenders and hound patients and seize their homes. Patients receive coded bills from doctors they never saw. Research charities get into bed with pharmaceutical companies and surreptitiously profit from the donations made by hard working people in good faith. Rosenthal offers hope by spelling out exactly how we can decode medical double speak, avoid the perils of the pharmaceutical scheme, and get the care you and your loved ones deserve.

Inferno: A Doctor's Ebola Story is by Steven Hatch, M.D. As an infectious disease specialist, Dr. Hatch came to Liberia in November 2013 to work at a hospital in Monrovia. Six months later, several of the physicians he had served with were dead or unable to work and Ebola had become an international worry. Hatch returned with the aid organization International Medical Corps to help establish and Ebola Treatment Unit. In this hastily built structure in the middle of the jungle, he witnessed the selfless care given by the unit's physicians, nurses, and other caregivers. He explores this deadly virus as well as the afflicted country of Liberia to reveal how the Ebola outbreak stoked anxieties that were exploited for political gain around the world. He discusses how generations of inequality left Liberia vulnerable to this crisis and how similar circumstances could fuel another plague elsewhere. Hatch feels that by understanding and alleviating these stressors, another outbreak in other countries could be curtailed more quickly.

A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa is by Tony Bartelme. Dr. Dilan Ellegala goes to Tanzania and is shocked to find that there are only three brain surgeons for its population of forty-two million people. In Haydom Lutheran Hospital, even the most basic surgical tools are absent, not even a saw to open a patient's skull can be found. Here, people with head injuries or brain tumors are left to heal on their own or die. Dr. Ellegala is confronted with a villager suffering from severe head trauma, so he takes it upon himself to buy a tree saw from a farmer, sterilize it, and then uses it to save the man's life. Ellegala realizes that there are far too many neurosurgery patients for a single person to save and he will soon be leaving Tanzania. The only solution is to teach someone the skills necessary to perform these complicated and dangerous procedures. He finds his first potential student in Emmanuel Mayegga. Though he has no formal medical degree, Mayegga is a stubborn and determined medical officer who possesses the dexterity and intelligence to do brain surgery. As he guides the Tanzanians in their studies, he also challenges the Western medical establishment to do more than send vacationing doctors on short-term medical missions. He offers a solution that could potentially transform the care of more than two billion people around the world.