This book is about pleasure. It's also about pain. Most important, it's about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential.

We're living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting... The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we've all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption.

In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain...and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.

Consumption was the deadliest, most common disease that mankind has faced up till now. Three billion people in Europe and North America died between the fourteenth and the end of the eighteenth century. It was a death sentence with no known cause which led to the development of unusual empirical therapies. Lucky Consumptive patients reached a Sanatorium. Sanatoria were developed to house sick patients in an environment where they stood the best chance of recovery from their illness. There was no organised healthcare system and funding for a Sanatorium depended upon provision provided by wealthy individuals, or societies. Charles Dunnell Rudd was a Cape Merchant who had made a fortune in South Africa successfully prospecting for Gold and Diamonds. His mother had died from Consumption and he wished to invest some of his money in building a Sanatorium. It had been shown that Consumptive patients survived longer if they took vigorous exercise, slept out of doors, and were nursed on higher land near to forests. Rudd anonymously purchased raised land at Northwood for this purpose. Helena (later Princess Christian) was Queen Victoria's third daughter, and had a marked social awareness, arranging charitable meals for the less fortunate. She was very hard working and became the Principal Patron for Mount Vernon Hospital, donating money and attending annual fundraising Festival Dinners. Contemporary photographs from this period show female patients walking around the grounds and occupying designated rest shelters. The male patients had a more vigorous lifestyle, working in the gardens and sleeping in their beds out of doors. Those surviving often acquired new skills which might enhance their future employment prospects. These measures greatly improved the prognosis for consumptive patients. After Koch discovered the Tubercle Bacillus effective curative anti-tuberculous therapy evolved.

The definitive story of COVID-19 and how global politics shape our health - from a world-leading expert and the pandemic's go-to science communicator

Professor Devi Sridhar has risen to prominence for her vital roles in communicating science to the public and speaking truth to power. In Preventable she highlights lessons learned from outbreaks past and present in a narrative that traces the COVID-19 pandemic - including her personal experience as a scientist - and sets out a vision for how we can better protect ourselves from the inevitable health crises to come.

In gripping and heartfelt prose, Sridhar exposes the varied realities of those affected and puts you in the room with key decision makers at crucial moments. She vibrantly conveys the twists and turns of a plot that saw: deadlier varients emerge (contrary to the predictions of social media pundits who argued it would mutate to a milder form); countries with weak health systems like Senegal and Vietnam fare better than countries like the US and UK (which were consistently ranked as the most prepared); and the quickest development of game-changing vaccines in history (and their unfair distribution)

Combining science, politics, ethics and economics, this definitive book dissects the global structures that determine our fate, and reveals the deep-seated economic and social inequalities at their heart - it will challenge, outrage and inspire.

The book describes Dr. Sevelius' long career as medical scientist, pursuing specifically what can be learned from a radiocardiogram (RCG), the recording through the skin of the heart flow, the cardiac output (CO), the most fundamental of all body functions. The RCG has been slow in acceptance in clinical medicine. One worry has been the radiation. The radiation is approximately one-third that of a chest x-ray and should be of minor concern with proper education. Another difficulty is how to interpret the results. Other techniques for CO measurements have had similar problems, not because the techniques were wrong but because the interpretation was based on wrong premises with too wide a standard deviation for proper diagnosis in clinical work.Dr. Sevelius introduces two new assessments: hemodynamic and metabolic. With these interpretations the heart as a pump is first judged according to the size of simultaneously measured blood volume it has to pump and second, separately, as to how large a body the heart has to supply with oxygen. The hemodynamic evaluation of the heart flow is found to be a good predictor to a within six-month pending heart attack. This would make the RCG an exceptionally simple and useful tool for diagnosis in clinical medicine.This book collects Dr. Sevelius' work in digital format to make it easily available. It is Dr. Sevelius' hope that his work will inspire some young scientists to follow up his work because of its wide application in modern medicine.

Medicine has, until recently, been slow to adapt to information technologies and systems for many reasons, but the future lies therein. Innovations in Data Methodologies and Computational Algorithms for Medical Applications offers the most cutting-edge research in the field, offering insights into case studies and methodologies from around the world. The text details the latest developments and will serve as a vital resource to practitioners and academics alike in the burgeoning field of medical applications of technologies. As security and privacy improve, Electronic Health Records and informatics in the medical field are becoming ubiquitous, and staying abreast of the latest information can be difficult. This volume serves as a reference handbook and theoretical framework for the future of the field.

Landmark Papers in Cardiovascular Medicine provides a thorough and wide-ranging analysis of core examples of novel research, clinical trials and seminal papers published in the medical literature that have paved the way for breakthroughs in the management of the entire spectrum of cardiovascular disease. These papers may have produced positive, negative or equivocal findings but are regarded by the experts as having either stimulated a paradigm shift in therapeutic strategy or been the catalyst for new and improved methods of research, diagnosis or drug development. Our aim is to provide both a benchmark and inspiration for future work in the field of cardiovascular medicine and also to give the reader an insight into the mechanics and infrastructure of how high-quality evidence-based medicine has been produced. Each trial summary is punctuated by sections on 'strengths and limitations', 'impact on the field', 'learning points' and 'further reading' suggestions that allow for a completely holistic analysis of the data. The experts also give their views on what research is currently underway, their hopes for the future and what advances they predict will occur in each subspecialty field of cardiovascular medicine, making this book essential reading for all those individuals with an interest in the field.