Amphibians are the extant descendants of the first vertebrate class to successfully colonize terrestrial environments; hence they occupy a unique position between fish and reptiles. Amphibian skin provides essentially no resistance to evaporative water loss, and consequently daily water turnover rates are an order of magnitude greater than in other terrestrial vertebrate groups. This has led to a suite of physiological, morphological and behavioural adaptations that have allowed a successful terrestrial existence in spite of this apparently spendthrift water retention strategy.
Ecological and Environmental Physiology of Amphibians provides a synthesis of current research on the comparative physiology of amphibians with a particular emphasis on water balance. It adopts a strong environmental perspective and includes a wealth of information on ecology, phylogeny and development. As with other books in the Ecological and Environmental Physiology Series, the emphasis in this book is on the unique physiological characteristics of the amphibians, although the latest experimental techniques and future research directions are also considered. This accessible text is suitable for both graduate students and researchers in the fields of amphibian comparative physiology and physiological ecology, including specialist courses in amphibian ecology. It will also be of value and use to the many professional herpetologists requiring a concise overview of the topic.

Disability studies has gone from being a relatively unknown field to one of increasing importance in the social sciences. The sixth edition of The Disability Studies Reader brings in new topics, scholars, writers, artists, and essays to address links between ableism and imperialism; disability bioethics; and the relationship between disability agency, social policy, and decarceration. There are as many meanings and experiences of disability as there are disabled people, and this diversity ensures that the work of the field will continue to evolve. Fully revised and brought up to date, this volume addresses a wider range of geographical and cultural contexts, and many pay specific attention to the intersections between disability and race, gender, and sexuality. The growing interest and activism around the issue of neuroatypicality is also reflected in a new section on neurodivergence. The Disability Studies Reader remains an excellent touchstone for students in disability studies courses across the disciplines, including the social sciences, English literature, and psychology.

This book offers an antidote to the "medicalization" of health care and observes the special needs of socioeconomically disadvantaged persons with respect to health. It is useful for practitioners in the fields of mental health, family and child welfare, gerontology, and industrial practice.

Psychiatric Pharmacogenomics is a book written to help clinicians to use pharmacogenomic testing to improve the pharmacotherapy that they provide for their patients. It is designed to teach clinicians how to order pharmacogenomic tests and interpret the results. Clinical examples are used to underscore the specific indications for pharmacogenomic testing and to clarify the clinical usefulness of identifying atypical genotypes that result in problematic responses to medication.
The first section of the book begins with a basic review of molecular genetics. Additionally, the book also includes an extensive glossary of technical terms associated with molecular genetics and pharmacogenomics. The clinical utility of pharmacogenomic testing is demonstrated throughout the book by describing the implications of genetic variations for the care of individual patients.
The second section of the book is organized into fourteen chapters that each focus on the clinical implications of testing for specific genes for which variants have been associated with either therapeutic response or side effects of psychotropic medications. Each of these chapters is structured in the same manner and involves a description of the gene and its significant variants. Each chapter also includes one or more clinical vignettes.
The third section of the book discusses the clinical usefulness of pharmacogenomic testing, ethical issues associated with pharmacogenomic testing, and provides predictions for the future development of more sophisticated pharmacogenomic testing.

Tourette syndrome (TS) is finally recognized as a common neurodevelopmental disorder, and has gained increasingly high social awareness and scientific interest worldwide. Knowledge of its clinical presentation, mechanisms of disease, and available treatment approaches has increased remarkably over the last decade. Likewise, the way clinicians, teachers, social care workers and families face the problems manifested by patients with TS is rapidly evolving. Tourette Syndrome, edited by Davide Martino and James F. Leckman, offers a unique opportunity to capture this interesting momentum through a comprehensive and up-to-date overview. Tourette Syndrome covers all of the main aspects related to TS, analyzing the complexity of its clinical presentation, the novel viewpoints of causes and mechanisms, the best way to assess TS patients, and the multifaceted and multidisciplinary treatment options. The multidisciplinary and up-to-date content is the main asset of this volume, which represents a useful source of consultation for a wide audience of professionals, all of whom will have access to what is known so far on TS within their particular area of expertise, at the same time being able to expand and update their knowledge in other areas. Medical and PhD students, as well as post-doctoral scientists, will be able to use the volume as a valuable learning source. Also, questions for future research are clearly presented in the volume, providing a summary of the viewpoint of the contributing authors upon where research on TS should be heading. Finally, clinicians and other health professionals will have access at a glance to the main patients' associations and organizations dedicated to TS worldwide, which can facilitate the direct contact with patients.

Written and edited by experts in medical interview skills, this book takes you through all the important aspects of CT, ST and Registrar interviews and will give you a unique insight into the marking schemes. Through the detailed analysis of 120 medical interview questions, techniques and hot topics, you will gain an invaluable insight into a wide range of common medical interview topics such as: - How to talk about your motivation, your skills, experience, strengths and weaknesses. - How to demonstrate your understanding and experience of clinical governance, audit, research and teaching. - How to deal with difficult ethical dilemmas on confidentiality and consent. - How to handle a wide array of difficult colleagues. - How to handle role plays, presentations, group discussions and other communication interview stations. This book gives you all the effective structures and appropriate power words you need to strengthen your answers, ensuring that you come across as a trustworthy, credible and knowledgeable candidate.

Dagmar Wujastyk explores the moral discourses on the practice of medicine in the foundational texts of Ayurveda. The classical ayurvedic treatises were composed in Sanskrit between the first and the fifth centuries CE, and the later works, dating into the sixteenth century CE, were still considered strongly authoritative. As Wujastyk shows, these works testify to an elaborate system of medical ethics and etiquette. Physicians looked to the ayurvedic treatises for a guide to professional conduct. Ayurvedic discourses on good medical practice depict the physician as highly-educated, skilled, moral, and well-mannered. The rules of conduct positioned physicians within mainstream society's and characterized medical practice as a trustworthy and socially acceptable profession. At the same time, professional success was largely based on a particular physician's ability to cure his patients. This resulted in tension, as some treatments and medications were considered socially or religiously unacceptable. Doctors needed to treat their patients successfully while ostensibly following the rules of acceptable behavior. Wujastyk offers insight into the many unorthodox methods of avoiding conflict while ensuring patient compliance shown in the ayurvedic treatises, giving a disarmingly candid perspective on the realities of medical practice and its crucial role in a profoundly well-mannered society.

This ambitious volume, worldwide in scope and ranging from antiquity to the present, examines the human encounter with Unreason in all its manifestations, the challenges it poses to society and our responses to it. In twelve chapters organized chronologically from the Bible to Freud, from exorcism to mesmerism, from Bedlam to Victorian asylums, from the theory of humours to modern pharmacology, Andrew Scull writes compellingly about madness, its meanings, its consequences and our attempts to understand and treat it.

When we think of yoga today, we envision spandex-clad, perspiring, toned people brought together in a room filled with yoga mats and engaged in a fitness ritual set apart from day-to-day life. Their aim is to enhance something they all deem sacred: their bodies. In Selling Yoga, Andrea Jain looks at the development of modern, popular yoga and suggests that its practitioners are strategic participants in the contemporary global market for self-developmental products and services. Pre-colonial and early modern yoga systems comprise esoteric techniques that aim at transcendent states of detachment from ordinary and conventional life. In contrast, contemporary popularized yoga aims at immediate self-development through the enhancement of the mind-body complex according to dominant health and fitness paradigms. Postural yoga is prescribed not as an all-encompassing worldview or system of practice, but as one part of self-development that provides increased beauty and flexibility as well as reduced stress; it can be combined with various other worldviews and practices available in the global marketplace. However, Jain argues that yoga systems cannot be reduced to mere commodities-that yoga is, in fact, a religion of consumer culture. It functions as a social ritual that removes individuals from everyday life for the sake of self-development. Yoga brands destabilize the basic utility of yoga commodities and assign to them new meanings that represent the fulfillment of self-developmental needs deemed sacred in contemporary consumer culture.

Nursing Informatics: Scope and Standards of Practice describes a competent level of nursing care at each level of nursing informatics practice and provides comprehensive overviews of the dynamic and complex practice of the nursing informatics specialty. Published by ANA, this book is informed by advances in health care and professional nursing practice. It contains national standards of practice and performance that define the who, what, where, when, why, and how of nursing informatics practice and is a vital reference for: Quality improvement initiatives Certification and credentialing Position descriptions and performance appraisals Classroom teaching and in-service education programs Boards of nursing members' orientation programs and regulatory decision-making activities Nursing Informatics: Scope and Standards of Practice is intended to guide nurses, as well as administrators, legislators, regulators, legal counsel, and other interprofessional colleagues.

The Ethics of Sport explores moral issues that arise in sports, especially competitive athletics, in a manner that is accessible not only to sports fans or participants but also to those critical of sports or simply interested in an introduction to the kind of moral issues raised by the practice of athletics. The issues considered range from the more abstract, such as the importance that should be assigned to winning in sports, to specific controversies such as arguments over the use of performance enhancing drugs, the nature of gender equity, and the evaluation of violence in competition. The book explores different sides of these issues and suggests reasonable resolutions to the kinds of ethical questions prevalent in the practice of sports.

This book examines questions of medical accountability and ethics. It analyses how the criminal justice system regulates health care practice, and to what extent it can and should be used as a tool to resolve ethical conflict in health care. For most of the twentieth century, criminal courts were engaged in matters relating to medicine principally as a forum to resolve ethical controversies over the sanctity of life. However, the judiciary approached this function with reluctance and a marked tendency to defer to the medical profession to define what constituted ethical, and thus lawful, conduct. However, over the past 25 years, criminal courts have increasingly been drawn into these types of question, and the criminal law has become a major actor in the resolution of ethical conflict. The trend to prosecute for aberrant professional conduct or medical malpractice and the role of the criminal process in medicine has been analytically neglected in the UK. There is scant literature addressing the appropriate boundaries of the criminal process in resolving ethical conflict, the theoretical legal analysis of the law's relationship with health care, or the practical impact of the criminal justice system on professionals and the delivery of health care in the UK. This volume addresses these issues via a combination of theoretical analyses and key case studies, drawing on the experiences of other carefully selected jurisdictions. It places a particular emphasis on the appropriateness of the involvement of the criminal justice system in health care, the limitations of this developing trend, and solutions to the problems it throws up. The book takes euthanasia as a primary example of the issues raised by the intersection of health care and the criminal law, and questions whether health care issues appropriately fall within the remit of the criminal justice system.

DMSO A True Wonder Drug

DMSO is a natural chemical compound derived from trees as a by-product from paper manufacturing. DMSO has been called a new medical principle and a true wonder drug. It has proven effective, either by itself or in combination with other products in the treatment of nearly every ailment known.

There has been much controversy about DMSO over the last 50 years. It is one of the most studied medical products ever. Thousands of scientific articles have been written about DMSO. When used properly it is one of the safest products know. It is also very cheap to produce.

This book provides the documentation needed to show that DMSO is probably the most important product ever for the relief of human suffering.

****** Archie is quite clearly a leading authorithy on DMSO. He has extensive knowledge and experience regarding the clinical benefits of DMSO treatment. For decades, Archie has studied and worked with DMSO. He understands the safety, utility and efficaciousness of DMSO. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in health, especially for those who want to learn more about non toxic medical therapies. For individuals with certain health ailments, DMSO could prove quite benefical. -Daniel Junck, MD

Heart failure occurs in almost epidemic proportions, placing a huge burden on both the healthcare system, and sufferers and their families. This can only rise over coming years as the ageing population, particularly in industrialized countries, increasingly suffers from heart failure and its related comorbidities. The care of this group of patients has evolved significantly over recent years as our knowledge and understanding of the pathophysiology of heart failure has developed. It has become evident that supportive care is integral to comprehensive heart failure care, and this book provides an evidence-based overview of heart failure aetiology, its management, and the supportive care required by patients throughout the course of their disease. Supportive Care in Heart Failure integrates the complexities of heart failure care, bridging knowledge bases from cardiology and cardiothoracic surgery, general medicine and palliative care. The book reviews essential information about epidemiology and pathophysiology of heart failure, and evidence-based medical, device, surgical and interdisciplinary management. It addresses the evaluation and management of quality of life, common symptoms and problems associated with heart failure, and the holistic approach to supportive care throughout the course of the illness through the end of life. Prognostication, communication, and ethical decision making are reviewed in detail. Heart failure has traditionally presented a challenge to physicians, as a generally progressive condition with significant symptoms, a poor quality of life, and high mortality. But by applying the principles of palliative medicine, it is possible to offer a supportive care approach that synthesizes the experience of both the heart failure specialist and the palliative care physician, and offers the best possible quality of care to this group of patients.

This conveniently sized guide is an invaluable point of reference for all who travel and take part in outdoor, wilderness and mountain activities. Written by doctors with a wealth of wilderness specific experience, it provides a comprehensive summary of wilderness first aid and medicine - that is, managing accident or illness in remote locations without immediate access to help - giving you confidence in your ability to deal with any situation that may arise. All topics are clearly referenced and easy to find, with chapters covering preparation, prevention, accident protocol, diagnosis, treatment and evacuation. From life-threatening emergencies to broken bones and sprains, infectious diseases, food poisoning, envenomation and respiratory problems, the book sets out all the crucial protocol and procedures to follow. It covers a wide range of different environments, including high altitude, desert, polar, tropical and marine, dealing with risk management and a variety of different scenarios. In addition, suggestions for first-aid kits and lists of medications and antibiotics (with dosage) can be found in the appendices.

Journalist Elissa Strauss explores the powerful role caring for others plays in our individual and communal lives, weaving together research and stories from parents and caregivers with a feminist bent.

Behind our current caregiving crisis, in which a broken system has left parents and caregivers exhausted, sits a fierce addiction to independence. But what would happen if we started to appreciate dependency, and the deep meaning of one person caring for another? If we start to care about care?

With a curiosity and desire to understand more fully one of humanity's most profound and essential relationships, journalist Elissa Strauss she interrogates our societal obsession with going it alone and poses a challenge to let ourselves be transformed by the act of caregiving. When You Care weaves historical anecdotes and science with conversations with parents and caregivers to the young, old, disabled, ill, and more, revealing a rich array of insights about how care shapes us on the inside and the outside, for the better.

Care is a long-ignored force in our collective and political lives, as well as a deeply philosophical, spiritual, and psychologically potent experience. Moreso, an embrace of care by both women and men will lead to a more gender equitable future and help us reimagine what it means to be productive and live a meaningful life.