Health Studies

• Siddhartha Mukherjee
• Hardcover; 592 pages
• Simon & Schuster; 2010
• 9781439107959

• Amy Franceschini and Daniel Tucker
• Chronicle Books 2010
• Hardcover, 191 pages
• 9780811867115

• Dan Savage (editor)
• Dutton, 2011
• Hardcover, 352 pages
• 9780525952336

• Mark Vonnegut, M.D.
• Delacorte 2010
• Hardcover, 205 pages
• 9780385343794

• Cardello, Hank
• Harper Collins; 2010
• Paperback; 272 pages
• 9780061896743

For more than thirty years, Hank Cardello was an executive and adviser to some of the largest food and beverage corporations in the world. For more than thirty years, he watched as corporate profits-and America′s waistlines-ballooned: fattening consumers meant fattening profits. Now, in this fascinating and timely book, Cardello offers a behind-the-scenes look at the business of food, providing an insider′s account of food company practices, failed government regulations, and misleading media coverage that have combined to place us in the middle of a national obesity epidemic. With insights culled from Cardello′s time in the food industry, Stuffed explores how food companies have spent the last fifty years largely ignoring healthier fare in the name of their bottom lines while pushing consumers toward "convenience" food and supersize portions without considering the health consequences. From grocery aisles to restaurant booths to boardrooms, Cardello reveals the hidden forces that have long shaped your supermarket purchases and menu selections.He examines the black-and-white mind-set that has producedthe carefully targeted marketing strategies that havemaximized profits for the food industry and led to weight gain for you.

• Gabor Maté, M.D.
• Vintage Canada, 2004
• Paperback, 306 pages
• 9780676973129

In this accessible and groundbreaking book -- filled with the moving stories of real people -- medical doctor and bestselling author of Scattered Minds, Gabor Maté, shows that emotion and psychological stress play a powerful role in the onset of chronic illness. Western medicine achieves spectacular triumphs when dealing with acute conditions such as fractured bones or life-threatening infections. It is less successful against ailments not susceptible to the quick ministrations of scalpel, antibiotic or miracle drug. Trained to consider mind and body separately, physicians are often helpless in arresting the advance of most of the chronic diseases, such as breast cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, and even Alzheimer’s disease.<br><br>Gabor Maté has found that in all of these chronic conditions, there is a common thread: people afflicted by these diseases have led lives of excessive stress, often invisible to the individuals themselves. From an early age, many of us develop a psychological coping style that keeps us out of touch with the signs of stress. So-called negative emotions, particularly anger, are suppressed. Dr. Maté writes with great conviction that knowledge of how stress and disease are connected is essential to prevent illness in the first place, or to facilitate healing.

• Heather Menzies
• Key Porter Books, 2009
• Paperback, 239 pages
• 9781554701551

Heather Menzies led a fairly normal life sandwiched between a demanding career and a busy family typical of her baby-boomer generation. Then the ground shifted. Her aging widowed mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.     Enter Mourning: A Memoir on Death, Dementia, and Coming Home chronicles Menzies’s transformative journey with her mother as words fail and the very nature of communication is redefined. Family dynamics among sisters and brothers come to the fore as the roles and responsibilities of the parent shift to the children: from moving their mother to a seniors' residence to signing a medical power of attorney to the matriarch's physical decline, to her safe passage into death. Menzies and her siblings experience growing old--and growing up--in touching and heart-wrenching ways.    Grounded with personal, intimate photos, Enter Mourning balances poetic and practical sensibilities in its tale of a mother losing her grip on reality and a daughter coming to grips with her own.

• Anne Rochon Ford & Diane Saibil (Eds.)
• Women's Press, 2010
• Paperback, 297 pages
• 9780889614789

In recent years, heated debate has surrounded the pharmaceutical industry and how it has gained unprecedented control over the evaluation, regulation, and promotion of its own products.  As a result, drugs are produced, regulated, marketed, and used in ways that infiltrate many aspects of everyday life. The nature and extent of this infiltration, and how this has special meaning for women, are at the core of The Push to Prescribe.This is an essential resource for a variety of courses in Health Sciences, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacology, Public Policy, Public Health, Health Policy, Women’s Studies, Women’s Health, as well as many Social Science courses in areas like Sociology and Political Science. It will also be of interest to a general audience, health professional organizations, government health associations, and consumer and women’s groups.

• Wendy Chapkis & Richard J. Webb
• New York UP, 2008
• Paperback, 257 pages
• 9780814716670

Marijuana as medicine has been a politically charged topic in this country for more than three decades. Despite overwhelming public support and growing scientific evidence of its therapeutic effects (relief of the nausea caused by chemotherapy for cancer and AIDS, control over seizures or spasticity caused by epilepsy or MS, and relief from chronic and acute pain, to name a few), the drug remains illegal under federal law. In Dying to Get High, noted sociologist Wendy Chapkis and Richard J. Webb investigate one community of seriously-ill patients fighting the federal government for the right to use physician-recommended marijuana. Based in Santa Cruz, California, the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM) is a unique patient-caregiver cooperative providing marijuana free of charge to mostly terminally ill members. For a brief period in 2004, it even operated the only legal non-governmental medical marijuana garden in the country, protected by the federal courts against the DEA.

• Pat Armstrong & Jennifer Deadman (Eds.)
• Womeen's Press, 2008
• Paperback, 290 pages
• 9780889614666

While women comprise the largest segment of health workers, health consumers, and health decision-makers for their families and communities, it has often been difficult for women to make themselves heard. Women's Health focuses on women's health issues from multiple perspectives and draws upon research and practice that include both qualitative and quantitative methodologies in data collection and knowledge formation. Women's Health incorporates work that ha sbeen produced from grass roots investigations of women's health issues and addresses specific health issues, diversity issues, and a variety of issues previously unexplored. In an effort to exemplify alternative forms of knowledge collection, and the importance of inclusiveness, diversity, and realism when understanding the various facets of women's health, Women's Health also highlights the work of women whose voices may not normally be heard or recognized - in a way that stretches beyond the traditional parameters of knowledge-sharing practices.

• Pat Armstrong & Hugh Armstrong
• Oxford UP, 2003
• Paperback, 272 pages
• 9780195417159

Wasting Away is a provocative text that examines and assesses the Canadian health care system. It examines the development of the Canadian health care system, and breaks the analysis down into accessible units: who provides (the institutions and the people); who pays (funding sources); and who decides (public, private, and patients).

• Ian Brown
• Random House Canada, 2009
• Hardcover, 289 pages
• ISBN: 97803087357106

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks). Walker Brown was born with a genetic mutation so rare that doctors call it an orphan syndrome: perhaps 300 people around the world also live with it. Walker turns twelve in 2008, but he weighs only 54 pounds, is still in diapers, can’t speak and needs to wear special cuffs on his arms so that he can’t continually hit himself. “Sometimes watching him,” Brown writes, “is like looking at the man in the moon – but you know there is actually no man there. But if Walker is so insubstantial, why does he feel so important? What is he trying to show me?” In a book that owes its beginnings to Brown’s original Globe and Mail series, he sets out to answer that question, a journey that takes him into deeply touching and troubling territory. “All I really want to know is what goes on inside his off-shaped head,” he writes, “But every time I ask, he somehow persuades me to look into my own.” Ian Brown is an author and a feature writer for The Globe and Mail whose work has won a total of nine Gold National Magazine and National Newspaper awards. He is the host of CBC Radio’s Talking Books, as well as the anchor of TVO’s two documentary series, Human Edge and The View from Here.

• Tilda Shalof
• McClelland & Stewart, 2009
• Hardcover, 289 pages
• ISBN: 9780771079849

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (2-4 weeks). The bestselling, critically acclaimed author of A Nurse’s Story and The Making of a Nurse is back to describe her experiences as a summer camp nurse. After years of working in intensive care units caring for critically ill people, nurse Tilda Shalof now turns her attention to healthy patients — the kids at summer camp. In this reminiscence of six summers at a variety of camps, Shalof opens a window into the world that is a utopia for the vast majority of children, the proverbial “happy campers,” but sometimes also a place of intense misery for a few. <br><br>Throughout the summers, as kids troop through the infirmary with a variety of ordinary — as well as some quite extraordinary — complaints, Shalof describes how she assesses, diagnoses, and treats them all, from pesky lice infestations and scratchy bug bites, to broken arms and severe accidents. But Shalof finds that more often than not, she is treating the psychological maladies. She befriends kids from families going through bitter divorces, girls with eating disorders, a camper who attempts suicide in a desperate plea to be sent home, a teenager grieving the recent death of his father. Whatever the problem or concern, it is to the camp nurse that kids — and counsellors — go for help.

• John Sloan, MD
• Greystone Books, 2009
• Paperback, 252 pages
• ISBN: 9781553654551

What's worse than the failure of the health care system to adequately care for seniors? The fact that it's actually doing them harm. In "A Bitter Pill," Dr. John Sloan investigates the reasons why the medical community is unable to provide lasting health to seniors, concluding that incorrect assumptions have led to the current health crisis among the elderly. In a remarkable argument, Sloan contends that medical measures based in prevention actually do seniors more harm than good, diminishing their current quality of life in the hopes of preventing future disease. Sloan maintains that we must understand what those in poor health really need -- a way to enjoy the final stages of their lives. A valuable resource for caregivers, nurses, doctors, and children of the elderly, this book may just turn the tide of medical misconception that has plagued the senior community.

In her third year of medical training - discouraged by how little focus there was on caring - a young woman was faced with a decision: she could throw her hands up and quit or she could risk speaking up and work toward change. She decided to send out a call for submissions, asking women to share their experiences of health care and caring. Her inbox immediately overflowed with stories from women across Canada. Together this amazing group of women wrote Women Who Care. Women Who Care is a collection of thirty-two women's stories about caring. Through prose and poetry, our book captures the personal and professional values and expectations of women caregivers at each stage in their lives and careers. It examines women's experiences as the providers and recipients of health care. Edited by Nili Kaplan-Myrth, MD PhD
with Lori Hanson and Patty Thille http://womenwhocare.ca/

• Laurie Kingston
• Women's Press;March,2009
• Paperback; 200 pages
• 9780889614697

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks). Not Done Yet opens a window on one woman's journey through breast cancer treatment, recovery, recurrence, and beyond. When she found a lump in her breast in December 2005, Laurie Kingston was thirty-eight, with an active life, a family, and a demanding job. A diagnosis of breast cancer was nowhere on her radar screen. But when that diagnosis was confirmed months later, Laurie began writing a blog. She wanted to process her reactions and express what she was feeling. Above all, she wanted to write about her experience in her own way. Spanning a two-year period, the entries are written matter-of-factly, in clear and engaging language. They take the reader on a compelling journey—from first diagnosis and what that meant personally and professionally, to preparing for treatments, learning how to ask questions of hospital caregivers, and coping with the physical hardships of undergoing chemotherapy. When Laurie learned in November 2006 that the cancer had spread to her liver, she was devastated. But she kept on writing--and went from a prognosis of “years not decades” and innumerable tumours, to “spectacular” results and (at last count) six clean scans under her belt. Laurie writes with both humour and compassion about her ups and downs as she comes to grips with this new reality. Not Done Yet will speak to those who are going through the same experience, those who know someone who is, or anyone who has wondered about living joyfully when life has been turned upside down.

• Stephanie Nolen
• Random House; April 2008
• Paperback; 416 pages
• 978-0-676-97823-0

From one of our most widely read, award-winning journalists – comes the powerful, unputdownable story of the very human cost of a global pandemic of staggering scope and scale. It is essential reading for our times. In 28, Stephanie Nolen, the Globe and Mail’s Africa Bureau Chief, puts a human face to the crisis created by HIV-AIDS in Africa. She has achieved, in this amazing book, something extraordinary: she writes with a power, understanding and simplicity that makes us listen, makes us understand and care. Through riveting anecdotal stories – one for each of the million people living with HIV-AIDS in Africa – Nolen explores the effects of an epidemic that well exceeds the Black Plague in magnitude. It is a calamity that is unfolding just a 747-flight away, and one that will take the lives of these 28 million without the help of massive, immediate intervention on an unprecedented scale. 28 is a timely, transformative, thoroughly accessible book that shows us definitively why we continue to ignore the growth of HIV-AIDS in Africa only at our peril and at an intolerable moral cost.

• Michael Pollan
• Penguin; Jan 2008
• Hardcover; 256 pages
• 9781594201455

What to eat, what not to eat, and how to think about health: a manifesto for our times "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, the well-considered answers he provides to the questions posed in the bestselling The Omnivore's Dilemma. Humans used to know how to eat well, Pollan argues. But the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused, complicated, and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists-all of whom have much to gain from our dietary confusion. As a result, we face today a complex culinary landscape dense with bad advice and foods that are not "real." These "edible foodlike substances" are often packaged with labels bearing health claims that are typically false or misleading. Indeed, real food is fast disappearing from the marketplace, to be replaced by "nutrients," and plain old eating by an obsession with nutrition that is, paradoxically, ruining our health, not to mention our meals. Michael Pollan's sensible and decidedly counterintuitive advice is: "Don't eat anything that your great-great grandmother would not recognize as food."

• Margaret Webb
• Penguin Books; April 2008
• Hardcover; 256 pages
• 9780670066247

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (2-4 weeks). On this passionate, cross-Canada odyssey, Margaret Webb introduces readers to 12 great farmers or, as she calls them, chefs of the soil and the sea, tractor-seat philosophers, poet biologists, thingamajig inventors, and zealous educators. Her stories of the challenges they face growing good food are inspiring, touching, gritty. They will make you hungry. They will make you laugh. They will make you run to your nearest farmers' market to hug a farmer. Arranged into sections titled Starters, Mains, and To Finish, these stories are of the passionate, driven people who farm and produce food in our country.

Mary-Ellen Kelm
UBC Press; 1999
Paperback; 272 pages
9780774806787 • Winner, 1999 Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, Canadian Historical Foundation
• Winner, 1999 Clio Award for British Columbia, Canadian Historical Foundation
• Selected, Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE Recent debates about the health of First Nations peoples have drawn a flurry of public attention and controversy, and have placed the relationship between Aboriginal well-being and reserve locations and allotments in the spotlight. Aboriginal access to medical care and the transfer of funds and responsibility for health from the federal government to individual bands and tribal councils are also bones of contention. Comprehensive discussion of such issues, however, has often been hampered by a lack of historical analysis.

• Jessica Mills
• AK Press; Nov 2007
• Paperback; 329 pages
• 9781904859727

Jessica Mills is a touring musician, artist, activist, writer, teacher, and mother of two. Disappointed by run-of-the-mill parenting books that didn't speak to her experience, she set out to write a book tackling the issues faced by a new generation of moms and dads. The result is a parenting guide like no other. Written with humor, extensive research, and much trial and error, My Mother Wears Combat Boots delivers sound advice for parents of all stripes. Amid stories of bringing kids (and grandparents) to women's rights demonstrations, taking baby on tour with her band, and organizing cooperative childcare, Jessica gives detailed nuts-and-bolts information about weaning, cloth vs. disposable diapers, the psychological effects of co-sleeping, and even how to get free infant gear. This book provides a clever, hip, and entertaining mix of advice, anecdotes, political analysis, and factual sidebars that will help parents as they navigate the first years of their child's life.

• Michael Pollan
• Penguin Books; 2007
• Paperback; 464 pages
• 978-1-59413-205-6

A New York Times bestseller that has changed the way readers view the ecology of eating, this revolutionary book by award winner Michael Pollan asks the seemingly simple question: What should we have for dinner? Tracing from source to table each of the food chains that sustain us—whether industrial or organic, alternative or processed—he develops a portrait of the American way of eating. The result is a sweeping, surprising exploration of the hungers that have shaped our evolution, and of the profound implications our food choices have for the health of our species and the future of our planet.