Biomedical Odysseys

Biomedical Odysseys

Author: Priscilla Song

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-05-16

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1400885280

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Thousands of people from more than eighty countries have traveled to China since 2001 to undergo fetal cell transplantation. Galvanized by the potential of stem and fetal cells to regenerate damaged neurons and restore lost bodily functions, people grappling with paralysis and neurodegenerative disorders have ignored the warnings of doctors and scientists back home in order to stake their futures on a Chinese experiment. Biomedical Odysseys looks at why and how these individuals have entrusted their lives to Chinese neurosurgeons operating on the forefront of experimental medicine, in a world where technologies and risks move faster than laws can keep pace. Priscilla Song shows how cutting-edge medicine is not just about the latest advances in biomedical science but also encompasses transformations in online patient activism, surgical intervention, and borderline experiments in health care bureaucracy. Bringing together a decade of ethnographic research in hospital wards, laboratories, and online patient discussion forums, Song opens up important theoretical and methodological horizons in the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine. She illuminates how poignant journeys in search of fetal cell cures become tangled in complex webs of digital mediation, the entrepreneurial logics of postsocialist medicine, and fraught debates about the ethics of clinical experimentation. Using innovative methods to track the border-crossing quests of Chinese clinicians and their patients from around the world, Biomedical Odysseys is the first book to map the transnational life of fetal cell therapies.


The Genome Odyssey

The Genome Odyssey

Author: Dr. Euan Angus Ashley

Publisher: Celadon Books

Published: 2021-02-23

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1250234972

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In The Genome Odyssey, Dr. Euan Ashley, Stanford professor of medicine and genetics, brings the breakthroughs of precision medicine to vivid life through the real diagnostic journeys of his patients and the tireless efforts of his fellow doctors and scientists as they hunt to prevent, predict, and beat disease. Since the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, the price of genome sequencing has dropped at a staggering rate. It’s as if the price of a Ferrari went from $350,000 to a mere forty cents. Through breakthroughs made by Dr. Ashley’s team at Stanford and other dedicated groups around the world, analyzing the human genome has decreased from a heroic multibillion dollar effort to a single clinical test costing less than $1,000. For the first time we have within our grasp the ability to predict our genetic future, to diagnose and prevent disease before it begins, and to decode what it really means to be human. In The Genome Odyssey, Dr. Ashley details the medicine behind genome sequencing with clarity and accessibility. More than that, with passion for his subject and compassion for his patients, he introduces readers to the dynamic group of researchers and doctor detectives who hunt for answers, and to the pioneering patients who open up their lives to the medical community during their search for diagnoses and cures. He describes how he led the team that was the first to analyze and interpret a complete human genome, how they broke genome speed records to diagnose and treat a newborn baby girl whose heart stopped five times on the first day of her life, and how they found a boy with tumors growing inside his heart and traced the cause to a missing piece of his genome. These patients inspire Dr. Ashley and his team as they work to expand the boundaries of our medical capabilities and to envision a future where genome sequencing is available for all, where medicine can be tailored to treat specific diseases and to decode pathogens like viruses at the genomic level, and where our medical system as we know it has been completely revolutionized.


Medical Odysseys

Medical Odysseys

Author: Allen B. Weisse

Publisher:

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Different and Unexpected Pathways to Twentieth-Century Medical Discoveries


An Odyssey with Animals

An Odyssey with Animals

Author: Adrian R. Morrison

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-06-25

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 019970564X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The relationship between animals and humans is more complex today than ever before. In addition to the animals that have served as household pets, and the farm animals that have provided labor and food, countless monkeys, rabbits, rats, and cats have enabled modern scientists to treat and cure humanity's most devastating illnesses. This aspect of animal-human interaction has engendered a bitter enmity between animal rights activists and the biomedical researchers whose work depends on the use (and oftentimes the killing) of laboratory animals. In An Odyssey with Animals, veterinarian and sleep researcher Adrian Morrison argues that humane animal use in biomedical research is an indispensable tool of medical science, and that efforts to halt such use constitute a grave threat to human health and wellbeing. The target of repeated acts of intimidation by anonymous animal rights activists because of his own research, Morrison is himself an animal advocate, and this volume is the culmination of his years spent negotiating the treacherous divide between a legitimate concern for animals and the importance of biomedical research. Drawing on the disciplines of philosophy, history, biology, and animal behavior, Morrison crafts a multi-faceted argument in favor of using animals humanely in research, the center of which is his staunch belief that human interests must be the primary concern of science and society. Along the way, Morrison delves into other human uses of animals in domains such as agriculture, hunting, and education, examining each use along with its philosophical, moral, and ecological implications. The result is a thought-provoking, intelligent and fair-minded discussion of a charged subject-- of the past and present of animals' relationships with humans, and how and why we should be able to use them as we do.


The Great Medical Student Odyssey: Tales & Adventures in Medical School

The Great Medical Student Odyssey: Tales & Adventures in Medical School

Author: Ashiq Pramchand

Publisher: Self Publisher

Published: 2021-02-28

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 9780620917612

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Medical school is an incredible adventure that, for many, is shrouded in mystery. South African medical student, Ashiq Pramchand, writes about his profound experiences in academia and in the hospital wards to elucidate the lives of future doctors and healthcare professionals. He recalls life-changing moments with patients and adventures across the world from exploring The City of the Dead and training with samurai in Japan to falling in love and researching life-threatening diseases. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Medical students have beautiful stories about life and death that should be shared to inspire and teach others about the great strengths and vulnerabilities of young healers. Ashiq Pramchand explores the great odyssey of the medical student and offers a glimpse into what medical school is really about.


Polio

Polio

Author: Thomas Abraham

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-09-01

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1787380866

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1988, the World Health Organization launched a twelve-year campaign to wipe out polio. Thirty years and several billion dollars over budget later, the campaign grinds on, vaccinating millions of children and hoping that each new year might see an end to the disease. But success remains elusive, against a surprisingly resilient virus, an unexpectedly weak vaccine and the vagaries of global politics, meeting with indifference from governments and populations alike. How did an innocuous campaign to rid the world of a crippling disease become a hostage of geopolitics? Why do parents refuse to vaccinate their children against polio? And why have poorly paid door-to-door healthworkers been assassinated? Thomas Abraham reports on the ground in search of answers.


Commodities of Care

Commodities of Care

Author: Elsa L. Fan

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1452961212

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How global health practices can end up reorganizing practices of care for the people and communities they seek to serve Commodities of Care examines the unanticipated effects of global health interventions, ideas, and practices as they unfold in communities of men who have sex with men (MSM) in China. Targeted for the scaling-up of HIV testing, Elsa L. Fan examines how the impact of this initiative has transformed these men from subjects of care into commodities of care: through the use of performance-based financing tied to HIV testing, MSM have become a source of economic and political capital. In ethnographic detail, Fan shows how this particular program, ushered in by global health donors, became the prevailing strategy to control the epidemic in China in the late 2000s. Fan examines the implementation of MSM testing and its effects among these men, arguing that the intervention produced new markets of men, driven by the push to meet testing metrics. Fan shows how men who have sex with men in China came to see themselves as part of a global “MSM” category, adopting new selfhoods and socialities inextricably tied to HIV and to testing. Wider trends in global health programming have shaped national public health responses in China and, this book reveals, have radically altered the ways health, disease, and care are addressed.


The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Global Health

The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Global Health

Author: Tsitsi B. Masvawure

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-20

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1003859070

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Global Health provides an overview of the complex relationship between anthropology and global health. The book brings together a diverse group of scholars who consider the intersection of anthropological concerns with health and disease as understood and intervened upon by the field of global health. The book is structured around five sections: (1) social, cultural, and political determinants of health; (2) knowledge production in anthropology and global health; (3) persistent invisibilities in global health; (4) reimagining a critical global health; and (5) new horizons in anthropology and global health. Over these five themes a range of topics is explored, including: rare diseases medical pluralism universal global health protocols HIV health security indigenous communities (non)communicable diseases decolonizing global health The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Global Health is an essential resource for upper-level students and researchers in anthropology, global health, sociology, international development, health studies, and politics.


Can Science and Technology Save China?

Can Science and Technology Save China?

Author: Susan Greenhalgh

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-02-15

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 1501747053

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Can Science and Technology Save China? assesses the intimate connections between science and society in China, offering an in-depth look at how an array of sciences and technologies are being made, how they are interfacing with society, and with what effects. Focusing on critical domains of daily life, the chapters explore how scientists, technicians, surgeons, therapists, and other experts create practical knowledges and innovations, as well as how ordinary people take them up as they pursue the good life. Editors Greenhalgh and Zhang offer a rare, up-close view of the politics of Chinese science-making, showing how everyday logics, practices, and ethics of science, medicine, and technology are profoundly reshaping contemporary China. By foregrounding the notion of "governing through science," and the contested role of science and technology as instruments of change, this timely book addresses important questions regarding what counts as science in China, what science and technology can do to transform China, as well as their limits and unintended consequences.


Clinical Engineering Handbook

Clinical Engineering Handbook

Author: Joseph F. Dyro

Publisher: Academic Press

Published: 2004-08-27

Total Pages: 696

ISBN-13: 012226570X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As the biomedical engineering field expands throughout the world, clinical engineers play an ever more important role as the translator between the worlds of the medical, engineering, and business professionals. They influence procedure and policy at research facilities, universities and private and government agencies including the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization. Clinical engineers were key players in calming the hysteria over electrical safety in the 1970s and Y2K at the turn of the century and continue to work for medical safety. This title brings together all the important aspects of Clinical Engineering. It provides the reader with prospects for the future of clinical engineering as well as guidelines and standards for best practice around the world.