What You Didn't Think to Ask Your Obstetrician
Author: Raymond I Poliakin
What you need to know before you deliver your bundle of joy
Completely revised and updated, What You Didn’t Think to Ask Your Obstetrician sheds light on your concerns about pregnancy and postpartum in an easy-to-navigate Q&A format. It answers everything you want to know but forgot to ask, including the latest on elective C-sections, postpartum depression, doulas and midwives, 3-D/4-D ultrasound, genetic testing, markers, CVS, and other new tests.
As a private-practice OB/GYN, author Raymond I. Poliakin, M.D., has fielded thousands of questions from expectant mothers and has the knowledge and authority to answer them simply and directly. He is a Clinical Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California.
Interesting book: Darwin among the Machines or Exploring Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Comprehensive
The Anatomy of Hope: How Patients Prevail in the Face of Illness
Author: Jerome Groopman
An inspiring and profoundly enlightening exploration of one doctor’s discovery of how hope can change
the course of illness
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, human beings have believed that hope is essential to life. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Harvard Medical School professor and New Yorker staff writer Jerome Groopman shows us why.
The search for hope is most urgent at the patient’s bedside. The Anatomy of Hope takes us there, bringing us into the lives of people at pivotal moments when they reach for and find hope--or when it eludes their grasp. Through these intimate portraits, we learn how to distinguish true hope from false, why some people feel they are undeserving of it, and whether we should ever abandon our search.
Can hope contribute to recovery by changing physical well-being? To answer this hotly debated question, Groopman embarked on an investigative journey to cutting-edge laboratories where researchers are unraveling an authentic biology of hope. There he finds a scientific basis for understanding the role of this vital emotion in the outcome of illness.
Here is a book that offers a new way of thinking about hope, with a message for all readers, not only patients and their families. "We are just beginning to appreciate hope’s reach," Groopman writes, "and have not defined its limits. I see hope as the very heart of healing."
The New York Times
If there is an ''anatomy'' here, it isn't an archetypal, unitary anatomy. Instead, hope turns out to be something negotiated between patients and physicians, imagined and reimagined at every visit. Oncologists need to rely on an incredible team of specialists: palliative-care physicians, social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists. Even so, the day-to-day practice of oncology is routinely humbled by the task. In its most introspective passages, Groopman's book manages to convey the perverse subtleties of these negotiations: Dan has to be tricked into hope; for Eva, hope becomes a joke that she snickers at, but never quite gets. In the end, you might not know how to define hope precisely - but that seems to be the point. Groopman succeeds principally because he refuses to offer a simple, easily digestible thesis. — Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Washington Post
Groopman writes with profound compassion. The kind of hope -- the kind of love -- that shines through this book's pages could have saved a cardiac patient like my father who, despising doctors and distrusting their motives, chose to die when his heart failed, rather than submit to surgery. It will undoubtedly save many other patients and their families. In body and in spirit. — Judith Warner
Publishers Weekly
In this provocative book, New Yorker staff writer and Harvard Medical School professor Groopman (Second Opinions; The Measure of Our Days) explores the way hope affects one's capacity to cope with serious illness. Drawing on his 30-year career in hematology and oncology, Groopman presents stories based on his patients and his own debilitating back injury. Through these moving if somewhat one-dimensional portraits, he reveals the role of memory, family and faith in hope and how they can influence healing by affecting treatment decisions and resilience. Sharing his own blunders and successes, Groopman underscores the power doctors and other health care providers have to instill or kill hope. He also explains that hope can be fostered without glossing over medical realities: "Hope... does not cast a veil over perception and thought. In this way, it is different from blind optimism: It brings reality into sharp focus." In the final chapters of the book, Groopman examines the existing science behind the mind-body connection by reviewing, for example, remarkable studies on the placebo effect. By the end of the book, Groopman successfully convinces that hope can offer not only solace but strength to those living with medical uncertainty. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Readers wary of the "miraculous recovery" genre need not pass on Groopman's latest book (after The Measure of Our Days; Second Opinions). Despite its title, the text contains a satisfyingly gritty realism-in fact, Groopman's first four case studies end in death. That, in itself, quickly drew this reviewer into subsequent chapters in which the author develops the concepts of hope and choice and pursues both his personal interest in and his professional quest for their biological effects. Chair of medicine at Harvard and staff writer in medicine and biology for The New Yorker, Groopman investigates recent research detailing the effects of placebos, emotion, and belief on the nervous system. He finds that hope can begin a domino effect that neither patient nor health provider can predict. In comparison, Dr. Howard Spiro, in The Power of Hope, focuses on placebo history and research and its place in the context of other alternative remedies. Excelling in narrative, The Anatomy of Hope is strongly recommended for most public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/03.]-Andy Wickens, King Cty. Lib. Syst., WA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Doctor/author Groopman (Second Opinions, 2000, etc.) insightfully examines the nature of hope and the role it plays in recovery from illness. Stories from his medical education and 30 years of practice reveal what New Yorker staff writer Groopman (Medicine/Harvard) has learned about the connections between hope and illness. He was still in medical school when an Orthodox Jewish woman confided in him that she believed her cancer was a punishment from God. "Well prepared for the science [but] pitifully unprepared for the soul," Groopman was unable to reach out and give her the hope she needed to pursue a course of therapy. Then, as a young resident, he followed an older doctor's lead in offering false hope to a terminally ill woman, a disturbing experience that subsequently led him to veer too far in the direction of hope-crushing cold facts as a specialist in oncology and hematology. Perhaps the most powerful story Groopman tells is about a professor of pathology who, in full possession of all the grim facts about his stomach cancer, nevertheless held onto hope, persisted in excruciating therapy, and survived. From his patients, the author observed that hope is at the very heart of healing, whether it derives from faith in God and belief in an afterlife or from a personal philosophy that gives meaning to life and mortality. The author's personal experience of pain, frustration, and despair was also instructive. After suffering severe back pain for 19 years, Groopman followed the advice of a physician to seek relief by changing his beliefs about pain and acting on those new beliefs. Experiencing for himself the physical changes caused by regained hope, he began to question neurologists,experimental psychologists, and others about the biology of hope. He relates their discoveries here, going on to consider why some people can sustain hope but others cannot and clearly delineating the difference between false hope and true hope. A thoughtful message, movingly yet unsentimentally presented by a physician alert to medicine's human as well as its scientific side. Agent: Suzanne Gluck/William Morris
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