You The Smart Patient

America’s doctors, Mehmet Oz and Mike Roizen, show you how to become your own medical detective and get the best health care possible. Everyone needs to become a smart patient. In fact, in the worst cases, your life may even depend on it. Number one bestselling authors and doctors Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz have written this indispensable handbook to help everyone to get the best health care possible—by making everyone into their own medical detective. Witty, playful, at times offbeat, but always authoritative, You: The Smart Patient shows you how to become your own medical sleuth, tracing your medical family tree and wending your way through the pitfalls of any health care situation. Written in conjunction with the health care community's leading oversight group, The Joint Commission, the book shows readers in clear, easy steps how to take control of their own health care and deal with all matters that may come up when facing a medical case: from choosing the right doctor, hospital, and insurance company to navigating prescription drugs, specialists, treatment options, alternative medicine, pain management, or any problem that might arise. Accessible, humorous, and filled with information that you need, You: The Smart Patient is a book for every patient and all those dealing with a loved one's medical issues.

America’s doctors, Mehmet Oz and Mike Roizen, show you how to become your own medical detective and get the best health care possible. Everyone needs to become a smart patient. In fact, in the worst cases, your life may even depend on it. Number one bestselling authors and doctors Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz have written this indispensable handbook to help everyone to get the best health care possible—by making everyone into their own medical detective. Witty, playful, at times offbeat, but always authoritative, You: The Smart Patient shows you how to become your own medical sleuth, tracing your medical family tree and wending your way through the pitfalls of any health care situation. Written in conjunction with the health care community's leading oversight group, The Joint Commission, the book shows readers in clear, easy steps how to take control of their own health care and deal with all matters that may come up when facing a medical case: from choosing the right doctor, hospital, and insurance company to navigating prescription drugs, specialists, treatment options, alternative medicine, pain management, or any problem that might arise. Accessible, humorous, and filled with information that you need, You: The Smart Patient is a book for every patient and all those dealing with a loved one's medical issues.

The essential guide by one of America's leading doctors to how digital technology enables all of us to take charge of our health A trip to the doctor is almost a guarantee of misery. You'll make an appointment months in advance. You'll probably wait for several hours until you hear "the doctor will see you now"-but only for fifteen minutes! Then you'll wait even longer for lab tests, the results of which you'll likely never see, unless they indicate further (and more invasive) tests, most of which will probably prove unnecessary (much like physicals themselves). And your bill will be astronomical. In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, one of the nation's top physicians, shows why medicine does not have to be that way. Instead, you could use your smartphone to get rapid test results from one drop of blood, monitor your vital signs both day and night, and use an artificially intelligent algorithm to receive a diagnosis without having to see a doctor, all at a small fraction of the cost imposed by our modern healthcare system. The change is powered by what Topol calls medicine's "Gutenberg moment." Much as the printing press took learning out of the hands of a priestly class, the mobile internet is doing the same for medicine, giving us unprecedented control over our healthcare. With smartphones in hand, we are no longer beholden to an impersonal and paternalistic system in which "doctor knows best." Medicine has been digitized, Topol argues; now it will be democratized. Computers will replace physicians for many diagnostic tasks, citizen science will give rise to citizen medicine, and enormous data sets will give us new means to attack conditions that have long been incurable. Massive, open, online medicine, where diagnostics are done by Facebook-like comparisons of medical profiles, will enable real-time, real-world research on massive populations. There's no doubt the path forward will be complicated: the medical establishment will resist these changes, and digitized medicine inevitably raises serious issues surrounding privacy. Nevertheless, the result-better, cheaper, and more human health care-will be worth it. Provocative and engrossing, The Patient Will See You Now is essential reading for anyone who thinks they deserve better health care. That is, for all of us.

The state of health care in this country is routinely discussed in the media, at the office, and around the kitchen table. Yet as consumers of medical care, Americans often blindly accept medical advice that may or may not be relevant or even appropriate. Doctor, Your Patient Will See You Now is meant to turn on its head the old notion that medical care is dictated by the doctors who offer advice. Today, it's all about the patients who receive it. Bias, financial incentives, and preventable medical error are common to the point of inevitability and have proven resistant to reform. Patients increasingly and correctly feel that they are on their own in a large, bewildering, impersonal, and dangerous medical system. Offering an insider's perspective, Dr. Kussin provides the tools readers need to make informed decisions about their care, as well as the confidence to question their doctor's advice, seek out additional information, and discern the best path for their care. With this book, readers learn how to maintain a professional approach that, rather than straining the doctor-patient relationship, makes it stronger and more cooperative.

The inspiring story of how a leading innovator in patient safety found a simple way to save countless lives. First, do no harm-doctors, nurses and clinicians swear by this code of conduct. Yet in hospitals and doctors' offices across the country, errors are made every single day - avoidable, simple mistakes that often cost lives. Inspired by two medical mistakes that not only ended in unnecessary deaths but hit close to home, Dr. Peter Pronovost made it his personal mission to improve patient safety and make preventable deaths a thing of the past, one hospital at a time. Dr. Pronovost began with simple improvements to a common procedure in the ER and ICU units at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Creating an easy five-step checklist based on the most up-to-date research for his fellow doctors and nurses to follow, he hoped that streamlining the procedure itself could slow the rate of infections patients often died from. But what Dr. Pronovost discovered was that doctors and nurses needed more than a checklist: the day-to-day environment needed to be more patient-driven and staff needed to see scientific results in order to know their efforts were a success. After those changes took effect, the units Dr. Pronovost worked with decreased their rate of infection by 70%. Today, all fifty states are implementing Dr. Pronovost's programs, which have the potential to save more lives than any other medical innovation in the past twenty-five years. But his ideas are just the beginning of the changes being made by doctors and nurses across the country making huge leaps to improve patient care. In Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals, Dr. Pronovost shares his own experience, anecdotal stories from his colleagues at Johns Hopkins and other hospitals that have made his approach their own, alongside comprehensive research-showing readers how small changes make a huge difference in patient care. Inspiring and thought provoking, this compelling book shows how one person with a cause really can make a huge difference in our lives.

Arguably medicine is either an arts-based science or a science-based art. In medieval times, clinical decisions were based on simple measures, such as the temperature of the body, the rhythm of the pulse, the consistency of the stool and the colour of the urine. Nowadays, thanks partly to modern technology, medical science has improved in many ways, as has healthcare. In particular, approaches which have their origins in Artificial Intelligence and Operational Research have a significant contribution to make in terms of improving not only diagnosis and treatment of patients, but also providing ways of managing patients in a more effective, more efficient, and more patient-friendly manner. This book focuses on the use of such Intelligent Patient Management to the benefit of clinicians, other healthcare and community practitioners and managers, patients and carers.

Gold Winner 2012 Foreword Reviews Book of The Year, Health Category The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 1.7 million people developed healthcare acquired infections in 2010. Since most people spend only a small part of their lives in healthcare facilities, this guidebook also tells readers how to avoid picking up serious infections in day care centers, schools, business offices, and other common locations. Unlike other books, which focus on how to change the hospital systems, The Patient Survival Guide focuses on empowering you with the knowledge and techniques to ensure a safer healthcare experience. The Patient Survival Guide: Inspires you to be a your own advocate Describes in vivid detail how your preparation and informed vigilance can significantly reduce the chances of harm and death to your loved one in a hospital Provides specific, practical, and outside-the-box strategies for anticipating and preventing errors, with chapters devoted to each of the most common mistakes and mishaps Provides checklists for patients to use upon admission to healthcare facilities

Written by the ultimate insider--a nurse with over twenty-five years of experience--this book provides the latest information on forty-four surgical procedures. In addition, the candid discussions of what to expect after surgery include positive and negative statements from patients who've undergone each procedure. This guidebook also includes simple explanations of medical tests, samples of common medical forms, and a glossary of medical terms.

Every day we make decisions about our health - some big and some small. What we eat, how we live and even where we live can affect our health. But how can we be sure that the advice we are given about these important matters is right for us? This book will provide you with the right tools for assessing health advice.