From a distinguished physician and medical ethicist, here is the definitive scientific investigation of the mysterious mind-body healing process. Did you know that:
<ul>
<li>You'll heal faster after surgery if you see trees and grass outside your window than if you're looking at a brick wall.</li>
<li>After asthmatic children were given vanilla aroma to use with their inhalers, their asthma eventually improved in response to the vanilla alone, even when the inhalers contained no active drug.</li>
<li>Some patients who had sham angina surgery performed in a double-blind experiment showed improvements lasting six months or more, which their physicians could not distinguish from the results in patients who had had the real surgery.</li>
<li>When people watched a movie showing Mother Teresa taking care of the poor in Calcutta, their bodies secreted extra amounts of salivary immunoglobulin A, a major germ-fighting chemical.</li>
<li>When Japanese teenagers, who were allergic to a tree similar to poison ivy, were touched with leaves from a harmless chestnut tree, they developed severe rashes. When touched with the poisonous leaves but told they were chestnut, they had no reaction whatsoever.</li>
<li>When a new medical treatment is introduced with much excitement and hope, the first patients to receive it typically show a seventy percent positive response rate, even in cases where the treatment--on more careful study-is shown to be medically worthless.</li>
</ul>
The Placebo Response, grounded in comprehensive research, presents a convincing case that we can harness our inner pharmacy for better health and healing.

The Placebo Response: How You Can Release the Body's Inner Pharmacy for Better Health

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Brody, Howard

Brody, Daralyn

Alternative Medicine

Harper

The brain can heal the body: that's the remarkable truth behind the body's placebo response. As one of the nation's foremost authorities on the mysterious connection between mind and body, Dr. Howard Brody introduces a radical new understanding of this phenomenon -- and how it can be used to foster good health. The body, says Brody, has an "inner pharmacy" that the brain taps into, according to what we anticipate, how we are conditioned by experience, and how we interpret events. Consider the following:
<ul>
<li>In one study, people with allergies showed no response when exposed to the irritant, when they were first convinced it was something</li>
<li>Sham surgery has sometimes produced lasting results, indistinguishable from the results of real operations.</li>
<li>Patients recover faster from surgery when they have window views of trees or grass, rather than brick walls.</li>
</ul>
But the placebo response is more than an astonishing medical fact -- it can be put to practical use. The Placebo Response gives you access to a new kind of alternative medicine, one proven by science and found within your own body.

Harper-perennial

Stories of Sickness

Our personalities and our identities are intimately bound up with the stories that we tell to organize and to make sense of our lives. To understand the human meaning of illness, we therefore must turn to the stories we tell about illness, suffering, and medical care. Stories of Sickness explores the many dimensions of what illness means to the sufferers and to those around them, drawing on depictions of illness in great works of literature and in nonfiction accounts. The exploration is primarily philosophical but incorporates approaches from literature and from the medical social sciences. When it was first published in 1987, Stories of Sickness helped to inaugurate a renewed interest in the importance of narrative studies in health care. For the Second Edition the text has been thoroughly revised and significantly expanded. Four almost entirely new chapters have been added on the nature, complexities, and rigor of narrative ethics and how it is carried out. There is also an additional chapter on maladaptive ways of being sick that deals in greater depth with disability issues. Health care professionals, students of medicine and bioethics, and ordinary people coping with illness, no less than scholars in the health care humanities and social sciences, will find much value in this volume.Unique Features:*Philosophically sophisticated yet clearly written and easily accessible*Interdisciplinary approach--combines philosophy, literature, health care, social sciences*Contains many fascinating stories and vignettes of illness drawn from both fiction and nonfiction*A new and comprehensive overview of the "hot topic" of narrative ethics in medicine and health care

Science & Math

History & Philosophy

Oxford University Press

Our personalities and our identities are intimately bound up with the stories that we tell to organize and to make sense of our lives. To understand the human meaning of illness, we therefore must turn to the stories we tell about illness, suffering, and medical care. Stories of Sickness explores the many dimensions of what illness means to the sufferers and to those around them, drawing on depictions of illness in great works of literature and in non-fiction accounts. The exploration is primarily philosophical but incorporates approaches from literature and from the medical social sciences. When it was first published in 1987, Stories of Sickness helped to inaugurate a renewed interest in the importance of narrative studies in health care. For the Second Edition the text has been thoroughly revised and significantly expanded. Four almost entirely new chapters have been added on the nature, complexities, and rigor of narrative ethics and how it is carried out. There is also an additional chapter on maladaptive ways of being sick that deals in greater depth with disability issues. Health care professionals, students of medicine and bioethics, and ordinary people coping with illness, no less than scholars in the health care humanities and social sciences, will find much of value in this volume. Unique Features: *Philosophically sophisticated yet clearly written and easily accessible *Interdisciplinary approach--combines philosophy, literature, health care, social sciences *Contains many fascinating stories and vignettes of illness drawn from both fiction and nonfiction *A new and comprehensive overview of the "hot topic" of narrative ethics in medicine and health care

Parenting & Relationships

Bioethics, born in the 1960s and 1970s, has achieved great success, but also has experienced recent growing pains, as illustrated by the case of Terri Schiavo. In The Future of Bioethics, Howard Brody, a physician and scholar who dates his entry into the field in 1972, sifts through the various issues that bioethics is now addressing--and some that it is largely ignoring--to chart a course for the future. Traditional bioethical concerns such as medical care at the end of life and research on human subjects will continue to demand attention. Brody chooses to focus instead on less obvious issues that will promise to stimulate new ways of thinking. He argues for a bioethics grounded in interdisciplinary medical humanities, including literature, history, religion, and the social sciences. Drawing on his previous work, Brody argues that most of the issues concerned involve power disparities. Bioethics' response ought to combine new concepts that take power relationships seriously, with new practical activities that give those now lacking power a greater voice. A chapter on community dialogue outlines a role for the general public in bioethics deliberations. Lessons about power initially learned from feminist bioethics need to be expanded into new areas--cross cultural, racial and ethnic, and global and environmental issues, as well as the concerns of persons with disabilities. Bioethics has neglected important ethical controversies that are most often discussed in primary care, such as patient-centered care, evidence-based medicine, and pay-for-performance. Brody concludes by considering the tension between bioethics as contemplative scholarship and bioethics as activism. He urges a more activist approach, insisting that activism need not cause a premature end to ongoing conversations among bioethicists defending widely divergent views and thcories.

The Future of Bioethics

Business & Money

Business Culture

Placebos and the Philosophy of Medicine: Clinical, Conceptual, and Ethical Issues

Univ of Chicago Pr

Discusses the physician's use and misuse of power. The book argues that the central task is not to reduce the physician's power, but to develop guidelines for its use so that the doctor shares with the patient both information and responsibility for deciding on appropriate treatment.

The Healer's Power

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Yale University Press

Although the physician’s use and misuse of power have been discussed in the social sciences and in literature, they have never been explored in medical ethics until now. In this book, Dr. Howard Brody argues that the central task is not to reduce the physician’s power, as others have suggested, but to develop guidelines for its use, so that the doctor shares with the patient both information and the responsibility for deciding on appropriate treatment.
Dr. Brody first reviews literary works dealing with medical power, from Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” to stories by William Carlos Williams, Vonda McIntyre, and Richard Selzer. These works, he shows, reveal the healers’ ambivalence over their own powers and patients’ fears of the abuse of power. Dr. Brody then points out important but neglected ethical issues that emerge from an analysis of power, such as the tension between care of individual patients and the pressures of the doctor’s workload; the rescue fantasy that impels some physicians to extraordinary lengths to save a life; and the economic system, which rewards surgeons and other specialists more than it does physicians who spend time talking with patients about their problems. He also shows how the perspective of shared power can shed new light on standard topics in medical ethics―from informed consent and confidentiality to resource allocation and cost containment.

For decades, medical professionals have betrayed the public's trust by accepting various benefits from the pharmaceutical industry. Both drug company representatives and doctors employ artful spin to portray this behavior positively to the public, and to themselves. In Hooked, Howard Brody argues that we can neither understand the problem, nor propose helpful solutions until we identify the many levels of activity connecting these purportedly noble industries. We can pass laws and enact regulations, but ultimately the medical profession must take responsibility for its own integrity. Hooked is a wake-up call for anyone expecting high quality, ethical medical care.

Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

This book explores the controversial relationship between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry, identifies the ethical tensions and controversies, and proposes numerous reforms both for medicine's own professional integrity and for effective public regulation of the industry.

Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry (Explorations in Bioethics and the Medical Humanities)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brody, Howard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Brody, Howard

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brody, Howard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Placebo Response: How You Can Release the Body's Inner Pharmacy for Better Health

The Placebo Response: How You Can Release the Body's Inner Pharmacy for Better Health

Stories of Sickness

Stories of Sickness

The Future of Bioethics

Placebos and the Philosophy of Medicine: Clinical, Conceptual, and Ethical Issues

The Healer's Power

The Healer's Power

Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry

Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry (Explorations in Bioethics and the Medical Humanities)