Книги

In this powerful and probing look at the reality of everyday choices in neonatal intensive care units, Renée Anspach explores the life-and-death dilemmas that have fueled national debate. Using case studies taken during sixteen months of extensive interviewing and observation, Anspach examines the roles of parents, doctors, nurses, and bioethicists in deciding whether critically ill newborns--be they premature, terminally ill, or severely malformed--should be saved by medical technology, or at least kept alive a little longer.

Through observations in three intensive care units, this book draws on the reality of practice to explore how nurses and doctors work in intensive care settings. It examines: the power held by the competing knowledge bases; the roles of the different professions; the decision-making process; the sources of conflict; the need for change. Drawing together sociological theories and clinical practice, Power and Conflict Between Doctors and Nurses explores the role of nurses in delivering contemporary health care. It makes a strong case for interdisciplinary working and is particularly timely when health care policy is challenging work boundaries in health care.

Modern medicine is a powerful institution. With the help of highly-developed drugs and surgical techniques, it promises to relieve suffering, improve the quality of life and extend the life-span. Conversely, it is expensive for the governments, insurance companies and individuals who pay for it and sometimes appears to be insensitive to the needs of those for whom it provides. And while recent restructuring of health care delivery services has provided medical practitioners with new challenges, there has been very little consideration of the range of pressures that they now face. Challenging Medicine offers a lively appraisal of the current changes to the health service and analyzes their effects on the status and practice of health professionals. It also provides original debate on the challenges posed from within medicine from the nurses, managers, alternative practitioners and self-help groups and beyond to the women's movement and the media.

Pain--it is the most common complaint presented to physicians. Yet pain is subjective--it cannot be measured directly and is difficult to validate. Evaluating claims based on pain poses major problems for the Social Security Administration (SSA) and other disability insurers. This volume covers the epidemiology and physiology of pain; psychosocial contributions to pain and illness behavior; promising ways of assessing and measuring chronic pain and dysfunction; clinical aspects of prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation; and how the SSA's benefit structure and administrative procedures may affect pain complaints.

Few large institutions have changed as fully and dramatically as the U.S. healthcare system since World War II. Compared to the 1930s, healthcare now incorporates a variety of new technologies, service-delivery arrangements, financing mechanisms, and underlying sets of organizing principles.
This book examines the transformations that have occurred in medical care systems in the San Francisco Bay area since 1945. The authors describe these changes in detail and relate them to both the sociodemographic trends in the Bay Area and to shifts in regulatory systems and policy environments at local, state, and national levels. But this is more than a social history; the authors employ a variety of theoretical perspectives—including strategic management, population ecology, and institutional theory—to examine five types of healthcare organizations through quantitative data analysis and illustrative case studies.

The author examines the evolution of the practice and the culture of medicine in the United States from the end of the colonial period into the last quarter of the twentieth century. His major concerns are with the development of authority, and the Janus image of professionalization as medicine has gained power, technical expertise, and effective modes of diagnosis and treatment and at the same time seems to be getting further from the patient.