To Live and Die in America details how the United States has among the worst indicators of health in the industrialised world and at the same time spends significantly more on its health care system than any other industrial nation.
Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson explain this contradictory phenomenon as the product of the unique brand of capitalism that has developed in the US. It is this particular form of capitalism that created both the social and economic conditions that largely influence health outcomes and the inefficient, unpopular and inaccessible health care system that is incapable of dealing with them.
The authors argue that improving health in America requires a change in the conditions in which people live and work as well as a restructured health care system.
Torture doctors invent and oversee techniques to inflict pain and suffering without leaving scars. Their knowledge of the body and its breaking points and their credible authority over death certificates and medical records make them powerful and elusive perpetrators of the crime of torture. In The Torture Doctors, Steven H. Miles fearlessly explores who these physicians are, what they do, how they escape justice, and what can be done to hold them accountable.
At least one hundred countries employ torture doctors, including both dictatorships and democracies. While torture doctors mostly act with impunity—protected by governments, medical associations, and licensing boards—Miles shows that a movement has begun to hold these doctors accountable and to return them to their proper role as promoters of health and human rights. Miles’s groundbreaking portrayal exposes the thinking and psychology of these doctors, and his investigation points to how the international human rights community and the medical community can come together to end these atrocities.
By empowering clients to be well-informed medical consumers and by delivering care providers from the straitjacket of inadequate diagnostic standards and stereotypes, this book sets out to transform the nature of transgender care.
In an accessible style, the authors discuss the key mental health issues, with much attention to the vexed relationship between professionals and clients. They propose a new professional role; that of "Gender Specialist."
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 provide definitive information (in the context of consulting health professionals) on hormone administration, aesthetic surgery, and genital reassignment surgery. Chapter 6 takes up the little-examined issue of HIV and AIDS among transgender people. There is also a chapter devoted to issues of transgender people of color, as well as a chapter on transgender adolescents.
The book contains a wealth of practical information and accounts of people's experiences about coming out to one's employer or to one's friends or spouse. Several essays spell out the legal rights of transgender people with regard to insurance, work, marriage, and the use of rest rooms.
The second part of the book consists of thirteen essays on a range of controversial topics. They include three personal stories of transgender life, one essay on the new academic field of Transgender Studies, two essays on legal rights, three essays on medical issues, and two essays on the origins and possible resolution of the conflicts between therapist and client. The authors have also provided useful listings of organizations, centers, and Web sites.
The book has been reviewed by a national committee of professionals and consumers, some of whose members have contributed the essays in the second part of the book.
Winner of the 2008 Arthur J. Viseltear Prize from the American Public Health Association and Nominated for the 2008 William H. Welch Medal, AAHM
Though notorious for its polluted air today, the city of Los Angeles once touted itself as a health resort. After the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1876, publicists launched a campaign to portray the city as the promised land, circulating countless stories of miraculous cures for the sick and debilitated. As more and more migrants poured in, however, a gap emerged between the city’s glittering image and its dark reality.
Emily K. Abel shows how the association of the disease with “tramps” during the 1880s and 1890s and Dust Bowl refugees during the 1930s provoked exclusionary measures against both groups. In addition, public health officials sought not only to restrict the entry of Mexicans (the majority of immigrants) during the 1920s but also to expel them during the 1930s.
Abel’s revealing account provides a critical lens through which to view both the contemporary debate about immigration and the U.S. response to the emergent global tuberculosis epidemic.
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