Sick

Why can it be so difficult to be around someone with a serious illness? Something lurks deep within us, urging us to avoid someone seriously ill. A Sick Prejudice explores our innermost fears, primal emotions, and biases when we get into illness situations. It reveals the flawed reasoning and escape tactics that naturally arise in us. Joseph McNolty weaves together research with heartfelt stories that span over 15 years of his wife’s cancer and his own. He uncovers why there is a “sick prejudice,” how it affects us, and how it can make an illness worse. McNolty offers us easy ways to overcome the distressed and exaggerated feelings we can have. We then can create a healing environment for the sick one and an enriching experience for ourselves. More than just a look at the stereo-types and aversions people can have to illness, A Sick Prejudice explores the essential role of sickness in our lives and the personal growth that can come from the experience.

An informed argument for reworking the broken market†‘based U.S. healthcare system by making cost and quality more transparent The United States has the most expensive healthcare system in the world. While policy makers have argued over who is at fault for this, the system has been quietly moving toward high†‘deductible insurance plans that require patients to pay large amounts out of pocket before insurance kicks in. The idea behind this shift is that patients will become better consumers of healthcare when forced to pay for their medical expenses. Laying bare the perils of the current situation, Peter A. Ubel—a physician and behavioral scientist—notes that even when patients have time to shop around, healthcare costs remain largely opaque, difficult to access, and hard to compare. Arguing for a middle path between a market†‘based and a completely free system, Ubel envisions more transparent, smarter healthcare plans that tie the prices of treatments to the value they provide so that people can afford to receive the care they deserve.

Dr Adrian Massey has worked at the intersection of medicine and society for decades. He argues compellingly that our hyper-medicalized society has falsely equated sickness with illness, and sickness with unfitness to work--whereas sickness is primarily a social problem requiring social, not medical, solutions. Sick-Note Britain lays bare Britain's gross error: when doctors cannot 'fix' anxiety or chronic pain, workplace attendance is still treated as a matter for arbitration by our strained primary care service. What is needed is a tailored, employer-employee contractual solution, but obstacles block this approach: excessively complex employment law constraining both sides; an outdated benefits system that overburdens doctors and traumatizes the vulnerable; and a workplace culture that is too inflexible to keep sick employees in work. This is a blistering condemnation of a sham system that works for nobody, and an urgent call to rethink how we manage sickness--for the sake of our economy, our wellbeing, and our health service.

Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries explores the attitudes and responses of the mendicant orders to illness, their contribution to medical history, the influence of health and sickness as a factor in the orders' decision making, the extent of their participation in treatments, their relationship with physicians or their own involvement in medical practice, and the problems which occurred as a result of these matters. Apart from brief details of the last illness noted in some convent obituaries, the sick friar is usually conspicuous by his absence from the records. This book addresses this absence. By focusing on these neglected aspects of the mendicant orders it is possible to begin to reconstruct their attitudes and practices towards sickness, health and medical treatment. In so doing, a picture begins to emerge which provides a much fuller understanding of both mendicant and wider medical history. Through such an approach, the book demonstrates how preserving health as well as treating illness were matters of interrelated and vital concern to the friars, a concern that coincided with a rising interest in health matters in wider society during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.