Vital Science

Get your pulse racing with Australia's most popular scientist, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki. Discover why people tell lies, why some planets are hotter than stars and how humans are terraforming the Earth. Is cockroach milk really the next Superfood? Why are birds so smart? Why do trees need each other to grow and how do they communicate? Why did a group of scientists voluntarily starve to death while surrounded by tonnes of food? How long does a decapitated head stay "alive"? What human artefacts can be seen with the naked eye from the International Space Station? Who is Bertha Benz and how did her first car trip revolutionise how we use petrol today? Finally, monitor your breathing and learn why whales are so big, why oral histories are surprisingly accurate and try the five tried-and-tested steps to becoming a wellness guru.

Pediatrician Melissa Blumenthal will try any scientific method available to conceive--until the horrible secrets of an urban clinic erupt in a nightmare of staggering proportions...

MENSTRUATION ISN'T JUST ABOUT HAVING BABIES Your menstrual cycle is a vital sign, just like your pulse, temperature, respiration rate, and blood pressure. And it provides you with essential information about your health.The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles and Optimize Your Fertility brings together over 1,000 meticulously researched scientific references in a textbook-quality guide to understanding your menstrual cycle. In this book you’ll learn: –What a normal cycle looks like; –The best way to chart your cycle and increase your fertility awareness; –How best to manage critical aspects of your health, including better sleep, exercise and a healthier diet; –Natural methods for managing period pain and PMS; –How to successfully avoid pregnancy without the pill; and –How to plan ahead if you do want to get pregnant. The Fifth Vital Sign aims to better connect women with their menstrual cycles, to break the myth that ovulation is only important when you're ready to have a baby. READ THE FIFTH VITAL SIGN TO BETTER UNDERSTAND YOUR HEALTH AND FERTILITY Whether children are a part of your future plans or not, your health matters. Start learning more now, and take control of your health. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lisa Hendrickson-Jack is a certified Fertility Awareness Educator and Holistic Reproductive Health Practitioner. She teaches women to chart their menstrual cycles for natural birth control, conception, and overall health monitoring. In her work, Lisa draws heavily from the current scientific literature and presents an evidence-based approach to fertility awareness and menstrual cycle optimization.

Vital signs, such as heart rate and respiration rate, are useful to health monitoring because they can provide important physiological insights for medical diagnosis and well-being management. Most traditional methods for measuring vital signs require a person to wear biomedical devices, such as a capnometer, a pulse oximeter, or an electrocardiogram sensor. These contact-based technologies are inconvenient, cumbersome, and uncomfortable to use. There is a compelling need for technologies that enable contact-free, easily deployable, and long-term monitoring of vital signs for healthcare. Contactless Vital Signs Monitoring presents a systematic and in-depth review on the principles, methodologies, and opportunities of using different wavelengths of an electromagnetic spectrum to measure vital signs from the human face and body contactlessly. The volume brings together pioneering researchers active in the field to report the latest progress made, in an intensive and structured way. It also presents various healthcare applications using camera and radio frequency-based monitoring, from clinical care to home care, to sport training and automotive, such as patient/neonatal monitoring in intensive care units, general wards, emergency department triage, MR/CT cardiac and respiratory gating, sleep centers, baby/elderly care, fitness cardio training, driver monitoring in automotive settings, and more. This book will be an important educational source for biomedical researchers, AI healthcare researchers, computer vision researchers, wireless-sensing researchers, doctors/clinicians, physicians/psychologists, and medical equipment manufacturers. Includes various contactless vital signs monitoring techniques, such as optical-based, radar-based, WiFi-based, RFID-based, and acoustic-based methods. Presents a thorough introduction to the measurement principles, methodologies, healthcare applications, hardware set-ups, and systems for contactless measurement of vital signs using camera or RF sensors. Presents the opportunities for the fusion of camera and RF sensors for contactless vital signs monitoring and healthcare.

Accurate clinical observations are the key to good patient care and fundamental to nursing practice. Vital Signs for Nurses will support anyone in care delivery to enhance their skills, reflect upon their own practice and assist in their continuing professional development. This practical introductory text explores how to make assessments of heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, pain and nutrition. It also looks at issues of infection control, record-keeping and legal and ethical considerations. With case studies and examples throughout, this text will be invaluable to all healthcare assistants, student nurses, Trainee Assistant Practitioners and students on foundation degrees.

Thousands of measures are in use today to assess health and health care in the United States. Although many of these measures provide useful information, their usefulness in either gauging or guiding performance improvement in health and health care is seriously limited by their sheer number, as well as their lack of consistency, compatibility, reliability, focus, and organization. To achieve better health at lower cost, all stakeholders - including health professionals, payers, policy makers, and members of the public - must be alert to what matters most. What are the core measures that will yield the clearest understanding and focus on better health and well-being for Americans? Vital Signs explores the most important issues - healthier people, better quality care, affordable care, and engaged individuals and communities - and specifies a streamlined set of 15 core measures. These measures, if standardized and applied at national, state, local, and institutional levels across the country, will transform the effectiveness, efficiency, and burden of health measurement and help accelerate focus and progress on our highest health priorities. Vital Signs also describes the leadership and activities necessary to refine, apply, maintain, and revise the measures over time, as well as how they can improve the focus and utility of measures outside the core set. If health care is to become more effective and more efficient, sharper attention is required on the elements most important to health and health care. Vital Signs lays the groundwork for the adoption of core measures that, if systematically applied, will yield better health at a lower cost for all Americans.

Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.

Why is pain so poorly understood? Why do we still distinguish between mental pain and physical pain, when pain is always an emotional experience? How can it be that science is about to clone a human being but still can't cure the pain of a bad back? If pain is the reason why most people visit the doctor, why are most doctors so bad at addressing the problem of suffering? Marni Jackson's PAIN: THE FIFTH VITAL SIGN is a witty, personal and groundbreaking inquiry into the nature, treatment and definition of human pain, one of the most misunderstood and elusive subjects to challenge humankind. In the questing and narrative manner of Oliver Sacks, Jackson takes us back into the history of pain and forward into the possibilities of pain genetics, Jackson brings us stories both of people in pain and the pain pioneers: eccentrics and artists, wrestlers and writers, psychologists and philosophers, nurses and doctors. Above all, Pain makes an elusive subject vivid and readable. We all know what pain is. Now Marni Jackson has given it a voice.