3 Medicine audiobooks

Atul Gawande - Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End



Narrator: Robert Petkoff
Listening Length: 9 hours and 3 minutes
Program Type: Audiobook
Version: Unabridged
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Audible.com Release Date: October 7, 2014

In Being Mortal, best-selling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: How medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending.

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.

Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.

Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.

Aubrey de Grey - Ending Aging



Written By: Aubrey de Grey, Michael Rae
Narrated By: Stephanie Murphy
Publisher: SENS Research Foundation
Date: April 2016
Duration: 16 hours 4 minutes

Must we age?

A long life in a healthy, vigorous, youthful body has always been one of humanity's greatest dreams. Recent progress in genetic manipulations and calorie-restricted diets in laboratory animals hold forth the promise that someday science will enable us to exert total control over our own biological aging.

Nearly all scientists who study the biology of aging agree that we will someday be able to substantially slow down the aging process, extending our productive, youthful lives. Dr. Aubrey de Grey is perhaps the most bullish of all such researchers. As has been reported in media outlets ranging from 60 Minutes to The New York Times, Dr. de Grey believes that the key biomedical technology required to eliminate aging-derived debilitation and death entirely - technology that would not only slow but periodically reverse age-related physiological decay, leaving us biologically young into an indefinite future - is now within reach.

In Ending Aging, Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe the details of this biotechnology. They explain that the aging of the human body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage. As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine's fully functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars. We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage.

By demystifying aging and its postponement for the non-specialist listener, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.

Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science



By: Siddhartha Mukherjee
Narrated by: Santino Fontana
Length: 1 hr and 44 mins
Unabridged
Release date: 13-10-2015
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio / TED

Essential, required listening for doctors and patients alike: A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one of the world's premiere cancer researchers reveals an urgent philosophy on the little-known principles that govern medicine - and how understanding these principles can empower us all.

Over a decade ago, when Siddhartha Mukherjee was a young, exhausted, and isolated medical resident, he discovered a book that would forever change the way he understood the medical profession. The book, The Youngest Science, forced Dr. Mukherjee to ask himself an urgent, fundamental question: Is medicine a "science"? Sciences must have laws - statements of truth based on repeated experiments that describe some universal attribute of nature. But does medicine have laws like other sciences?

Dr. Mukherjee has spent his career pondering this question - a question that would ultimately produce some of the most serious thinking he would do around the tenets of his discipline - culminating in The Laws of Medicine. In this important treatise, he investigates the most perplexing and illuminating cases of his career that ultimately led him to identify the three key principles that govern medicine.

Brimming with fascinating historical details and modern medical wonders, this important audiobook is a fascinating glimpse into the struggles and "eureka!" moments that people outside of the medical profession rarely see. Written with Dr. Mukherjee's signature eloquence and passionate prose, The Laws of Medicine is a critical book not just for those in the medical profession but for everyone who is moved to better understand how their health and well-being are being treated. Ultimately this book lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding medicine now and into the future.