Medicine audiobooks

Deadly Spin

By: Wendell Potter

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 9 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

"My name is Wendell Potter, and for twenty years I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies. I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick—all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors." —Senate testimony, June 24, 2009



Wendell Potter is the insurance industry's worst nightmare.



In June 2009, Wendell Potter made... Read more

Ah-Choo!

By: Jennifer Ackerman

Narrated by: Emily Durante

Length: 7 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

Scientists call this the Golden Age of the Common Cold because Americans suffer up to a billion colds each year, resulting in 40 million days of missed work and school and 100 million doctor visits. They've also learned over the past decade much more about what cold viruses are, what they do to the human body, and how symptoms can be addressed.... Read more

Healing Hearts

By: Kathy E. Magliato, MD

Narrated by: Renée Raudman

Length: 8 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Dr. Kathy Magliato is one of fewer than a dozen female heart surgeons practicing in the world today. She is also a member of an even more exclusive group—those surgeons who perform heart transplants. Healing Hearts is the story of the making of a surgeon who also calls herself a wife and mother. Dr. Magliato takes us into her highly demanding,... Read more

101 Theory Drive

By: Terry McDermott

Narrated by: Stephen Hoye

Length: 8 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

It's not fiction: Gary Lynch is the real thing, the epitome of the rebel scientist—malnourished, contentious, inspiring, explosive, remarkably ambitious, consistently brilliant. He is one of the foremost figures of contemporary neuroscience, and his decades-long quest to understand the inner workings of the brain's memory machine has begun to... Read more

Eternity Soup

By: Greg Critser

Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt

Length: 6 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

What happens when you mix modern medical entrepreneurship with one of the most ancient of human desires—the desire to live forever? The answer is today's multibillion-dollar antiaging industry, which promises everything from restoring lost vitality to actually turning back the hands of time for aging boomers. But who, exactly, makes up the... Read more

The Poisoner's Handbook

By: Deborah Blum

Narrated by: Coleen Marlo

Length: 9 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Deborah Blum, writing with the high style and skill for suspense that is characteristic of the very best mystery fiction, shares the untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City. In The Poisoner's Handbook, Blum draws from highly original research to track the fascinating, perilous days when a pair of forensic scientists began their... Read more

The Fatal Strain

By: Alan Sipress

Narrated by: George K. Wilson

Length: 14 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

When avian flu began spreading across Asia in the early 2000s, it reawakened fears that had lain dormant for nearly a century. During the outbreak's deadliest years, Alan Sipress chased the virus as it infiltrated remote jungle villages and teeming cities and saw its mysteries elude the world's top scientists. In The Fatal Strain, Sipress... Read more

Hospital

By: Julie Salamon

Narrated by: Karen White

Length: 14 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

In 2005, Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, unveiled a new state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar cancer center. Determined to understand the whole spectrum of factors that determine what kind of medical care people receive in this country, bestselling author Julie Salamon spent one year tracking the progess of the center and getting to... Read more

The Uncertain Art

By: Sherwin B. Nuland

Narrated by: Michael Prichard

Length: 7 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

Long-time physician Sherwin B. Nuland presents a provocative and stimulating collection of stories illustrating the vagaries of medical practice over the years. Among the fascinating and probing questions that Nuland investigates are:



—What does the first Hippocratic Oath really mean?



—What happens when knowledge comes before we're ready for... Read more

Switching Time

By: Richard Baer

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 12 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Switching Time is the first story centering on multiple personality disorder to be told by the treating physician. It is the incredible saga of a young woman stranded in unimaginable darkness who, in order to survive, created seventeen different versions of herself.



In 1989, Karen Overhill walked into the office of psychiatrist Richard Baer... Read more

How Doctors Think

By: Jerome Groopman, M.D.

Narrated by: Michael Prichard

Length: 10 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

A New Yorker staff writer, bestselling author, and professor at Harvard Medical School unravels the mystery of how doctors figure out the best treatments—or fail to do so. This book describes the warning signs of flawed medical thinking and offers intelligent questions patients can ask.



On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing... Read more

The Family That Couldn't Sleep

By: D. T. Max

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 8 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

For two hundred years a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter.... Read more

Splendid Solution

By: Jeffrey Kluger

Narrated by: Michael Prichard

Length: 13 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

The riveting story of one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of the twentieth century, from the coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Apollo 13.



With rivalries, reversals, and a race against time, the struggle to eradicate polio is one of the great tales of modern history. It begins with the birth of Jonas Salk, shortly before one... Read more

Stiff

By: Mary Roach

Narrated by: Shelly Frasier

Length: 7 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

An oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem.



For 2,000 years, cadavers—some willingly, some unwittingly—have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to... Read more

Extreme Measures

By: Jessica Nutik Zitter, MD

Narrated by: Jessica Nutik Zitter, MD

Length: 11 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

For readers of Being Mortal and Modern Death, an ICU and Palliative Care specialist offers a framework for a better way to exit life that will change our medical culture at the deepest level


In medical school, no one teaches you how to let a patient die.

Jessica Zitter became a doctor because she wanted to be a hero. She elected to specialize in... Read more

Miracle Cure

By: William Rosen

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Length: 12 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

The epic history of how antibiotics were born, saving millions of lives and creating a vast new industry known as Big Pharma.

As late as the 1930s, virtually no drug intended for sickness did any good; doctors could set bones, deliver babies, and offer palliative care. That all changed in less than a generation with the discovery and development... Read more

The Cancer Whisperer

By: Sophie Sabbage

Narrated by: Sophie Sabbage

Length: 6 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

The self-published sensation and UK bestseller that has helped thousands touched by cancer.

“I have cancer. Cancer does not have me.”

Sophie Sabbage was forty-eight years old, happily married, and mother to a four-year-old daughter when she was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. Since that shocking diagnosis, she has been on a remarkable... Read more

Your Pregnancy, Your Way

By: Allison Hill

Narrated by: Alicyn Packard

Length: 11 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

As an OB/GYN, Dr. Allison Hill has delivered thousands of babies; as a mom, she's given birth to her own two children. Hill has a unique perspective on the many questions moms have surrounding pregnancy and childbirth—especially when it comes to "going natural." Drawing on her twenty years of expertise as well as current medical data, she weighs... Read more

A Path Out of Poverty

By: Paul Farmer

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
—Lilla Watson, Aboriginal activist and artist

World-renowned physician and public health pioneer Dr. Paul Farmer has long been devoted to caring and advocating for the world's... Read more

The Mouth-Body Connection

By: Gerald P. Curatola & Diane Reverand

Narrated by: Chris Sorensen

Length: 7 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Acclaimed oral health expert and wellness pioneer, Dr. Gerry Curatola, explores the bi-directional relationship between the health of your mouth and your body, and provides a groundbreaking program for creating a healthy mouth that will help maintain a healthy body.

The mouth acts as mirror and a gateway and reflects what is happening in the rest... Read more

Your Health, Your Decisions

By: Robert Alan McNutt

Narrated by: Dan Woren

Length: 6 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

In nearly every medical-decision-making encounter, the physician is at the center of the discussion, with the patient the recipient of the physician’s decisions. Dr. Robert Alan McNutt starts from a very different premise: the patient should be at the center. McNutt challenges the physician-directed, medical-expertise model of making decisions,... Read more

Open Heart

By: Stephen Westaby

Narrated by: Gordon Griffin

Length: 10 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

In gripping prose, one of the world's leading cardiac surgeons lays bare both the wonder and the horror of a life spent a heartbeat away from death

When Stephen Westaby witnessed a patient die on the table during open-heart surgery for the first time, he was struck by the quiet, determined way the surgeons walked away. As he soon understood,... Read more

Head Strong

By: Dave Asprey

Narrated by: Dave Asprey & Rob Shapiro

Length: 10 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

From the creator of Bulletproof Coffee and author of the bestselling The Bulletproof Diet comes a revolutionary plan to upgrade your brainpower—in two weeks or less.For the last decade, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dave Asprey has worked with world-renowned doctors and scientists to uncover the latest, most innovative methods for making humans... Read more

Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember

By: Christine Hyung-Oak Lee

Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller

Length: 7 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

 A memoir of reinvention after a stroke at thirty-three, based on the author’s viral Buzzfeed essayChristine Hyung-Oak Lee woke up with a headache on New Year’s Eve 2006. By that afternoon, she saw the world—quite literally—upside down. By New Year’s Day, she was unable to form a coherent sentence. And after hours in the ER, days in the... Read more