Medicine audiobooks

Drug Dealer, MD

By: Anna Lembke, MD

Narrated by: Callie Beaulieu

Length: 5 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

Three out of four people addicted to heroin probably started on a prescription opioid, according to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the United States alone, 16,000 people die each year as a result of prescription opioid overdose. But perhaps the most frightening aspect of the prescription drug epidemic is that... Read more

A Stitch of Time

By: Lauren Marks

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Length: 11 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Lauren Marks was twenty-seven when an aneurysm ruptured in her brain and left her fighting for her life. She woke up in a hospital soon after with serious deficiencies to her reading, speaking, and writing abilities, and an unfamiliar diagnosis: aphasia. This would be shocking news for anyone, but Lauren was a voracious reader, an actress,... Read more

Hot Lights, Cold Steel

By: Michael J. Collins, MD

Narrated by: John Pruden

Length: 9 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

When Michael Collins decides to become a surgeon, he is totally unprepared for the chaotic life of a resident at a major hospital. A natural overachiever, Collins's success, in college and medical school led to a surgical residency at one of the most respected medical centers in the world, the famed Mayo Clinic. But compared to his fellow... Read more

The Inheritance

By: Niki Kapsambelis

Narrated by: Callie Beaulieu

Length: 9 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

Every sixty-nine seconds, someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Of the top ten killers, it is the only disease for which there is no cure or treatment. For most people, there is nothing that they can do to fight back. But one family is doing all they can.



The DeMoe family has the most devastating form of the disease that there is: early... Read more

The Drug Hunters

By: Donald R. Kirsch, Ph.D. & Ogi Ogas, Ph.D.

Narrated by: James Anderson Foster

Length: 7 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity—by chewing, brewing, and snorting—some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the five-thousand-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found... Read more

A Double Dose of Dilaudid

By: Kerry Hamm

Narrated by: Donna Postel

Length: 4 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

Welcome to a small-town Emergency Room in rural Ohio. While it's true our ER doesn't see the stabbing and gunshot action ERs see in inner cities, we have no shortage of the sad, the scary, the painful, and the just plain dumb.



With more than twenty stories, things ER workers want to say to patients, and Emergency Room bingo, A Double Dose of... Read more

Miracles We Have Seen

By: Harley A. Rotbart, MD

Narrated by: Angela Brazil & Stephen R. Thorne

Length: 12 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

This is a book of miracles—medical events witnessed by leading physicians for which there is no reasonable medical explanation, or, if there is, the explanation itself is extraordinary. These dramatic first-person essays detail spectacular serendipities, impossible cures, breathtaking resuscitations, extraordinary awakenings, and recovery from... Read more

Critical Care

By: Theresa Brown

Narrated by: Coleen Marlo

Length: 5 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

In her former career as an English professor, Theresa Brown had been shielded from the harsh reality of death. That all changed the day she decided to become an oncology nurse. In Critical Care, Theresa writes powerfully
and honestly about her first year on the hospital floor. With great compassion and a disarming sense of humor, she shares the... Read more

When the Air Hits Your Brain

By: Frank T. Vertosick, Jr., MD

Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne

Length: 8 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

With poignant insight and humor, Frank Vertosick, Jr., MD, describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick's patients... Read more

One in a Billion

By: Mark Johnson & Kathleen Gallagher

Narrated by: Jonathan Yen

Length: 7 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

In this landmark medical narrative, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher chronicle the story of Nic Volker, the Wisconsin boy at the center of a daring breakthrough in medicine—a complete gene sequencing to discover the cure for an otherwise undiagnosable illness.


At just two years old, Nic experiences a searing... Read more

Medical Apartheid

By: Harriet A. Washington

Narrated by: Ron Butler

Length: 19 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted... Read more

The Smart but Scattered Guide to Success

By: Peg Dawson, Ed.D. & Richard Guare, Ph.D.

Narrated by: Randye Kaye

Length: 10 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Are you smart, scattered, and struggling? You're not alone. Cutting-edge research shows that today's 24/7 wired world and the growing demands of work and family life may simply max out the part of the brain that manages complex tasks. That's especially true for those lacking strong executive skills—the core brain-based abilities needed to... Read more

ContamiNation

By: McKay Jenkins

Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer

Length: 8 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

A few years ago, journalism professor McKay Jenkins went in for a routine medical exam. What doctors found was not routine at all: a tumor, the size of a navel orange, was lurking in his abdomen. When Jenkins returned to the hospital to have the tumor removed, he was visited by a couple of researchers with clipboards. They had some questions for... Read more

Lights and Sirens

By: Kevin Grange

Narrated by: Sean Runnette

Length: 10 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

Nine months of tying tourniquets and pushing new medications, of IVs, chest compressions, and defibrillator shocks—that was Kevin Grange's initiation into emergency medicine when, at age thirty-six, he enrolled in the "Harvard of paramedic schools": UCLA's Daniel Freeman paramedic program, long considered one of the best and most intense... Read more

Alpha Docs

By: James M. Dale & Daniel Muñoz, M. D.

Narrated by: Jonathan Yen

Length: 7 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

It takes drive, persistence, and plenty of stamina to practice cardiology at the highest level. The competition for training fellowship spots is intense. Hundreds of applicants from all over the world compete to be accepted into the Cardiovascular Disease Training Fellowship at Johns Hopkins. Only nine are chosen each year. This is the story of... Read more

Bad Faith

By: Paul A. Offit, MD

Narrated by: Tom Perkins

Length: 7 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

In recent years, there have been major outbreaks of whooping cough among children in California, mumps in New York, and measles in Ohio’s Amish country—despite the fact that these are all vaccine-preventable diseases. Although America is the most medically advanced place in the world, many people disregard modern medicine in favor of using their... Read more

The Heart Healers

By: James Forrester, M.D.

Narrated by: Jonathan Yen

Length: 15 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

At one time, heart disease was a death sentence. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was killing millions and, as with the Black Death centuries before, physicians stood helpless. Visionaries, though, had begun to make strides earlier. On September 7, 1895, Ludwig Rehn successfully sutured the heart of a living man with a knife wound to... Read more

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole

By: Dr. Allan H. Ropper & Brian David Burrell

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

Length: 9 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

"Tell the doctor where it hurts." It sounds simple enough, unless the problem affects the very organ that produces awareness and generates speech. What is it like to try to heal the body when the mind is under attack? Like Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Allan H. Ropper inhabits a world where absurdities abound:




— A figure skater whose body has become... Read more

Doctored

By: Sandeep Jauhar

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 10 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

Hoping for the stability he needs to start a family, Sandeep Jauhar, an attending cardiologist, accepts a position at a massive teaching hospital on the outskirts of Queens. With a decade’s worth of elite medical training behind him, he is eager to settle down and reap the rewards of countless sleepless nights.




Instead, he is confronted with... Read more

Why Can't I Get Better?

By: Richard I. Horowitz, MD

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 19 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

You may not know that you have Lyme. It can mimic every disease process, including Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, autoimmune conditions like MS, psychiatric conditions like depression and anxiety, and cause significant memory and concentration problems, mimicking early dementia. It is called the "Great Imitator," and inaccurate... Read more

The Pain Chronicles

By: Melanie Thernstrom

Narrated by: Laural Merlington

Length: 11 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

Each of us will know physical pain in our lives, but none of us knows when it will come or how long it will stay. Today as much as 10 percent of the population of the United States suffers from chronic pain. It is more widespread, misdiagnosed, and undertreated than any major disease. While recent research has shown that pain produces... Read more

Strong at the Broken Places

By: Richard M. Cohen

Narrated by: Mel Foster

Length: 10 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

In an extension of his New York Times bestselling book Blindsided, author Richard M. Cohen depicts one year in the lives of five individuals who are living with serious chronic illness and of their families. These "citizens of sickness," as Cohen calls them, were selected for the diversity of their ages, races, socioeconomic positions, illness... Read more

Why You Eat What You Eat

By: Rachel Herz, PhD

Narrated by: Jo Anna Perrin

Length: 9 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Why You Eat What You Eat examines the sensory, psychological, neuroscientific, and physiological factors that influence our eating habits. Rachel Herz uncovers the fascinating and surprising facts that affect food consumption: bringing reusable bags to the grocery store encourages us to buy more treats; our beliefs about food affect the number... Read more

The Education of a Coroner

By: John Bateson

Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne

Length: 11 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

Marin County, California is a study in contradictions. Its natural beauty attracts thousands of visitors every year, yet the county also is home to San Quentin Prison, one of the oldest and largest penitentiaries in the country. Marin ranks in the top one percent of counties nationwide in terms of affluence and overall health, yet it is far... Read more