BEYOND MEDICINE is the first major book about ARDS written for patients, families and medical professionals with input from patients themselves.
ARDS effects over 150,000 individuals annually with a mortality rate of 30-50% or higher. Patients and families will find information and consolation in the stories of other patients with similar problems. Physicians, nurses and other medical professionals will get a patient-family perspective that they may have missed by focusing on the disease rather than on the person with the disease.
BEYOND MEDICINE comes in an era of "Evidence-based Medicine" and protocol- based patient care. This engaging book reminds us to remember and use the healing forces of Love & Prayer, Touch & Humor, Music & Pets. Each of these elements of healing can be helpful in critical illnesses such as ARDS, as illustrated by the stories in this book. Chapters on each element go into depth on that topic.
This book aims to help the reader confused by a multiplicity of diseases responsible for similar symptoms in different patients. Consequently, the chapters are noticeably sign-oriented rather than disease-oriented, each dealing with one of the four cardinal modalities of HRCT presentation, namely the reticular, nodular, alveolar and cystic patterns. Each chapter is introduced by a list of diseases, immediately followed by a detailed description of each disease. All the chapters are thoroughly illustrated with high-quality, enlarged images which, like a counterpoint, provide the rhythm to the written text.
When dealing with the diseases within each pattern, only the pertinent manifestations are taken into account. This is a feature unique to this book, which sees the same disease being introduced more than once. This distinction is not artificial, since different phases in the progression of a process not only have different clinical features, but also dissimilar pathological findings, and therefore different radiological aspects.