Management of Acute Decompensated Heart Failure: A Clinician's Guide to Diagnosis and Treatment
This important textbook successfully tackles the lack of evidence for practice in caring for patients with acute heart failure, and provides the reader with practical advice on how to diagnose and treat their patients effectively.Bringing a major public health problem into the era of evidence-based medical practice, this important textbook successfully tackles the lack of evidence for practice in caring for patients with acute heart failure. Providing the reader with practical advice on how to diagnose and treat their patients effectively, key elements of the text include: - a definition of the problem, including its scope and epidemiology - common complications and comorbid conditions - an in-depth review of the pharmacological therapy for acute heart failure. With an interesting focus on the integrative care of the patient, the book includes chapters on psychosocial aspects, nursing care, and disease management, which clarify many issues about the total care of the patient and family that are often ignored in medical textbooks. Comprehensive and easy to use, this is an essential companion to practitioners caring for patients with this increasingly common, difficult, and fatal disease.

Diabetes mellitus, particularly non-insulin-dependent diabetes Type 2, is a common disease and, even though insulin has been around for seventy years, this endocrine disorder still reduces the life expectancy of diabetic patients because of the development of long-term complications, including hypertension. Hypertension occurs twice as often in diabetic patients as in non-diabetic ones. Bryan Williams and his international team of collaborators provide the reader with their views for treatment of diabetes associated with hypertension and the prevention of subsequent coronary artery disease and other disorders.

In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author Josй Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.

In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.