Medicine / Science

This guide is intended for doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers in rural clinics and hospitals. It addresses the curative and, to a lesser extent, preventive aspects of the main illnesses encountered in the field. The list is not exhaustive but covers the essential needs. This guide aims to provide the simplest possible answers to the problems faced by healthcare professionals through practical solutions, combining the experience gained in the field by Doctors Without Borders with the recommendations of leading organizations such as the World Health Organization.

General practitioners receive a great deal of information about alcohol, its use, and its immediate or potential pathological consequences. This knowledge, primarily originating from hospital-based and specialist physicians, has led to recommendations intended to guide general practitioners in identifying patients with alcohol use disorder and providing them with therapeutic care. However, the relevance and applicability of most of these recommendations are poorly or inadequately assessed in general practice. Consequently, general practitioners, sometimes contrary to the recommendations, are led to develop concepts and practices specific to their patients and working conditions. The originality of this book lies in the comparison of the knowledge and practices of two physicians treating patients with alcohol use disorder in different settings. The authors—a general practitioner in private practice and university professor, and a hospital-based university physician specializing in alcohol addiction—offer, after comparing their respective approaches, a brief overview of current knowledge useful for practice, and a reflection on the specific challenges and difficulties encountered by general practitioners in their work. This is more a book on general medicine for patients with alcohol-related problems than a book on alcohol addiction.

General practitioners and specialists are increasingly called upon to examine elderly and very elderly patients. Until now, they have been ill-prepared for this highly specialized clinical approach, where each symptom can stem from multiple causes, where illnesses are almost always multifaceted, symptomatic, or poised to manifest as a complication, where one diagnosis can conceal another, and where medical history—key to diagnosis—may have been overlooked or concealed. This concise book allows physicians to master the approach to the elderly patient in a useful and, we hope, engaging way. It provides a clear understanding of the most common diagnoses at this age and how to avoid the pitfalls. This is neither an exhaustive treatise for specialists nor a quick reference guide for students in a hurry. The authors, from different generations, aim to share their experience as geriatricians with everyone. Readers can rediscover the importance of the clinical examination, the primary source of all diagnoses, regardless of age.

A general practitioner-teacher and a university professor have chosen to revitalize the theoretical teaching of immunology by grounding it in clinical experience. While modern immunology, like endocrinology and neuroscience, is largely a discipline of intercellular communication, this manual owes much of its quality to the ongoing interaction between the two authors, who worked to select the essential elements and firmly ground them in everyday practice. Another characteristic of this work is its combination of rigor and simplicity. Too many books, and especially too many articles, discourage physicians with their abundance of information and poor integration. This is not the case here, as the didactic presentation is based on the indisputable achievements of modern immunology, selected for their explanatory value and harmoniously assembled whenever the current state of knowledge allows. The Department of General Medicine at the Paris-Sud Faculty of Medicine was established around Antoine Bédère Hospital more than twenty years ago, at the same time as INSERM Unit 131 and just a few years after the creation of the hospital's Internal Medicine department. This network and the bonds of friendship among its members remain strong and fruitful. This book is further evidence of that.

The author invites us to pay close attention to the behavior of people with Alzheimer's disease and to the behaviors we adopt with them. The entire question of behavioral expression arises in their case, just as it does for everyone else. We are led to delve into the mysteries of unconscious communication. It then becomes necessary to seriously examine the ideological aspects of the role attributed, without formal proof, to brain lesions. Such a guiding principle allows us to advance our understanding of the disease from the patient's perspective. A better understanding of their thought processes, their issues, and their psychological needs allows us to better organize their care and learn how to negotiate with them. The practice of sociotherapy, the principles of which are explained, provides a concrete illustration of this.

While scientists are still searching for treatments that will definitively cure cancer in all its forms, they have known for several years now that the most effective fight against this terrible disease lies in prevention. Numerous clinical studies have already shown that increased consumption of plant-based foods, including fruits and vegetables, is a key factor in reducing the risk of cancer. Even better, some foods have the ability to nip in the bud the microtumors that we all develop during our lives and that threaten to become cancerous.

So, you've decided to quit smoking? Congratulations! This brochure contains tips based on the experiences of hundreds of ex-smokers who participated in our research. By reading it, you'll learn how they successfully broke free from cigarettes.