Thomasine Kushner is a bioethicist at the California Pacific Medical Center Program in Medicine and Human Values. Co-editor of the Cambridge Quarterly for Healthcare Ethics, she is author (with David Thomasma) of Birth to Death: Science and Bioethics, Asking to Die: Inside the Dutch Debate about Euthanasia, and Ward Ethics: A Case Book for Doctors-in-Training.

• 1. Letter to patients: on becoming the 'good' patient and finding the 'right' doctor Leonard Groopman; 2. Becoming an active member of your healthcare team William Norcross; 3. Information that will help you with advance planning for your health care Mark Wicclair; 4. What do you do now? Responding to medical emergencies Kenneth V. Iserson; 5. What you need to know about medical errors Erica Friedman and Rosamond Rhodes; 6. Being informed when you give consent to medical care Ben Rich; 7. Beware of scorecards Rosamond Rhodes and James Strain; 8. Transplantation 101: negotiating the system Aaron Spital and Steven Smith; 9. When the illness is psychiatric Leonard Groopman; 10. On the horizon: genetic testing Robyn Shapiro; 11. To be or not to be - a research subject? Eric Meslin and Peter Schwartz; 12. Information that will help you make health care decisions for adult family members Mark Wicclair; 13. Caring for individuals with Alzheimer's Robyn Shapiro; 14. When the patient is a child Timothy Yeh; 15. Care of elders Claudia Landau and Guy Micco; 16. Being and thinking Hina Singh, Claudia Jacova, Paul Ford, and Judy Illes; 17. Your guide to pain management Ben Rich; 18. The hardest decisions: when treatment stops working Timothy Quill and Mindy Shah; 19. What you need to know about disasters Griffin Trotter; 20. Making the internet work for you: researching your health questions Bette Anton.

"...Overall, this volume is a very good guide for individuals with little or moderate knowledge of the health care field.... Recommended..." L. Synovitz, Southeastern Louisiana University, CHOICE