Lawrence Gold has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators. The most-rated is State of Mind.
Stranger in a Strange World: Asperger's: The Outsider
Summary
An automobile accident shatters the near-perfect lives of David and Luke Hyatt, identical twins. David survives intact, but Luke nearly dies from his injuries. The residue of Luke's head injury is an acquired form of Asperger's. The twins had graduated from medical school and were about to enter an internship at Brier Hospital in Berkeley. Although Luke is gifted with savant-like intelligence, can he continue his career in medicine? Will health professionals, administrators, and patients themselves accept Luke as a physician or succumb to the petty fear of someone different, or is it time for the world to consider the value of an individual beyond his or her label?
©2017 Lawrence W. Gold, MD (P)2018 Lawrence W. Gold, MD
Tortured Memory
Summary
Dr. Abbie Adler had chosen a general, child, and adolescent psychiatrist to treat sexually abused girls. As a victim of such abuse herself, Abbie's insights make her an effective therapist. In addition, her practice includes adult patients and provides group and individual therapy for a broad range of psychiatric problems including depression, personality disorders, psychopathy, and malignant narcissism. On a December evening, the Berkeley Police find Abbie sitting in her car at Inspiration Point overlooking the East Bay of San Francisco. She's bruised and catatonic. They transport her to Brier Hospital where they admit her to the psychiatric ward. The nature of her condition, and its cause, remain a mystery. After standard treatments fail, her psychiatrist recommends electroshock therapy. Finally, she awakens but remembers nothing of the month preceding. In addition, she discovers significant memory gaps from the past few years. Abbie had been treating two victims of the Chabot rapist who targeted girls, and as she's making progress in their care, unbelievably, someone abducts and strangles them. Their deaths devastate Abbie. During Abbie's difficult recovery, memories of past events gradually return. They are fragmentary and torture her with memory flashes and nightmares. Gradually, she begins to suspect that one of her adult patients may be the strangler. When the police find Abbie's prime suspect brutally murdered, both she and the police are befuddled. Abbie struggles to discover the identity of the strangler and those who may be abetting his actions. Will he/they get away with it?
©2013 Lawrence W. Gold, MD (P)2016 Lawrence W. Gold, MD
The Plague Within
Summary
Even in the age of the genome and sophisticated biotechnology, medical progress still moves at a snail's pace. Seasoned investigators are matured by experience and they accept the virtue of the too-slow scientific process. The young, however have been brought up in a world of instant gratification, and they barrel ahead never looking back to see the havoc in their wake. So it is with Dr. Harmony Lane. In her single-minded obsession to cure her patients, she cuts corners and treats a desperately ill woman with an experimental viral vector provided by an unscrupulous research scientist. While he shares her impatience, he cares nothing for her humanistic sensibilities. She uses a similar vector on her patients with autoimmune diseases. While the vector has remarkable curative properties, it soon becomes clear that it has devastating and lethal side effects. The race is on to cure or at least control the vector before it kills again. The novel proves, once again, that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".
©2013 Lawrence W. Gold, M.D. (P)2014 Lawrence W. Gold, M.D.
State of Mind
Summary
Dr. Kimberly Powell, a PhD in neuropsychology, works in a research lab trying to understand the roots of violence by stimulating the brains of aggressive rats to reduce their savagery.
Her successes lead to phase I safety trials in volunteers and prisoners, and then to phase II and III studies in patients.
Soon it becomes clear that Kim's brain stimulating techniques, besides controlling aggression, offer the potential to cure a number of medical problems including Parkinson's disease, depression, PTSD, and many others.
When the court instructs her to treat a psychopathic killer, she's appalled. What would such a killer, if cured, still owe to his victims and to society?
The ethical implications of the research and especially its application on humans are substantial, but so, too, is her altruistic desire to help.
Where is the balance and how far and how fast should these trials proceed - and, at what cost?
©2015 Lawrence W. Gold, M.D. (P)2017 Lawrence W. Gold, M.D.