This new edition of the most comprehensive text available in the field continues to provide a vast amount of information to enable consumers to make... wise choices regarding health products and services. It offers a panoramic view of the health marketplace, while explaining the scientific methods that are essential for validating claims about how products and services affect health.

The most comprehensive consumer health text available, Consumer Health: A Guide to Intelligent Decisions offers a panoramic view of the health... marketplace. You’ll learn how to sharpen your critical consumer skills so you can distinguish valid health claims from those that are fraudulent or misleading. By offering science-based facts and guidelines, Consumer Health provides the tools you need to make smart decisions about health-care products and services for yourself and your family.

Consumer Health: Making Informed Decisions is a concise, current text with the most up-to-date information about health care reform and insurance. It is... devoted to the most important issues relative to consumer health issues, including advertising, dietary supplements, herbal remedies, weight management, and medications. There are in-depth analyses of the American health care system, insurance options, and consumer protection. The text also takes a critical look at complementary and alternative therapies. Throughout the text, there are guidelines for making decisions that can benefit the individual. A comprehensive list of learning objectives precede each chapter and a list of study questions conclude each chapter. The questions are designed to help the student summarize the major points of the chapter, prepare for exams, and critically analyze the material contained in the chapters. Instructor Resources: PowerPoint Presentations

This comprehensive volume explores the evolving fields of consumer informatics and telemedicine as envisioned by the Institute of Medicine in its... landmark reports on the electronic medical record, patient safety, and quality care. Each chapter describes the role of computers, technology, and telecommunications as enablers within a specific application focused on the needs of consumers. The applications covered are ones which empower consumers as they seek information, analyze their health care needs, and make decisions about their own health care. Such applications empower professionals in their efforts to serve patients, while increasing the knowledge of the consumer. Richly illustrated with detailed examples, this volume speaks to a wide range of audiences as it addresses issues raised by consumer informatics, the use of technology, research and development effects, and telemedicine. Chapter highlights include: Patient-Centered Communication; Using the Internet Toward Reliable Consumer Health Information; Disease Management and Home Telehealth; and Biothreats and Disaster Management. The book's audience includes all healthcare professionals, healthcare administrators, IT professionals, health informaticians, and students.

This second edition of Consumerism in World History draws on recent research of the consumer experience in the West and Japan, while also examining... societies less renowned for consumerism, such as those in Africa. By relating consumerism to other issues in world history, this book forces reassessment of our understanding of both consumerism and global history. Each chapter has been updated and new features now include: a chapter on Latin America Russian and Chinese developments since the 1990s the changes involved in trying to bolster consumerism as a response to recent international threats examples of consumerist syncretism, as in efforts to blend beauty contests with traditional culture in Kerala. With updated suggested reading, the second edition of Consumerism in World History is essential reading for all students of world history.

The Third Edition has been completely updated to include current and emerging issues in Consumer Law. The text covers a range of topics, including... advertising and marketing, consumer credit regulation, consumer privacy, payment systems, warranty law, debt collection, remedies and predatory lending (a capstone chapter). This text contains a balance of cases, problems (updated to reflect modern situations) and notes (discussion questions and references to the latest consumer protection scholarship), allowing the professor the maximum flexibility in choice of topics, and pedagogical methods. A complete teacher's manual and a new statutory supplement are also available.

In recent years, the interest in consumer-related issues has grown tremendously, fueled by growing unemployment, high foreclosure rates, credit card... interest rate increases and a recession more sweeping than anything seen in more than a generation. Unfortunately, when readers look for a text to explain these issues, they are too often confronted with case books that have more application to law school curricula than to a college-level course. This book fills the need for a well-written text on consumer law and consumer protection. Covering topics as diverse as protecting a persons' credit rating to avoiding predatory lending, Consumer Law & Protection explains the law and gives readers the tools that they need to protect themselves from telemarketers, unscrupulous debt collectors and network marketing schemes, to name only a few of the topics covered in the book.

Consumer Mathematics presents basic math skills used in everyday situations—paying taxes, buying food, banking and investing, and managing a... household. The full-color text helps learners of all ages become wiser, and more informed.

Why do people behave and think the way they do? What makes people choose certain products and services? How does consumption affect our everyday... lives? Informed by psychological theory and supported by research, this book provides an overall understanding of consumer behaviour and underlying thought processes. Psychology is central to an effective understanding of consumer behaviour and this book shows how it can be used to explain why people choose certain products and services, and how this affects their behaviour and psychological well-being. It explores key theories within social, cognitive and developmental psychology to show how psychology can help explain consumption behaviours. These include: Memory Learning Perception Attention Emotions Decision making Each chapter features an introduction, key terms and a summary as well as study questions or class exercises that encourage you to think critically about the subjects covered. Each topic is illustrated with real-life examples, including adverts and case studies, allowing you to relate the theory to everyday life. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book is essential reading for students of consumer psychology. It is also important reading for anyone studying consumption, whether in marketing, consumer behaviour, sociology, anthropology or business studies.

Slogans such as "Let's put Christ back into Christmas" or "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" hold an appeal to Christians who oppose the... commercializing of events they hold sacred. However, through a close look at the rise of holidays in the United States, Leigh Schmidt show us that commercial appropriations of these occasions were as religious in form as they were secular. The rituals of America's holiday bazaar that emerged in the nineteenth century offered a luxuriant merger of the holy and the profane--a heady blend of fashion and faith, merchandising and gift-giving, profits and sentiments, all celebrations of a devout consumption. In this richly illustrated book, which captures both the blessings and ballyhoo of American holiday observances for the mid-eighteenth century through the twentieth, the author offers a reassessment of the "consumer rites" that various social critics have long decried for their spiritual emptiness and banal sentimentality.Schmidt tells the story of how holiday celebrations were almost banished by Puritans and other religious reformers in the colonies but went on to be romanticized and reinvented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Merchants and advertisers were crucial for the reimagining of the holidays, promoting them in a grand, carnivalesque manner, which could include gargantuan fruit cakes, masked Santa Clauses, and exploding valentines.Along the way Schmidt uses everything from diaries to manuals on church decoration and window display to show in bright detail the ways in which people have prepared for and celebrated specific holidays--such as going Christmas shopping, making love tokens, choosing Easter bonnets, sending flowers to Mom, buying ties for Dad. He demonstrates in particular how women took the lead as holiday consumers, shaping warm-hearted celebrations of home and family through their intricate engagement with the marketplace. Bringing together the history of business, religion, and gender, this book offers a fascinating cultural history of an endlessly debated marvel--the commercialization of the American holidays.

Social Theory/Latin American Studies Translated and with an Introduction by George Yúdice An essential analysis of the ways consumerism and... globalization intersect with political power. In Consumers and Citizens, Nestor García Canclini, the best-known and most innovative cultural studies scholar in Latin America, maps the critical effects of urban sprawl and global media and commodity markets on citizens-and shows at the same time that the complex results mean not only a shrinkage of certain traditional rights (particularly those of the welfare or client state) but also new openings for expanding citizenship. García Canclini focuses on the diverse ways in which democratic societies recognize markets of citizen opinions, however heterogeneous and dissonant, as in the fashion and entertainment industries. He shows how identity issues, brought to the fore by the aligning of citizenship and consumption, can no longer be understood strictly within the purview of territory or nation. Rather, the postmodern citizen-consumer inhabits a transterritorial and multilingual space, structured more along the lines of markets than states. Defining this space, García Canclini seeks to formulate a participatory and critical approach to consumption in which national culture, far from being extinguished, is reconstituted in transnational, cultural interactions. Néstor García Canclini is the author of Hybrid Cultures (Minnesota, 1995), the original Spanish edition of which won the 1992 Premio Iberoamericano. He is director of the Program of Studies on Urban Culture at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. George Yúdice teaches in the American Studies Program and in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University.