Reliance series demystifies medical practices with a practical approach to twenty-first-century health and home medicine, particularly helpful in a financial downturn.

When There Is No Doctor is smartly designed and full of medical tips and emergency suggestions. At a time when our health system has become particularly susceptible to strain, it should be no further than an arm's reach away in your household.

This is a book about sustainable health, primarily having to do with your health and what you can do to protect it--in bad times certainly, but also in good. I will help you ensure the health of those you love, yourself and, should you so choose, your community, if and when the world changes. World may come to mean your little town or the whole globe. It could change for a few days or weeks, or for a few years. It could change because of a flood, financial crisis, flu pandemic, or failure of our energy procurement, production or distribution systems.

I will not teach you to be a lone survivalist who anticipates doing an appendectomy on himself or a loved one on the kitchen table with a steak knife and a few spoons, although I will discuss techniques of austere and improvised medicine for really hard times.

Gerard S. Doyle, MD, teaches and practices emergency medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he also plans the hospital's response to disasters.