Books
By Cheree Cleghorn, Editor
This is a pre-Thanksgiving special of a totally different kind.
This may seem like an odd book for a health care website to recommend but it really is relevant.
Health is one part of the world’s ways and means or the lack of them. Understand the latter, and the health status of the people [...]

Topics: Books

News
“The “sexual début” of an evangelical girl typically occurs just after she turns sixteen,” says this story.
The article explores the differences between “red state” and “blue state” parents, their teenagers and their attitudes toward sex among young people.
Anti-sex ed. Pro sex-ed.
Contraception is good. Contraception suggests you are bad, you planned this.
What horrifies red state parents [...]

Topics: Books, News/Commentary

Commentary
This Washington Post column, Family Almanac, is about girls and bullying. Bullying at any age is something to deal with promptly and effectively—- but bullying is especially difficult for parents when kids are in middle school. Teenager-time.
The “mean girls” problem has been getting more attention lately but bullying can go on whenever two people are in one place if one [...]

Topics: Books, Friends & Families

Books
By Cheree Cleghorn, Editor
This is a very good day to get a small book by a very wise doctor and read such truths as that one.
I was fascinated by the elegant simplicity of this one of thirty “true” things this book title promises. Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need [...]

Topics: Books

News Brief
Sociologists have identified something called the “milling effect,” in which people who may need to act in what may be in an emergency do—the mill around and talk to each other first.
“Is this for real? I can’t leave my desk. Was this drill planned? That bell has got to stop.”
“I am not evacuating…are [...]

Topics: Books, Friends & Families, News

News Brief/Books
At last!
A well-known sociologist is heard from—-one who does not believe Baby Boomers will cause the ruin of future generations, saddled by the debts caused by their elders, staggering through life indentured to Medicare.
In “The Long Baby Boom,” Jeff Goldsmith, rejects the gloomers and doomers. With 30 years of experience in health policy, listening [...]

Topics: Books, In Brief, News

News/Books
Please read the second paragraph, which sums up beautifully what is right with medicine.
When health care and reform comes up, the analogy to an elephant and the blind men often comes up. The blind men who touch an elephant in different places have totally different notions about what an elephant is.
The delivery of health care [...]

Topics: Books, How To Speak Doctor, You, the Patient

Feature
A new book advises adult children and the friends and families of the elderly to go about caring for them differently. The physician-author calls his approach Slow Medicine.
In a column in The New York Times, by Abigail Zuger, M.D., the book’s author, Dennis McCullough, has this to say about adult children’s ability to assess [...]

Topics: Books, Friends & Families, Patient's Own Decision-Maker

Books
Jerome Groopman, M.D., is a distinguished Harvard medical professor, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of best-selling books—-Second Opinion, Anatomy of Hope and How Doctors Think.
He is a physician who writes about the areas of medicine patients need to know about….but few physicians know how to tell them.
For instance, very few academicians could [...]

Topics: Books, In Brief

By Cheree Cleghorn, Editor
A doctor’s husband died from cancer. His tests showed the cancer very early, when it was far more treatable. It was missed.
We can’t know for sure if he would have survived because cancer is unpredictable. What we do know is that the many mistakes made did not provide him or his wife [...]

Topics: Books, News