Healing Hearts: A Doctor's Perspective on Dementia Care


Book Description

Dementia is a complex and multifaceted condition that affects millions of individuals and their families worldwide. As the global population continues to age, the need for compassionate, effective, and evidence-based dementia care has never been more urgent. "Healing Hearts: A Doctor's Perspective on Dementia Care" offers an insightful “bird’s eye view” of the challenges and triumphs associated with dementia care, in non-technical language, drawing upon Dr. Ashok Bharucha’s extensive clinical experience and expertise.




Families Caring for an Aging America


Book Description

Family caregiving affects millions of Americans every day, in all walks of life. At least 17.7 million individuals in the United States are caregivers of an older adult with a health or functional limitation. The nation's family caregivers provide the lion's share of long-term care for our older adult population. They are also central to older adults' access to and receipt of health care and community-based social services. Yet the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the least appreciated challenges facing the aging U.S. population. Families Caring for an Aging America examines the prevalence and nature of family caregiving of older adults and the available evidence on the effectiveness of programs, supports, and other interventions designed to support family caregivers. This report also assesses and recommends policies to address the needs of family caregivers and to minimize the barriers that they encounter in trying to meet the needs of older adults.




Reimagining the Human Service Relationship


Book Description

The traditional lines of demarcation between service providers and service users are shifting. Professionals in managed service organizations are working to incorporate the voices of service users into their missions and the way they function, and service users, with growing access to knowledge, have taken on the semblances of professional expertise. Additionally, the human services environment has been transformed by administrative imperatives. The drive toward greater efficiency and accountability has weakened the bond between users and providers. Reimagining the Human Service Relationship is informed by the premise that the helping relationship should be seen as developing in the interactive space between those who provide human services and those who receive them. The contributors to this volume redefine the contours, roles, institutional divisions, means, and aims of providing and receiving services in a range of settings, including child welfare, addiction treatment, social enterprise, doctoring, mental health, and palliative care. Though they advocate an experience-near approach, they remain sensitive to the ambiguities and competing rationalities of the service relationship. Taken together, these chapters reimagine the service relationship by making visible the working relevancies of service delivery.




Heeding the Caregiver Call


Book Description

In the fall of 2015, Barbara Sr. called her only child to ask for her help. Unbeknownst to her family, Barbara Sr. was already in the grips of Alzheimer’s. This book tells the story of Barbara Jr.’s journey as her mother’s caregiver and shares insights into the physical, emotional, financial, and spiritual impacts of caregiving while fighting her own cancer. It also provides practical information to others who assume caregiving roles for their loved ones. Follow this mother and daughter’s journey through resentments and regrets, forgiveness and faith, laughter and love. Barbara Jr. promised her mother on her deathbed that she would tell her story. Here it is.




Strong Heart, Sharp Mind


Book Description

“[Piscatella and Sabbagh] show what’s good for keeping your heart pumping keeps your memories and passions alive. They give you a really great plan to follow. This book can help many and hopefully will help you and yours for years to come.” — From the Foreword by Michael Roizen, MD, Chief Medical Consultant for The Dr. Oz Show, and New York Times bestselling author The science of why both heart and brain health are the key to wellness and longevity and ho w to cultivate a brain-body-balance to live a longer, healthier, and happier life. Strong Heart, Sharp Mind: The 6-Step Brain-Body Balance Program that Reverses Heart Disease and Helps Prevent Alzheimer’s presents a cutting-edge, science-based program that teaches readers how to develop the habits and lifestyle practices that improve both heart and brain health. Readers will learn how they can prevent or forestall both the nation’s number-one killer–heart disease–as well as the affliction Americans fear most: Alzheimer’s disease. For the 108 million Americans 50 and over, creating what the authors call the “BRAIN-BODY-BALANCE” through the steps detailed in these pages can also improve quality of life and longevity, by synchronizing the interaction between our two most vital organs. Joseph C. Piscatella, nationally-known, bestselling speaker and author of countless heart health books, and one of the longest-living survivors of coronary bypass surgery (43 years and counting!) and Cleveland Clinic neurologist Marwan Noel Sabbagh, M.D., one of the world’s foremost researchers in the fight against Alzheimer’s, employ the latest science and recommendations from other leading-edge thinkers and practitioners, to help readers optimize the connection between cardiac and neuro health—a nexus that until recently has been overlooked as a key to wellness and longevity. Together, "No Ordinary Joe" Piscatella and Dr. Sabbagh are poised to guide readers to this new intersection of heart-brain health, and take them through the necessary steps to make that connection between our most vital organs, for optimal wellness—and to protect them against the world's most lethal and feared diseases. STRONG HEART, SHARP MIND blends science and solution in the form of a new, singular heart/brain-specific program and takes readers through the steps necessary to optimal wellness and a longer, happier life.




Breathing Spaces


Book Description

The charismatic form of healing called qigong, which at its core involves meditative breathing exercises, achieved enormous popularity in China during the last two decades. Anthropologist Nancy N. Chen examines the cultural context of medicine and healing practices in the PRC, Taiwan, and the United States, and the pages of her book come alive with the narratives of the numerous practitioners, healers, psychiatric patients, doctors, and bureaucrats she interviewed.




Communities in Action


Book Description

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.




Love in the Land of Dementia


Book Description

Caregiver Shouse celebrates spiritual and practical lessons learned on her unscripted yet rewarding journey with her mother through Alzheimer's disease.




You Say Goodbye and We Say Hello


Book Description

Follow Tom and Karen Brenner as they help people living with dementia, their families and caregivers navigate this challenging condition using techniques first developed by Maria Montessori. This positive and inspiring book values the person being cared for and offers methods and strategies to engage them and help families and caregivers connect.




Poems of Healing


Book Description

A remarkable Pocket Poets anthology of poems from around the world and across the centuries about illness and healing, both physical and spiritual. From ancient Greece and Rome up to the present moment, poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. Poems of Healing gathers a treasury of such poems, tracing the many possible journeys of physical and spiritual illness, injury, and recovery, from John Donne’s “Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse” and Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul has Bandaged moments” to Eavan Boland’s “Anorexic,” from W.H. Auden’s “Miss Gee” to Lucille Clifton’s “Cancer,” and from D.H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” to Rafael Campo’s “Antidote” and Seamus Heaney’s “Miracle.” Here are poems from around the world, by Sappho, Milton, Baudelaire, Longfellow, Cavafy, and Omar Khayyam; by Stevens, Lowell, and Plath; by Zbigniew Herbert, Louise Bogan, Yehuda Amichai, Mark Strand, and Natalia Toledo. Messages of hope in the midst of pain—in such moving poems as Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” George Herbert’s “The Flower,” Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning,” Gwendolyn Brooks’ “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story” and Stevie Smith’s “Away, Melancholy”—make this the perfect gift to accompany anyone on a journey of healing. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.