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Carol-Ann Hamilton: Coping with Grueling Eldercare: 7 Survival Tips You Need to Know
Find out the shocking health and relationship impacts those who care for aging parents encounter and what to do to safeguard your own life. 1  |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Suicide Prevention -- Does it Work?
Are psychiatric services successful in preventing suicide or do we actually cause more suicides than would otherwise happen. We create a culture of helplessness in which people expect rescue and do not believe they are in control of their actions. They can attempt suicide thinking they will be saved, but can miscalculate and accidentally die. An Australian man stopped 160 suicides by giving people breakfast. Is this better? 1 |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: The difficulty of practicing narrative medicine
I look at the stories that people hold about their lives that sometimes work against them. I tell the story of a driven man whom I warned 25 years earlier that he might drop dead if he didn't take a break, and discover that he did, in his fifties. I discuss the problems we face in medicine, how to help people change their stories that are leading them toward illness. This is one of the hallmarks of narrative medicine. 1 |
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Lewis Corbitt: How Technology is Assisting and Aiding Patients with Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI)
Blast injuries from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDS) and other forms of blasts and explosions have caused closed head injuries and trauma to over 178,000 service men and women serving in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These injuries are called Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI). The future of treatments and aids to patients suffering from TBI, and to include a possible cure for TBI lay in interactive technology. 1 |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: How we treat is more important than the treatment!
The way we relate to people is more important than what we do in both medicine and psychiatry. Randomized, clinical trials of the drug, citalopram, for geriatric depression, for example, showed that where a patient got treated mattered more than what drug they received. The response rate to citalopram varied from 16% to 82% among 15 hospitals. The time is nigh to improve the human elements in what we do be more helpful. 2 |
 Frank J. Granett R.ph.: The Price of ADHD Business The Price of ADHD Business focuses on the outdated assessment and treatment process in children for behavioral conditions during the past 40 years. The new business model involves ruling out underlying nutritional, physiological and environmental risk factors prior to premature drug therapy. The symptoms of ADHD are real and can be uncovered as described in Over Medicating Our Youth and The American Epidemic. |
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Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 8 of Australia 2013: Bairnsdale
On the next to the last day of our Australian cross-cultural journey we visit our friend Wayne, who's now the Koorie Liaison Officer for AdvanceTAFE, an educational concern in Victoria. Our focus for the workshop that Wayne arranged for us was to consider how to better use culture to address problems in the community. The problems were the usual suspects -- drugs, alcohol, violence, gambling. What happens under colonization 1 |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 4 of Australia 2013: Indigenous Energy Medicine 2
During the fourth day of our Australian cross-cultural journey we continued to present our form of indigenous (Cherokee) bodywork/osteopathy and energy medicine ("doctoring"). The second day focused on how anyone can feel energy differences in other people and within those areas of energy differences, can find points that need rubbing or holding. We showed how these intuitively discoverable points are the same as TCM. 1 |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 1 of Australia 2013: The Autobiographical Narrative
Each year we make a cross-cultural tour to Australia, though one of our Coyote colleagues comes twice a year to make an impact on incorporating culture in health care for aboriginal people. This year we began with a lecture in a writing conference on the topic of the autobiography in which I describe my experience of writing Coyote Medicine. I finish with a description of what has been accomplished in five years of coming. 1 |
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Lewis Mehl-Madrona: NIMH and its Biologic Emphasis
I respond to Dr. Thomas Insel's blog about his views of the top ten advances for mental health for 2012. What saddens me is that all of these advances are heavily biological and that biological medicine hasn't really succeeded very well in improving our mental health. While these advances are very interesting, I argue that what we need is more understanding of how our social relationships form our brains and behavior. 1 |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Health Care Costs and Schizophrenia
I reflect on the cost of care for people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia. I muse about a moving lecture by Eleanor Longdon, PhD, who was once a schizophrenic and now is a clinical psychologist. She spoke about her own process at the Hearing Voices Conference in Melbourne, Australia. Eleanor echoed my observations, that the way we manage people who hear voices and suffer this kind of distress is costly and ineffective. 1 |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: More about Single Payer
In this article, I continue my musings about single-payer health systems. I share my experiences of working within the Canadian health care system as a physician (family medicine and psychiatry). I describe the back logs we did have and how we got around them, the lack of utilization review, how I could hospitalize anyone at anytime so long as there was a bed open, and how no one pushed me to discharge patients too early. |
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Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Single Payer Health
In this article, I look at possible difficulties of implementing single payer health care in the United States. We review studies that show that the difference in health care costs between the U.S. and Canada are due almost entirely to administrative costs. We look at the administrative inefficiencies that already exist in the U.S. and amply them to start a single-payer system, supporting local control of health care. |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: The Debate Over Obamacare
I offer my views on health care financing. I suggest that we have reached a point as a society in which we are not willing to let people die in hospital waiting rooms who do not have insurance. We even have laws that require hospitals to care for whoever appears regardless of ability to pay even if we do not have any means to remunerate those hospitals. It's time to wake up to the reality that this kind of reality costs. |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 13 of the Australian Journey 2012
Today is Day 13 of the Australian Cultural Exchange Journey for 2012. After a quick morning run, we went to Mission Australia's Youth Forum 2012. We met Nancy Ingram, an elder from the area who attended Harvard University and knew about Vermont. I have a talk about the importance of heroism for adolescents and finding ways for them to be heroic or to save face when they feel they have not been heroic. |
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Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 12 of the Australian Journey
Day 12 of the Australian cross cultural exchange journey consisted in our leading an inipi ceremony (sweat lodge) for people associated with Mission Australia. We also learned much about some very exciting projects being conducted by Mission Australia, including the Michael Project, which is an intensive effort to assist homeless people in Sydney, and the Catalyst-Clemente Project, which provides education for disadvantaged. |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 9 of the Australian Journey 2012
Today is Day 9 of the Australian Cultural Exchange Journey for 2012. Related to the constant, driving rain, we mostly talked today We talked about the health care system to which we wished to move and how to get there, especially through changing the socialization of students and giving them new stories about what to expect from others. |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 8 of the Australian Journey 2012
This is Day 8 of the Australian cross cultural adventure. Today we went to the heart of the community where the elders from the Northern Territories demonstrated some of their ceremonies and procedures to the community. That included the burning ceremony for healing pain, the smoking ceremony for purification, and spear throwing. On the way back to the island, I interviewed a patient advocate from Western Australia. |
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Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 7 of the Australian Journey 2012
Today is Day 7 of the Australian journey 2012. We are on Boole Poole in the Lake District of Gippsland. Our sweat lodge ceremony had been rained out the day before, so we prepared to do the ceremony as soon as the rain stopped which happened around 8am. I've written about sweat lodge before, as have others, most notably Bucko, author of The Lakota Sweat Lodge. It was a wonderful experience and then we hear crocodile tales. |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 6 of the Australian Journey 2012
Today is Day 6 of the 2012 Cultural Exchange Adventure in Australia. It was also the first day of culture camp at Boole Poole with the aboriginal coop. The driving rain prevented our crew from Northern Australia from doing much outside. We had planned a sweat lodge ceremony but that was cancelled also due to the rain. So instead, while we tried to stay dry, I interviewed the new doctor at the Coop. |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 4 of the Australian Journey 2012
Day 4 of the Australian Journey finds us in Warburton with Auntie Jennie, an aboriginal elder from Queensland. I discuss the workshop we did together and explore further the concepts that integrate indigenous theories of mind and mental health with the Hearing Voices movement, showing that its founders were thinking indigenously as they approached voices, which appears much more effective than the biomedical approach. |
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Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 2 of the Australian Journey 2012
Day 2 of the Australian Journey for 2012 finds me in Melbourne at the International Hearing Voices conference, attended by aboriginal and non-aboriginal people alike. I present the highlights of the conference including aspects of my keynote address. The conference is unique in that it is organized hy voice hearers and not professionals who treat voice hearers. It is also unique in being upbeat, positive, and full of hope. |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 1: Australia 2012
This article begins my 2012 Australian journey. I briefly describe my presentation for the day and then go to the meat of what I learned, which is about aboriginal health and disparity statistics in Australia today. Generally, as anyone can imagine, aboriginal people are in terrible shape in Australia -- to my surprise, worse than their counterparts in the USA and Canada. We know the sad state of Indians in the US. |
Dr. Kathleen Albertson, L. Ac., PhD: Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner Discusses National Health Reform: TCM advocates "health" care--not "sick' c
Improved patient care depends on holistic measures that resolve health problems and improve patient care. Today, chronic diseases- heart and liver disease, arthritis, stress, fatigue and anxiety are common place ailments. They should not be. With the Health Reform Act, more people will have health care, and that is a good thing. But who is advocating the "health" in "healthcare?" TCM does! 7 reasons to use it for you and your 1 |
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Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Reflections upon transitioning to private practice
Just over 2 months ago I left the public mental health sector in New York to transition into private practice in Vermont. This article reflects upon those two months of changes and wonders what we can learn from the type of care available in Vermont compared to New York and from New York's apparent discrimination against paying private practitioners in favor of community mental health centers. 1 |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Accountability
This essay is about accountability. In the community mental health center where I have been working, most of the patients lack any sense of self-agency or accountability. Most see themselves as helpless victims of diseases over which they have no influence. They expect me to provide them with a drug that will regulate their moods and emotions and make them feel normal again. What does it take to restore a sense of agency? 1 |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Thoughts after Sundance 2011
I reflect upon Sundance 2011 and what I have learned. I realize that Sundance is about love and compassion and following this red road that leads to these directions. Sundance gives us an opportunity to rise to become spiritual warriors, to find all the benefits and none of the detriments of battle, to create a community of fellow warriors within which we can feel strong, and to transcend our natural limits to become more. 1 |
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Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Sweat Lodge, Prayer, and Community
Prayer and community have been stripped away from contemporary health care. Both are sorely needed. I talk about the sweat lodge ceremony as being a laboratory for exposing mainstream healthcare practitioners to the perspective on health and the world of Native American people and show how it produces the kind of connectedness and sense of belonging that we desperately need and which is associated with greater health. |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Adolescent Addictions and Las Vegas
This weekend I attended an addictions and mental health conference focused upon adolescents in Las Vegas, Nevada. What an appropriate venue! I spoke about narrative practices in relation to addictions -- how we have to counter the dominant stories about magical potions and find other heroic stories that work equally well. |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Nanglyala Mental Health Center
I write about the composite mental health center I have created in previous essays which comes from my and others' experiences working in mental health in New York State. I call it Nanglyala Mental Health Center, in honor of the Russian word for Valhalla, which one can't use, for it actually exists. I propose a thought experiment in changing the culture at NMHC, which I hope someone somewhere will be inspired to do. |
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Articles For Tag "Health" |
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