Disability-and-Health Books

Wonderfully written and detailed book. As a clinician and behaviorist I will be referring to this book often. A must have for people who perform FBAs or FAs frequently.

This is an extremely good book for the mental health professional or student. It contains alot of up-to-date information on behavioural assessment, and is easy to use. Non-professional parents would also find this book useful.

Reviewed by Paige Lovitt for Reader Views (1/07)

The author, Deborah Ribis, has had extensive experience in a variety of areas working with people who have become disabled. She describes herself as "a nurse of 22 years who has worked in the system, survived through the system, and assisted others in the system." She has experienced two serious disabling conditions. She writes this book in a comprehensive outline form to help you go through the process step-by-step. By learning how to advocate for yourself, you can greatly increase your opportunity for success in dealing with the system. This is not a "How to Scam the System" kind of book. She legitimately addresses issues that persons who become disabled have to deal with. People who are either injured on or off the job will benefit from the information provided here.

Included in the wealth of information presented is: definitions of terms; descriptions of the roles of people involved; interesting cases; and each chapter is concluded with "Things to Remember" summaries and "Questions You Need to Ask." In the back of the book are worksheets and a communications log to help organize information. Ribis also includes a list of references and resources.

The author's own personal experiences in dealing with the system took her from being a passive patient to becoming an advocate for oneself. I experienced the same situation myself with an on-the-job injury when I was in my early twenties. I was injured while working at a hospital. Having been a loyal employee for four years, I expected different treatment then what I got. Reading "Get Back on Your Feet" taught me that many of my negative experiences in dealing with my injury are very common.

"The System" knows how to deal with injured employees. They know how to emotionally make a person try to back down from claims of injury. They know how to try to work around doctors orders for "Light Duty," etc. The employee that has been injured doesn't have the resources to know how to work through the mire that will be thrown at them. Or at least they didn't until this book was published. I wish I had this information back then. I would have been able to better advocate for myself. I ended up hiring an attorney to advocate for me, which was expensive.

I highly recommend this book to people who are recovering from injuries that will affect their employment. They need to get their hands on this resource as quickly as possible. I also recommend this book to people working with those that have become disabled because the information in here is invaluable. I am going to use "Get Back on Your Feet" as a resource for helping teach my disabled students how to self-advocate. I look forward to using the knowledge that I have gained from this great book.

This book is so detailed and complete for anyone who has had the misfortune of becoming ill/injured and has had to deal with insurance and/or legal problems. Well written and very easy to understand!

This book is very helpful for parents of autistic girls, as well as for educators and those who work with girls on the autistic spectrum. It delicately and compassionately handles the particular problems that girls on the autistic spectrum face as they go through puberty. It makes excellent suggestions and gives tangible ideas to both the autistic girl and her parents as the youngster makes the transition from child to young woman. The book is very well researched, yet remains very readable. It can certainly help parents to feel that they are not "alone" and that the authors really have studied this and know what they are talking about. Highly recommended.

This book is thorough, quite parent-friendly, and valuable. It has a lot of practical suggestions for everything from teaching autistic young women how to handle their menstrual cycles to addressing the issue of fashion/trends to the potential physiological bases for the different manifestations of autism in boys and girls.

The sections on sexuality are, IMO, particularly valuable: parents of people with disabilities often don't want to face these issues because the future can be so scary to contemplate. I saw Shana Nichols talk on this topic at a conference and it was a real eye-opener for me.

The students in my class are very low functioning and I am always looking for activities to do with them to keep them active and to encourage them to interact with each other. This book is filled with great ideas. For each activity described is a suggestion of how the game can be adapted for students with different disabilities. I recommend this book for any special ed. teacher.

This is one of the few books available that provides activities and games for elementary students that can easily be adapted to include students with visual impairments, hearing impairments, and limited mobility. I am a fifth/sixth grade special ed. teacher and have found this book great for giving me ideas of different games I can play with my students. The directions in the book are easy to follow and so far, all games have been a hit with my students (which is quite rare!)

This book works extremely well for me as a clinic reference. I've had students doing their clinicals with me reference it as well to build treatment plans. Well worth my money.

Excellent reference book which is clearly written. A must have for those wishing to give maximum benefit to their orthopedic clientele.

Way to go Michelle! A great work, really helped Stage 2 pec tear.

I've been through it all. My low back pain didn't respond to the physiotherapist. My primary care didn't think it to be HIS problem. After weeks of complaints he finally passed me on to the orthopedic guy who wanted to fuse all of my spine bones. The second opinion of the neurosurgeon was to do nothing at all. Then I was back at square one until I read this book. Michelle's guidance and calm reassurance pointed me in directions I had never considered. I don't believe in magic and I think that most of the things that my friends and my doc says are crap, but Michelle got me through the worse times of my life. GET THIS BOOK IF YOU HURT!!!!! My review could have been THAT short.

The Mom's Choice Awards® honors excellence in family-friendly media, products and services. An esteemed panel of judges includes education, media and other experts as well as parents, children, librarians, performing artists, producers, medical and business professionals, authors, scientists and others. A sampling of the panel members includes: Dr. Twila C. Liggett, Ten-time Emmy-winner, professor and founder of Reading Rainbow; Julie Aigner-Clark, Creator of Baby Einstein and The Safe Side Project; Jodee Blanco, New York Times Best-Selling Author; LeAnn Thieman, Motivational speaker and coauthor of seven Chicken Soup For The Soul books; Tara Paterson, Certified Parent Coach, and founder of The Just For Mom Foundation(tm) and the Mom's Choice Awards®. Parents and educators look for the Mom's Choice Awards® seal in selecting quality materials and products for children and families. This book has been honored by this distinguished award.

Tears and laughter will come with reading this "The Heart's Alphabet". James Grimm tells his own story about haveing all the hopes, passions, and goals of a normal individuaal trapped in an abnormal body. It will change your view of what handicap is about.

Regan is determined to become a professional dancer: and with talent and flare she seems certain to achieve her goals, especially when she successfully hosts a weekly aerobic exercise program. Suddenly a mysterious ailment strikes down her dreams - in coping with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, will she become crippled and lose her dreams of dancing? A realistic story of adjustment and courage.

Homeroom Exercise is a wonderful and deeply felt story about the hopes and desires of a young dancer and the obstacles put in her path by fate. Regan is a 12 year old with big goals of a dancing career. She is stricken with Juvenille Rheumatoid Arthritis at a time in her life where she is on top of the world and everything seems certain. She had just auditioned and won the coveted position as host of a televised middle school exercise program called Homeroom Exercise. Throughout the book the authors talent for description lends the book an authenticity of experience and feeling that take you right into each scene and into the heart of Regan. I recommend this book highly to all children over 9 and parents as well.

September 1955. Six-year-old Mark O'Brien moved his arms and legs for the last time. He came out of a thirty-day coma to find himself enclosed from the neck down in an iron lung, the machine in which he would live for much of the rest of his life.

How I Became a Human Being is Mark O'Brien's account of his struggles to lead an independent life despite a lifelong disability. In 1955, he contracted polio and became permanently paralyzed from the neck down. O'Brien describes growing up without the use of his limbs, his adolescence struggling with physical rehabilitation and suffering the bureaucracy of hospitals and institutions, and his adult life as an independent student and writer. Despite his weak physical state, O'Brien attended graduate school, explored his sexuality, fell in love, published poetry, and worked as a journalist. A determined writer, O'Brien used a mouthstick to type each word.

O'Brien's story does not beg for sympathy. It is rather a day-to-day account of his reality?the life he crafted and maintained with a good mind, hired attendants, decent legislation for disabled people in California, and support from the University of California at Berkeley. He describes the ways in which a paralyzed person takes care of the body, mind, and heart. What mattered most was his writing, the people he loved, his belief in God, and his belief in himself.

Mark O'Brien was the subject of the 1997 Academy Award?winning documentary Breathing Lessons. He was a published poet and cofounder of the Lemonade Factory, a California press that published poetry by people with disabilities. O'Brien died in 1999 at the age of forty-nine after completing a draft of How I Became a Human Being . Gillian Kendall is a writer. She has contributed to both Outright Radio and Sun magazine; one of her short stories appeared in The Student Body, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

"How I became a human being" is a great read. It is one of those books that I had trouble putting down, once I had begun reading it. Mark O'Brien is a truely inspirational person, who proves that if you set your mind to something, you can achieve whatever you want to in life despite, in his case, extraordinary obstacles. I simply can't imagine being paralysed from the neck down. What amazed me while reading the book, was that at times, I forgot that Mark had such a profound disabilty, with his humour, personality and love coming through in his writing.
My only criticism of this book is that there was no mention at any point of Mark's realization that he would never walk again, that he would forever be reliant on others and indeed be reliant on an iron lung. When was he first told he would never walk again? How did he and his parents react to this news? Did he live in hope that by some miracle, he would walk again or did he accept that this was the way he was going to be for the rest of his life? After finishing the book, I felt that these questions were left largely unanswered.
Also, as Mark O'Brien died in 1999, I felt that it would have been good for the co-writer to have written an epilogue regarding the circumstances of his death. Throughout the book Mark comes close to death on several occasions and he talks about death in quite some detail, but the reader is left with no details of the actual circumstances in which he died.
Despite these criticisms, I recommend this book highly. It is an amazingly inspirational read.

The Mom's Choice Awards® honors excellence in family-friendly media, products and services. An esteemed panel of judges includes education, media and other experts as well as parents, children, librarians, performing artists, producers, medical and business professionals, authors, scientists and others. A sampling of the panel members includes: Dr. Twila C. Liggett, Ten-time Emmy-winner, professor and founder of Reading Rainbow; Julie Aigner-Clark, Creator of Baby Einstein and The Safe Side Project; Jodee Blanco, New York Times Best-Selling Author; LeAnn Thieman, Motivational speaker and coauthor of seven Chicken Soup For The Soul books; Florrie Binford-Kichler, Founder of Patria Press, Inc.- an award-winning independent publisher and Member of The Children's Book Council; Tara Paterson, Certified Parent Coach, and founder of The Just For Mom Foundation(tm) and the Mom's Choice Awards®. Parents and educators look for the Mom's Choice Awards® seal in selecting quality materials and products for children and families. This book has been honored by this distinguished award.

The artist/illustrator author Jennifer Allen's I CAN SURVIVE was created to help her find hope during her father's battle with prostate cancer: here the lovely watercolors and inspirational poetic short words will appeal to all ages: "I cartwheel three times,/waving pompoms/when I don't even score."