Disability-and-Health Books

I am so grateful to have a book to recommend for those struggling with chronic pain as I am. Regardless of what chronic pain or condition one has, appropriate comments, advice, and understanding may be hard to come by. Often, additional wounds may unfortunately come to further our pain, adjustments, and loss from unexpected places such some friends, church members, family and yes, even our doctors.

These devotions are real words from people who have been there. Each one is welcome, soothing hope from honest people. It has been my best "medicine" yet. Mosaic Moments reminds us we do not need to be perfect and we don't suffer alone. One may never know all the answers to their questions. However, this book helps the reader know that God is still in control, He will never give up on us, and there is purpose somewhere in our pain. I keep this one near my favorite chair and fully expect it to become well worn. Mosaic Moments should be in every doctor's waiting room. I give it 5 stars!

Thank you for finally providing those living with chronic illness a devotional that addresses the issues we face!

You can learn so much specific details about Group music therapy in working with special needs children from this book. I think that this is the first book which specificly address to the group music therapy. It is easy to read. I highly suggest this book!

This comprehensive book contains all the information a therapist needs in order to conduct group MT with children in special education. It is very well organized; easy to read layout with sub-headings; logical and complete progression of information. It is an indispensible reference and teaching text.

Sharon Rae North takes readers on an exciting journey through rhyme, reason and heart. The characters of the book are from different cultures and don't have anything in common, right down to their legs. Instead of embracing the thought of having lost a leg and living with an artificial one, the main character shows the true meaning of "playing the hand you've been dealt."

Having been afflicted by sickness is often disheartening and frustrating. Through this story, the life of a little girl has been shaped and molded to share with others the value of accepting yourself. MY BRAND NEW LEG is a great juvenile rendition of believing in yourself. Another plus: it comes with a CD-ROM, allowing readers to exercise their technology skills as well.

Written with sincere detail and beautiful illustrations, Sharon Rae North has taken an ordinary barrier of childhood affliction and crafted a bridge of friendship, trust and bravery.

Reviewed by T. Belinda Williams
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

My Brand New Leg is an excellent way of introducing children 9-12 to differently enabled individuals. Wonderfully illustrated, the characters are introduced to a girl who has a prosthetic leg and can do everything her newfound friends can do. While nameless and colorless, the main character gracefully shares her abilities with others and never once expresses a difference. As she encounters new activities, her friends see that she is no different. The moral of the story is aptly suited to readers of all ages.

Dr. Pueschel is well known as an advocate for people with Down syndrome, a leading expert in the field, and a father of a child with Down syndrome. A noted speaker at Down syndrome conferences across the country, Dr. Pueschel has revised his popular book with the latest information. The book covers a range of topics from prenatal diagnosis to stimulating your child's gross motor, fine motor and speech skills to pre-school to adolesence and on to adulthood. It also covers vital information about the most current legislation including IDEA 1997. This is one of the books that should be on every new parent's bookshelf.

New parents should be aware of Siegmund Pueschel's reputation in the community of families affected by Down syndrome. As both a doctor and father of a child with Down syndrome this book is a compassionate, accurate, and thorough introduction to Down syndrome for the new parent. It is among the first 5 books I acquired when my son was born and remains one that I look back to and appreciate for its quality.

This book allows you to get a good visual understanding on how physical dysfunction is effected by injury in the brain. It is a great compliment reading to my neuro text.

Here it is. The latest update for physical disability science within occupational therapy. Whether you are a current student in need of another source, or an experienced practitioner with a desire to go back and check the basics. This updated book will have more than one topic to get you up to speed. I love it, and frequently reference it. It's also nice to know that added emphasis is placed on realistic case studys throughout the book.
Enjoy!!

-Derek Malayeri OTR/L, CA.

I was hoping for a book dealing with challenging behavior in a general ed setting. This book is focused on inclusion for those with emotional or developmental disabilities. I returned the book to Amazon for a refund. I'm sure it's a fine book, so I gave it 5 stars to match the other reviewer. It just wasn't the book I needed.

The title of this book does not convey the breadth of topics covered relevant to children of many different ages, the complete description and explanation of a wide variety of behavioral interventions along with expected results. Also good list of other sources of scholarly articles. One slight critique would be that a greater use of footnotes might have made the text a bit more user friendly.

This fascinating and thought-provoking book should be read by anyone interested in disability rights. It presents a variety of views on a challenging topic. The book deals with philosophical issues in understandable terms, and argues for a new paradigm for consideration of prenatal testing.

Different chapters are written by various authors from different backgrounds. Physicians, professors, parents, those with disabilities, therapists and lawyers all contribute to this multifaceted approach to whether or not prenatal testing devalues those with disabilities. Social factors and medical factors are discussed with clarity. This book will cause the reader to question the basis for their pre-concieved beliefs about what it means to have a disability, and will encourage them to look at this issue in a more thoughtful way.

I found this book difficult to put down, and have recommended it to several friends.

(A longer version of this review ran in the January 2001 issue of Ragged Edge magazine.) Does prenatal testing for genetic defects "send a message" to disabled people? Adrienne Asch, the Henry L. Luce Professor of Biology, Ethics and Reproduction at Wellesley College, insists that it does. For two years, Asch and Hastings Center bioethicist Eric Parens engaged a group of scholars, philosophers, ethicists, biologists, physicians, sociologists and educators under the auspices of the Hastings Center to grapple with that question, and the disability rights perspective on prenatal testing in general. This book is the product of that project.

After listening to all the opinions expressed by project members, Asch writes in an essay late in the book that she has not changed her mind. She says that people who choose to abort based on a diagnosis of disability are "allowing a single trait to stand in for the whole, to obliterate the whole." People like Baily -- and they are in the large majority in society -- simply do not believe that aborting a fetus because it will likely have a disability "sends a message" that is bigoted; most do not believe that it sends any message at all. Many do not agree that the provision of more accurate information about disabilities or about living with particular disabilities would make any great difference in their decision to abort a fetus they feared carried a "defect." Even knowing about disabled people and their lives, she would still not want to bear a disabled child if it could be avoided, says Baily. Nor do they buy the "any/particular" distinction articulated by Asch, who has been writing about the disability perspective on reproductive choice for decades. The "any/particular distinction" refers to the difference between the decision to simply not have any child at all at the time -- the decision of someone who becomes pregnant when they were not planning a family and thus seeks an abortion, for example -- and the decision to abort a particular fetus, even when the woman in fact wants a child, when prenatal testing has revealed disability in the fetus. The project, funded in part by a grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, did not reach unanimity on any of the "major claims" of the disability rights movement -- not after five intense two-day intense meetings, not despite ongoing email correspondence among participants, notwithstanding meetings with members of the Society for Disability Studies. So are we simply at that juncture in history in which almost no one outside one's tiny community of thought believes one's critique; before one's ideas are accepted? Is this what it was like in the 1800s to hear perfectly nice, logical people say things which we now we see as hopelessly racist? It's hard to tell. This is an important, though academic, book. It lays out both the disability rights critique from Asch, Marsha Saxton and others, and the reasons why people just don't "buy" the argument that life with a disability is alright, which is really what it comes right down to.

"Using prenatal tests to prevent the births of babies with disabilities seems to be self-evidently good to many people," Asch writes. No matter that critics argue that these beliefs stem from unexamined attitudes about disability; this project shows that when the attitudes are examined they are often found to be fine attitudes -- by those who hold them. In her piercingly honest essay "Somewhere A Mockingbird" (which also appeared in the anthology Bigger Than The Sky: Disabled Women on Parenting (Ragged Edge, Jan./ Feb. 2000), Deborah Kent reports what happens when she and her husband begin to plan having a child, knowing it may be born with Kent's genetic blindness: Despite the closeness of the couple, writes Kent, she had failed to convince her husband, even after their years together, "that it is really okay to be blind." "I will always believe that blindness is a neutral trait, neither to be prized nor shunned. Very few people, including those dearest to me, share that conviction... They cannot fully relinquish their negative assumptions...." "Though they dread blindness as a fate to be avoided at almost any cost," she writes of her family and friends, "they give me their trust and respect. I don't understand how they live without discomfort amid such contradictions."(emphasis ours.) Yet many of the project's participants live with this contradiction seemingly quite well and without question. If there is a theme to be taken away from this volume, it is that society can quite easily live without examining such contradictions. In one of the most sobering essays in the book, Nancy Press writes that "certain silences in the public discourse have actually enabled the routinization and rapid growth of prenatal testing,.... by obscuring or limiting the need for public debate about two topics about which Americans are deeply conflicted but which lie at the heart of prenatal testing: abortion and disability." This book arrives at a time in our society when prenatal testing is becoming routine -- and a duty. As tests for finding ever more genetic traits and predispositions become ever easier to administer, our country's legal hubris being what it is, women will be told to get them done, or else. Sociologist Dorothy Wertz contends that "even if some lines might be drawn in practice they will not make a difference since market and political forces will determine which prenatal tests are offered and in what kind of an atmosphere they will be offered." Biologist Pilar Ossorio points out that "when prenatal tests become part of routine [medical] practice, courts will find that physicians have a duty to offer them." Detailing the strange and horrific outcome, today's "wrongful birth" and "wrongful life" lawsuits (in which the disabled child argues before the court "that her life is worse than non-existence"), Ossorio's chapter is a sober reminder of the road we head down when we reject the disability rights critique of prenatal testing.

I have been a quadriplegic for almost 30 Years. For over 25 of those years I have worked with newly injured persons. Spinal cord injury does not discriminate, it crosses economic, racial, and geographic boundaries. There is not a quick fix formula for dealing with paralysis. Mr. Holicky expertly demonstrates this in showing how persons from disparate backgrounds successfully navigate the rough waters of sustaining a spinal cord injury. This book puts a real face on what is too often fodder for a movie of the week. It is vital reading for persons with spinal cord injuries, their friends and families, professionals, or anyone who wants to understand the process of moving forward after a traumatic injury. Roll Models showcases how a tragic event need not lead to a tragic life.

I found this book to be valuable and useful not only for people with spinal cord injury, but also for family, friends, and professionals who wish to truly understand the challenges of being paralyzed and using a wheelchair. These personal interviews offer candid information and a variety of useful and creative how-to's from people who have survived spinal cord injury, rehabilitation, and life adjustments. The book will be a valuable resource both for those new to spinal cord injury and those injured for some time. Despite being a professional in the field for over 20 years, I learned a great deal reading this book.

The book is in new condition, and delivery was right on time!

As the title states, this is "A Practitioner's Handbook" and an extremely useful one for the practicing School Psychologist or anyone involved with or interested in furthering their knowledge of School and Clinical Neuropsychology.

Likely one of the best School Neuropsychology resources to surface, I particularly found the Case Studies as well as the practical approach to disorders typically found in the schools (written language, reading, ADHD) useful in my own practice. The chapter entitled Linking Assessment to Intervention is tantamount to today's changing dynamic in the field and gives School Psychologists interested in Neuropsychology a solid conceptualization of appropriate service delivery in which the psychologist can intervene to assess as opposed to simply running everyday psychoeducational reports with figures nobody understands. The authors guide the practitioner to use effective pre-referral intervention programs to offset the tremendous amount of referrals seen in the schools today.

This is a well-researched and thorough handbook that has accomplished all the important groundwork to help guide School Neuropsychology into the future. I highly recommended it as a useful reference for any researchers and clinicians working with children and adolescents.

this tx planner is great; very useful!!

In addition the seller was wonderful, received product very timely

This 2nd edition of the Severe and Persistent Mental Illness Treatment Planner has been revised to include Evidence Based Treatment (EBT) Objectives and Interventions. The latest research evidence has been integrated into the content of most of the chapters. Those Objectives and Interventions that go beyond "Best Practice" to being based on replicable reseach results are highlighted with an EBT symbol. Now the reader can be assured that all the latest research has been reviewed and suggestions for treatment based on successful results are noted in those chapters where research evidence exists. Where there is not sufficient research evidence available for a presenting problem, best practice interventions continue to be suggested. As federal funding sources as well as some other third party payers are beginning to insist on treatment based on research evidence, this Planner offers just such Interventions.

Please be reminded that all of our psychotherapy suggestions assume a compassionate relationship of empathy that is crucial for effective treatment. Good psychotherapists realize the critical importance of a therapeutic relationship while delivering research informed treatment.