Disability-and-Health Books

This is a terrific resource for pediatric therapists who want to provide home positioning and handling strategies for families. Positioning for play has wonderful illustrations designed to be given out to parents with correlating activities. This resource is a must for the pediatric therapist!

The notion that beliefs can have powerful effects on our lives is thousands of years old, but is re-appearing in a new setting. Not as some New Age idea, but as a key to health and healing.

The beliefs that we have about our health are central to the way that we understand, behave and respond to medical treatment. From teaching thousands of health care professionals and members of the public around the globe, it is striking that virtually all of them have become wedded to the notion that an illness or a problem must have a single cause. The idea has been repeated in a thousand television programs, books and articles. Yet it is almost always wrong. Rarely is there just one cause for any problem. It's very interesting to hear people describe something like back pain, a headache or a marital problem. As they describe the problem they will constantly insert their beliefs about what caused it.

Many doctors become very frustrated if they are told that most medical problems cannot be reduced to a single biochemical cause. Most have been trained to believe that behind every human malady lies a faulty gene or a metabolic process deranged by intemperate behavior. But there's more to illness than that: we have to consider the psychological and social aspects of the problem, and even its meaning and purpose.

This is one of the very best books on these topics that I have read in a long time. It is a collection of essays, primarily from researchers in the United Kingdom. For a multi-authored book, the writing is remarkably uniform and there is little overlap.

The Introduction begins with two essays entitled: "Beliefs: shaping experience and understanding illness." And "Beliefs: Clinical and vocational interventions; tackling psychological determinants of illness and disability."
Part 1: "Conceptual and Psychological Perspectives," has chapters on:
The cognitive neuroscience of belief
Biased beliefs and the subjective validation effect
The cognitive anthropology of belief
Placebo: the role of expectancies in the generation and alleviation of illness
Volition and psychosocial factors in illness behavior
Belief in rehabilitation, the hidden power for change.

Part 2: "Clinical and Occupational Perspectives," includes chapters on:
Pubic and medical beliefs about mental disorders and their treatment
Beliefs and adherence to treatment: the challenge for research and clinical practice
Explaining unexplained symptoms: the role of beliefs in clinical management
Beliefs and obstacles to recovery in low back pain
Managing disability by public policy initiatives
Clinician bias in diagnosis and treatment

As you can see, the book covers a lot of ground in just over 200 pages, and every article is well referenced.

This is an important book that I hope will have an impact on clinical practice, research and policy. Though designed for clinicians, it is a book that has much that would be of interest to anyone concerned about health, wellness and recovery from illness.

Highly recommended.

This book lays a good foundation for the principles of insurance law, including contract formation, contract interpretation, and insurance regulation issues.

This book is a fine introduction to coping withpsoriasis. Unlike the top-selling psoriasis books that claim auniversal "cure" with some specific diet, this book hasno-nonsense practical information. It acknowledges what many patientswith psoriasis know, that "What works for one person may donothing for the next". It covers the specrum of traditionaltreatments and offers many useful tips...

So, this is a great starter. We need more dealing with the psychiatric patient who is terminally ill.

This unique book provides step-by-step guidance to evaluating psychiatric claims in workers' compensation. It analyzes the definition of a mental disorder using the DSMIV-R, its application in the workers' compensation arena, and causation in the legal concept. It then discusses disability evaluation, apportionment or successive disability issues, rehabilitation, stress, psychiatric treatment, testing, and expert testimony. It also shows you how to handle depositions, trial preparations, and trial tactics and strategies.

This book is a wealth of information for teachers, counselors, and educationaldiagnosticians. Validity, reliability, and methods of administration arediscussed for many standardized tests, including the Wechsler scales.

I was surprised to find that no one had written a review about this book. I know it has been used as a recommended textbook at the University of Pittsburgh in Deaf Education and Educational Psychology, and it was recommended to me by at least four professors. This may constitute part of the problem in deaf and special education, and regular education in public schools for deaf and hearing impaired children. The little amount of research that is being done by people like Marc Marschark, who is a genius in my opinion, is not filtering down to those who need to use this information in making sure that equal opportunity to education is available to these children, no matter what environment they are placed in.

I specifically went to read what Marschark has written about intelligence, memory, and attention in deaf children. Since I am totally deaf, I recognize some of the problems that arise when a child is presented with nothing but verbal/oral material in a learning situation. Marschark did more research than he needed to or others would have done, and he pulls all the research together to make a comprehensible whole. The references he provides in this book are valuable for referring back to and reading on their own, since he places them in context. This book was published in 1993, and I really think an update is needed because neuroscience has found out some significant information over the last few years that apply to teaching and understanding the workings of the mind in the presence of deafness or hearing loss. For example, it has been shown that prelingually-deafened adults use their auditory cortex when lipreading or using American Sign Language. This indicates a rewiring of the brain which occurs in children whose deafness is caught early enough to use manual language with or teach lipreading skills to. This information could be vitally important in teaching those with hearing loss, and also be used to pressure Congress to demand that all newborns be tested for hearing loss prior to leaving the hospital. The importance of determining hearing loss early is mandatory to providing these children with educational opportunities early enough to make up for their diversity (I refuse to call it a disability when the Deaf community does not recognize it as such).

Marschark writes well. The book is immensely readable. He also provides enough information to show that deafness does not equate with lack of intelligence, for which I am supremely thankful. Karen Sadler, Science Education, University of Pittsburgh

Attention Deficient Disorder or ADD is an increasingly prevalent condition amongst America's children. Now in a newly revised second edition, "Putting On The Brakes: Understanding And Taking Control Of Your ADD or ADHD" is the collaborative effort of developmental pediatrician and ADD treatment specialist Patricia Q. Quinn (Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Georgetown University Medical Center) and educational consultant Judith M. Stern. This thoroughly 'kid friendly' compendium of practical ideas, activities, and insights is specifically designed to help children to manage their attention disorders, make friends, control emotions, and improve their general health. Also available in a hardcover edition, "Putting On The Brakes" is very highly recommended reading and ideal for children ages 8 to 13 (and their parents) having to deal with ADD and ADHD in their daily lives at home and at school.

With increased pre-natal genetic testing comes the knowledge to know of disabilities that the chile will face later. This book is a series of papers describing the ethical and social issues this raises. A second theme is a discussion of the quality of life for disable persons.

This book came from a working group that the editors convened. Papers were presented on the subject, and then afterwards they were revised in light of the deliberations at the conference. The contents range from the social contract under which we all live to the right of the individual woman to terminate a pregnancy for any reason what so ever (as defined by Roe v. Wade).