What can be done about the poor state of global health?

Blog Post By Solomon Benatar, University of Cape Town & Gillian Brock Department of Philosophy, University of Auckland

What can be done about the poor state of global health? How are global health challenges linked to the global political economy and to issues of social justice? What are our responsibilities and how can we improve global health? These questions are addressed from the perspective of medicine, philosophy and the social sciences. Offering a wealth of empirical data and both practical and theoretical guidance, this is a key resource for bioethicists, public health practitioners, and philosophers.

Health care and mental illness

Blog Post by David Gardner, Professor of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University

Read also Cardiovascular Disease responsible for shorter life expectancy in people with mental illness

The health care received by people living with a major mental illness (outside of mental health care) is less frequent, of a lower standard, and leads to poorer outcomes when compared to the general population. This has been found in studies of people with a mental illness who also have hypertension, diabetes, HIV/AIDs, a major cardiovascular event, and so on. Two reports have offered striking examples of this.

Ho, ho, ho! – Healthy Christmas Eating

Managing your weight is particularly relevant at this time of year, especially if you are amongst the millions of people who tend to over do it a bit in December.  It has been estimated that over the two days of Christmas, the average person eats over 11,000 calories. That’s almost three times the norm so no wonder you might end up carrying a few extra pounds.  

Feeling trim can help boost confidence, but I do worry that many of us are slaves to weight, especially when we have a distorted view of how we should look. Remember that if you want to lose weight, keep your goals reasonable as disappointment and frustration are the death of a good diet.  

 

Aside from aesthetic reasons, being overweight or obese can contribute to the incidence of cancers, and is the second most likely cause of death after smoking so if you need to lose weight, then now’s the time.  

The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease: the Hidden Epidemic

Blog Post by Eric Vermetten, MD, PhD, e.vermetten@umcutrecht.nl Associate Professor Psychiatry at the University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands

Traumatic events of the earliest years of infancy and childhood are not lost but, like a child’s footprints in wet cement, are often preserved life-long. Time does not heal the wounds that occur in those earliest years; time conceals them. They are not lost; they are embodied .” (Felitti 2010, this volume)

Leadership and Management in the operating department

Blog Post by Paul Wicker, Head of Perioperative Studies, Faculty of Health, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK

Ugh! I can hear you now, after all, who on earth would be interested in a droll subject like leadership and management, let alone buy a book about it!

Well, I think that there are three main reasons why you might want to read Operating Department Practice, Leadership and Management. Firstly there are 234 million surgical procedures carried out in the world annually. Somebody has to manage that mess. Secondly, if you work in an operating department, you might be the manager taking the buck for it all. Thirdly, you might be at the receiving end of all of this. Wouldn’t you want your operation to go smoothly?

Managing Violent Patients

Managing Violent Patients - see it on YouTube

A training video for psychiatrists on how to best manage potentially violent patients. It was made by psychiatry residents at the University of Iowa in the spring of 2008.

View Part 1

View Part 2

One of the bright spots in any educator’s career is seeing his students’s own creative and influential productions. Literally, that’s what I am proud to introduce—a professional, very clever, and educational video production dramatizing the principles of what I’ve taught psychiatry residents regarding the management of violent patients. Readers will be able to see the principles in my chapter in the forthcoming book, Introduction to Psychosomatic Medicine.

The Rhetoric of Committee Meetings

Blog Post by Neil Seeman Director and Primary Investigator of the Health Strategy Innovation Cell at Massey College at the University of Toronto and Mary V. Seeman Psychiatrist, writer and Professor emerita at the University of Toronto

With a thank you to Richard Nordquist’s “From Accismus to Zeugma: 20 Rhetorical Terms You Never Learned in School,” we have explored many of the most common policy concerns raised nowadays by healthcare providers and analysts throughout Western nations. There often is, we feel, a lack of forthrightness which could be solved through a better appreciation of the subtleties of language. Consider a hypothetical exchange at a board committee in a hospital.