A world of possibilities opens up for Joy Harkness when she sets out on a journey that's going to show her the importance of friendship, love, and what makes a house a homeComing-of-age can happen at any age. Joy Harkness had built a university career and a safe life in New York, protected and insulated from the intrusions and involvements of other people. When offered a position at Amherst College, she impulsively leaves the city, and along with generations of mate...

This volume examines crucial concerns in palliative care, including the proper balance between comfort and cure for the patient, the integration of spiritual well-being, and the challenges of providing care in the absence of basic medical services and supplies.In the first section, palliative-care pioneers Constance Dahlin, Eduardo Bruera, Neil MacDonald, and Declan Walsh recount the early history of the discipline. Part 2 discusses the role of poetry, prose, plays, and other aspec...

Geriatric Palliative Care covers a broad spectrum of issues characterizing care near the end of life for older adults. Beginning with the social and cultural context of old age and frailty, this volume details specific aspects of palliative care relevant to particular disorders (e.g. cancer, strokes, dementia, etc.) as well as individual symptoms (e.g., pain, fatigue, anxiety, etc.). Communication between care-givers and patients, in a variety of settings, is also discussed. The theme of t...

The third edition of Geriatric Medicine appears at a crucial time for health profession als, a time when the values and goals of our overall American health care system are being reoriented to those values and goals that have long been at the core of geriatrics. It is likely that the readership of this highly respected textbook will be even substan tially greater than that for the two previous editions or, for that matter, for any other textbook on geriatric medicine published in the Unite...

Unlike Nazi medical experiments, euthanasia during the Third Reich is barely studied or taught. Often, even asking whether euthanasia during the Third Reich is relevant to contemporary debates about physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia is dismissed as inflammatory. Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: Before, During, and After the Holocaust explores the history of euthanasia before and during the Third Reich in depth and demonstrate how Nazi physicians incorporated mainstr...

The growing geriatric population in the United States has created an increasing need for palliative medicine services across the range of medical and surgical specialties. Yet, palliative medicine lacks the resources to carry such a workload itself. Geriatric Palliative Care addresses this need by encouraging individual specialties to "own" the management of elderly with the same vigor as they "own" other key management competencies within their specialty. This clinically focused and highl...

Meeting the Needs of Older Adults with Serious Illness: Challenges and Opportunities in the Age of Health Care Reform provides an introduction to the principles of palliative care; describes current models of delivering palliative care across care settings, and examines opportunities in the setting of healthcare policy reform for palliative care to improve outcomes for patients, families and healthcare institutions. The United States is currently facing a crisis in health care mar...

Since the publication of the third edition of Geriatric Medicine,extraordinary advances have occurred in the science of aging and the potential for biomedical research to give us answers to many, if not most, of the age-related disorders that threaten the quality of life in older years. At the most basic level, the successful mapping of the human genome was declared complete in the fall of 2000. Understanding the map of the human genome is as important as understanding the map of genomes o...

Reorganized into a single, tightly focused volume, the new edition of Geriatric Medicine offers practical, authoritative, and comprehensive coverage of the diseases, common problems, and medical care of older persons. The thorough revision includes new chapters on "Urinary Incontinence" and "Falls" as well as expanded discussions of rheumatic/orthopedic disorders and neuropsychological testing. Particularly noteworthy is the superb chapter on "Dementia"; written by a neuro...

This practical, concise guide discusses how to distinguish different types of tremor and make the diagnosis of essential tremor. Written in an easy-to-read format, this book summarises other conditions that may be confused with essential tremor and details all current treatment options for this condition, including medications, surgery and non-invasive alternatives. Examination techniques for patients with a tremor complaint are described, some of which may be novel to the general practiti...

As aging trends in the United States and Europe in particular are strongly suggestive of increasingly older society, it would be prudent for health care providers to better prepare for such changes. By including physiology, disease, nutrition, pharmacology, pathology, radiology and other relevant associated topics, Geriatric Gastroenterology fills the void in the literature for a volume devoted specifically to gastrointestinal illness in the elderly.This unique volume incl...

For readers of Being Mortal and Modern Death, an ICU and Palliative Care specialist offers a framework for a better way to exit life that will change our medical culture at the deepest levelIn medical school, no one teaches you how to let a patient die.Jessica Zitter became a doctor because she wanted to be a hero. She elected to specialize in critical care—to become an ICU physician—and imagined herself swooping in to rescue patients from...