Concise, user-friendly guide for the elderly.
Help is on the horizon for senior citizens debilitated by depression.
Author and psychiatrist Bragin is founder and medical director of the Stress Relief and Memory Training Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a clinician and researcher with more than 40 years of experience. In his work with geriatric patients, he developed the Brain Activation Program to treat depression and enhance memory and concentration. He sees depression–the “quiet assassin”–as a whole-body illness and the cause, not the result, of numerous medical problems in the elderly, including cardiac disease, diabetes, arthritis and Alzheimer’s. In addition to traditional drugs and psychotherapy, the author advocates a regimen of supplements, memory training, stress-management techniques and physical exercises to stimulate the flow of blood, oxygen and glucose to the brain. Instead of passively waiting for a jump-start from medications, patients become active partners in their treatment, employing sensory activation to allow the brain to repair. The program encompasses positive affirmations, hand, finger and spine exercises, charts for eye and hand coordination, meditations and visualizations, and muscle-relaxation techniques. Exercising the hands–like rolling a tennis ball between the palms while counting backward and forward–is especially effective since the hands retain functionality longer than other body parts. After only a ten-minute workout, patients may experience positive emotions and a sense of well-being without any adverse effect on the cardiovascular system. One sensory exercise is the “hand contrast bath,” which involves immersing the hands first in cold water, then hot and in cold water again to stimulate pleasant feelings. The book is indexed for reference and has an appendix of recipes for salads, entrees and soups to improve digestion. In spite of a few minor usage errors, the material is in a format that is easy to understand. Instructions for exercises, activities and recipes are straightforward and simple to follow. As a bonus, most of the text is in large print. Overall, the guide presents a comprehensive method for those in their “golden years” to actively participate in restoring their health and well-being.
Concise, user-friendly guide for the elderly.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-934938-14-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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