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My favorite medical diagnosis is “failure to thrive.” Not because patients are failing to thrive — that part makes me sad. But because of the diagnosis’s bold proposition: Humans, in their natural state, are meant to thrive. My patient, however, was not in his natural state. Cancer had claimed nearly every organ in his body. He’d lost a quarter of his body mass. I worried his ribs would crack under the weight of my stethoscope. [For more on this story by Dhruv Khullar, go to...

Telemedicine isn't just for rural areas without a lot of doctors anymore. In the last few years, urban areas all over the country have been exploring how they can connect to patients virtually to improve access to primary care and keep people from calling 911 for non-urgent problems. In Washington, D.C., Mary's Center, a community health center, is piloting a program to provide primary care virtually to Medicaid patients who can't make it in to any of their clinics. Sometimes there are...

Throughout high school and college, Alicia slept in cars, tents, friends’ couches, benches, on the bus, on the train and in group homes. Almost anywhere but a shelter. “My experience with shelters is that you’d go when it was raining. You’d go to San Francisco, wait in line and sleep on the floor, if you slept at all,” the serious, soft-spoken Oakland woman, who’s now 22, said last week. “It’s scary enough to be a young person there. But if you’re queer you just feel a lot more vulnerable.

"I've been arrested 18 times, incarcerated 496 days, and spent 2,556 days addicted to heroin," Nicole Walmsley says before about 70 people at an event center in Lodi, Ohio. It's April of 2017, and Nicole has been sober for over four years. The better part of her recovery was spent in what she calls fight mode, driving all across Ohio to save addicts in the midst of the state's rising opioid epidemic . Since 2015, when the state's opioid epidemic hit record numbers, Nicole has been a major...

Policymakers, practitioners and advocates seeking to improve the juvenile justice system have increasingly acted on calls from youth and their families to make “no decisions about us, without us.” These well-intentioned efforts have led to the proliferation of youth leadership councils, advisory boards and youth speakers’ bureaus — recognizing that some of the most effective emerging advocates and reform leaders are young people whose personal narratives can serve as a powerful catalyst for...

By the numbers, Native Americans reliably top lists of violence , poverty , unemployment , and addiction in the United States. Taken alone, the data paint a dismal picture of intractable, inescapable poverty. But on reservations and in communities, the picture was a whole lot more complex in 2017. As I have for several years, I spent most of 2017 traveling through Indian Country for the stories I was covering. An old-school journalist, I travel simply and close to the ground; I keep a loose...

I began riding the “trauma-informed care” wave three years prior to realizing I was part of something bigger than my own vision to bust open the conversation on trauma. When my life as a writer, editor, and advocate for parenting survivors of childhood abuse collided with my professional life as a mental health care manager, I knew the universe was trying to tell me something. Having long ago succumbed to the realization that everything really does happen for a reason, I started to see my...

New briefs show impact of intentionally embedding brain science Briefs feature lessons learned, site-specific examples Through the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities' two-year Change in Mind initiative, a cohort of 10 U.S. and five Canadian organizations have demonstrated the impact of intentionally infusing brain science and evidence into programs and organizations. It also has identified new insights into the longer-term opportunities and challenges of facilitating and...

Tear Down the Juvenile Jails; They Make Bad Situations Worse [JJIE.org] By: Judge Steven Teske| July 10, 2017 Summary and Analysis by: Julius Patterson| July 30, 2017 This article really hits home for me. Judge Steven Teske talks about how Juvenile prisons need to be torn down. This article also focuses on how there’s a difference between being unruly and being a criminal. Jail is not always the answer for these young men and women. Statistics show that youth that have been incarcerated are...

Please join us for a three -part learning series hosted by the California Campaign to Counter Childhood Adversity and ACEs Connection . We'll hear from states that are making great strides towards adopting trauma-informed policies and practices. Three-Part Learning Series: Webinar 1: Overview of State Level Efforts to Address Childhood Adversity and Highlights from Oregon, Tennessee, and Wisconsin Date: January 10th, 10AM PST (1:00 PM EST) Speakers: Elizabeth Prewitt, Policy Analyst, ACEs...

What if there was one New Year’s Resolution that had the inherent ability to completely transform our lives? Most of us operate in a perpetual state of disconnection to who we really are: aka higher self, source self, true self or whatever you may call it . Many of the challenges and issues in our lives could be resolved by simply getting connected and staying connected. Of course, we wouldn’t be alive if we weren’t connected at some level, but there is a big difference between minimal...

Although, the hashtag gained viral popularity by actress, Alyssa Milano, the campaign was originally created in 1997 by activist, Tarana Burke . The motivation behind this movement was to help survivors in under privileged communities—where rape crisis centers and counseling services were unavailable—heal from one another. The viral sensation of the #MeToo campaign and the continued number of survivors coming forward in the news shows the prevalence of this issue and demands that sexual...