Blog

I am a general urologist in Muskegon, Michigan. Muskegon is a small to midsized community on the shore of Lake Michigan. In many ways, Muskegon is much like any other Midwestern community. It is a historically industrial city, trying hard to adapt to the challenges of the new global economy. In January 2014, our local hospital opened a Level II Trauma Center. Since that time, the service has admitted and treated 25 pediatric patients with gunshot wounds. Many more gunshot victims have been...

Thank you Chris Serres for reporting on the troubling development at St Joseph’s Hospital in Brainerd. (11.2.17) This may be our community’s (nation’s) most serious health problem. St Joe’s failure to admit mental health crisis patients reflects the growing nightmare of how medical institutions are dealing with mental health at a management level. Refusing help to our most troubled citizens (people in crisis) means more sad & awful things happen to the rest of us. People in crisis are a...

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” – Nelson Mandela, Former President of South Africa Learn about the CASA guardian ad-Litem program and how you can make life better for abused and neglected children where you live. Today, there are 500 abused and neglected children in Ramsey & Hennepin County child protective services without a guardian ad-Litem. Being a State Ward child is painful. Being a voice for that child is...

Two major interstate freeways cross at the edge of the Seattle neighborhood where I live. Last autumn, as winter began to close in, the homeless encampments growing along the freeways wrapped around the hill and took root under the interstate bridge six blocks from my house. Constructions of pallets and old furniture and blankets began to accumulate, and rubbish spread across the walkways leading to the bus stops. We commuters made our way past the campsites, heads down. Eye contact with the...

Over the last two years, there has been a great deal of arguing about the prevalence of violent crime in America and how the national crime rate is changing. The president and attorney general say it’s soaring. Criminal justice reformers aren’t so certain. A Who’s Who of crime researchers and experts gathered to tackle the question at the Smart on Crime Innovations conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City last month. The panelists were Thomas Abt of Harvard’s...

That "to do" list of chores and errands could actually provide a variety of health benefits, according to researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. The study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, found women over age 65 who engaged in regular light physical activity had a reduction in the risk of mortality. "Every movement counts," said Andrea LaCroix, PhD, senior author of the study and professor in the Department of Family Medicine...

Children who have been spanked by their parents by age 5 show an increase in behavior problems at age 6 and age 8 relative to children who have never been spanked, according to new findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study, which uses a statistical technique to approximate random assignment, indicates that this increase in behavior problems cannot be attributed to various characteristics of the child, the parents, or the home...

The anger window is open. For decades, centuries, it was closed: Something bad happened to you, you shoved it down, you maybe told someone but probably didn’t get much satisfaction — emotional or practical — from the confession. Maybe you even got blowback. No one really cared, and certainly no one was going to do anything about it. But for the past six weeks, since reports of one movie producer’s serial predation blew a Harvey-size hole in the news cycle, there is suddenly space, air, for...

BEING RANDOMLY STOPPED and questioned by the police is par for the course for black men in America. It’s an injustice so familiar that it barely registers as an injustice. That’s something I knew intellectually. Still, I was stunned when officers stopped me while walking on my law school campus back in the spring of 2011. From that stop and my subsequent complaint came a series of events that changed my life forever. That interaction led to the ruin of my reputation as a student and it...

If you walked into Cynthia Scott's waiting room at a clinic in the Cox's Bazar district of Bangladesh, you would be surrounded by people lying on benches looking pained and malnourished. They're part of the flood of 600,000 Rohingya refugees who've fled violence in Myanmar and sought refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. The U.N. has called the exodus "the world's fastest growing refugee crisis." "The amount of people is just unfathomable," says Scott, a clinical psychologist who is a mental...

We’ve long heard about America’s digital divide , but the nation is facing a parallel and deepening digitalizationdivide, too. According to a new Brookings Institution study , this digitalization divide is reflected in the increasingly uneven spread of high-paying digital jobs across the economy and workforce, by gender, race, and ethnicity, and across cities and metro areas. Digitalization has transformed just about everything we do—from the way we work to our entertainment choices, and how...

From the recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia to the racial slurs that were scribbled outside black students’ doors at the U.S. Air Force Academy’s preparatory school, it is clear that the United States is not a post-racial society as some pundits in the media have argued. Researchers have found that racism in all forms takes its toll on people of color. Racism, both in blatant, overt forms as well as subtler forms such as microaggressions, can have a detrimental impact on the health...