Never mind the little girl’s name. What’s important is that she was about 10 years old and all the doctors she had seen month after month had failed to ease her pain. The girl’s stomach wrenched. Her chest tightened. Her skull...
As many of you know who are supported by foundations, many ask for a report on how things are going. I’m writing such a report now for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Just FYI, things are going very well! There’s...
In the 1980s, Dr. Vincent Felitti, now director of the California Institute of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, discovered something potentially revolutionary about the ripple effects of child sexual abuse. He discovered it while trying to solve a...
I just heard about another homeless man in Los Angeles who was shot and killed. Five cops were involved, and 3 are alleged to have shot the victim. Cop killings are all too common. Police come across a situation, attempt to use force to control it and...
In 2004, I put one of Dr. W. Edward Deming’s principles to work. He said: “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.” While a human is not a company, I consider the development of a human being as taking...
Robert Barksdale steps in front of the students in an English class at Eastern High School, searching for some semblance of redemption. “For me, school is a treat because I never got to be in school, for real,” he begins. He always...
We often think of health as a trip to the doctor or a prescription to treat or prevent diseases. Or maybe it's an operation to fix something that's gone wrong. But a new poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan...
When you ask people what impacts health you'll get a lot of different answers: Access to good health care and preventative services, personal behavior, exposure to germs or pollution and stress. But if you dig a little deeper you'll find a...
Women are moody. By evolutionary design, we are hard-wired to be sensitive to our environments, empathic to our children’s needs and intuitive of our partners’ intentions. This is basic to our survival and that of our offspring....
Authors: Laura Avellaneda-Cruz, LMSW & Jaclynne Oyoumick, BA of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC), Alaska Native Epidemiology Center, in Anchorage, Alaska What are the goals of the card? The wallet-sized, fold-out safety card is an evidence-based tool developed by health and domestic violence professionals for use in health care to promote safety and support for patients experiencing intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and/or reproductive coercion.
This is blog four of the series to educate you about stress and to help you increase your ability to cope with stress. Please refer to previous blogs for background information and to review the behaviors that reduce the response of the brain...
Health care providers may miss opportunities to counsel high-risk patients More than half of patients with symptoms of mental illness - and nearly one-third of those who also had diabetes - said their health care providers had never told them...
Marvell Robinson was in kindergarten when a classmate poured an anthill on him at the playground. After that, the gibes became sharper: “Why are you that color?” one boy taunted at the swing set, leaving Marvell scared and...
There’s no greater gentrifier than climate change, and that’s no matter whether you think gentrification is a good or a bad thing. If you define it as displacement of people of color and the poor, climate change got that covered. If...
Is mental illness a “white person’s disease”? Dior Vargas says that’s often how media and pop culture portray it. Vargas, who refers to herself as a Latina feminist mental health activist, wants to change that...