There is a new compilation of the latest research on the long-term impact of childhood adversity. I have written about this key subject in earlier blogs (here and again here). Now there is a new DVD where the latest research and its implications for policy are presented by those who conducted the studies.
Archive Categories
- Changing the System (29)
- History of Stress (9)
- Lectures (19)
- Patient Stories (15)
- Stress Illness Causes (56)
- Stress Relief (26)
- Stress Research (47)
- Words of Wisdom (24)
New DVD on Adverse Childhood Experience
August 27th, 2012In Memoriam: Howard Spiro, MD (1924 – 2012)
June 2nd, 2012I first met Howard Spiro, MD in 1980 when I applied for a position in the Department of Gastroenterology he established at Yale in 1954. He brilliantly blended encyclopedic knowledge (he wrote one of the major textbooks in the field singlehanded), superb clinical skills and droll wit. I really wanted to learn from him and thought I might have a chance when I was the only person on rounds that day (apart from him) to know the cause of an abnormality on a patient’s x-ray. Alas, it was not to be and I completed my training at UCLA instead.
New Research on Back Pain and Stress
May 26th, 2012Keele University in Staffordshire, England is fifty years old and educates 10,000 undergraduates on a square mile of land once owned by the same family for four centuries and prior to that by the medieval Knights Templar. Their arthritis research unit has published an interesting paper comparing usual care of low back pain with a new approach based on stratifying patients into three groups (1).
Adverse Childhood Experience
April 2nd, 2012A therapist recently posed a key question about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs): what is the benefit to a patient of their family doctor knowing this information?
Stress and the Immune System: Dr Robert Ader
December 27th, 2011Thirty five years ago, Robert Ader, PhD serendipitously discovered a key part of our physiology that was not thought to exist. The story begins with rats drinking water sweetened with saccharine. Half the rats were simultaneously given low doses of Cytoxan to cause stomach pain. (Cytoxan is a chemotherapy drug for cancer.) It was no surprise that soon the rats associated the sweetened water with the pain and refused to drink it.
Integrating Medical and Mental Health Care
October 30th, 2011I attended the 13th Collaborative Family Healthcare Association (CFHA) meeting in Philadelphia last week. A prominent theme was difficulty gaining acceptance from medical clinicians about the role of mental/behavioral health practitioners in the primary care setting. These practitioners provide skills helping people with complex medication regimens (insulin for example), weight management, smoking cessation, exercise regimens, substance abuse and stress management as well as help with mental health disorders. But these resources are not used nearly as well as they could be.
Stress Illness and CBT
August 1st, 2011Stress Illness (also known as Psychophysiologic Disorder or PPD) is one of the most common causes of Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS). These are symptoms for which no link to a diseased organ or structure can be found after diagnostic testing. Javier Escobar, MD and colleagues (1) at the Robert Wood Johnson medical school in New Jersey, USA, decided to try a treatment called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for these patients.
