Listen with the Heart or Understanding Healthcare

Listen with the Heart: Relationships and Hearing Loss

Author: Michael A Harvey

While distressing for an individual, hearing loss also takes a heavy toll on family and friends. These stories chronicle the unique challenges of hearing loss in interpersonal relationships, including communication, self-identity, and how to continue sharing and growing in these relationships. Many shared activities, such as enjoying music, whispering sweet nothings to a lover, and hearing children's voices are deeply missed by both the hearing and hearing-impaired relationship partners. This book illustrates the power of relationships to transform people and how each party has unparalleled opportunities to grow in profound and unpredictable ways.

Author Biography: Michael Harvey is the author of Odyssey of Hearing Loss and Family Narratives of Hearing Loss. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Doody Review Services

Reviewer: Linda Jacobs-Condit, AuD, CCC-A (George Washington University)
Description: This book depicts vignettes that describe how individuals with hearing loss as well as those in their lives are affected by that loss.
Purpose: The purpose is to use tales to portray how psychological, social, and spiritual influences shape one's experience of hearing loss and that of significant others. For me, as an audiologist interested in bettering my counseling abilities, fulfilling these objectives can give better insight into the needs of others. The author meets his objectives using stories.
Audience: According to the author, this book is intended for use by a wide audience:spouses, children, parents, friends, extended family members, interested laypersons, and professionals. I believe this would make interesting reading for all of these groups, yet professionals may find it to be "light reading" because it is not technical in nature. The author is a clinical psychologist whose practice includes many persons with hearing loss. This is one of several books he has written about psychotherapy with the deaf and hard-of-hearing.
Features: This author uses stories to describe crises of hearing loss, as well as other crises that can occur in life:loss of loved ones through divorce or death, changes in health, for example. He includes scenarios to portray individuals' coping strategies, ability to empathize, to more fully develop relationships, and to "listen with the heart." The stories are compelling and draw one into the book. As a professional, I wanted more.
Assessment: This would be a good book for families to read, as well as students entering the field of audiology or psychology. The use of stories can often be more instructive and make for more "fun" reading than technical texts.

Rating

3 Stars from Doody

Book review: Empires Of The Crab or Cooking to Impress Without Stress

Understanding Healthcare

Author: Richard Saul Wurman

Understanding your automobile and how to service and repair it is certainly useful. Understanding your body and how to maintain and improve it is far more important.

Understanding Healthcare answers hundreds of key questions and contains links to the best websites and other resources.

Understanding Healthcare is a visual encyclopedia -- each spread making the complex clear.

Understanding Healthcare takes the powerful tools of information architecture to create a roadmap for each reader.

Understanding Healthcare empowers each of us to constructively navigate through our own patterns of health information as well as those for whom we care.

Healing States or Bodies In Treatment

Healing States: A Journey into the World of Spiritual Healing and Shamanism

Author: Alberto Villoldo

A colorful and compelling examination of evidence for the mind's ability to heal, taking a step into the fascinating world of psychic healing and shamanism. 80 black-and-white photographs.

Publishers Weekly

Although the authors of this provocative exploration into the spiritual realms of healing are trained in the orthodoxies of Western medicine and psychology (both have doctorates and are researchers and scientists in San Francisco), their inquiries into ``mind over matter'' phenomena have led them to conclude that science alone is inadequate in treating human illness. (On this subject, they note the question put to them by a Peruvian shaman: ``In the training of your healers, what steps do they take to attune Mother Earth and the Great Spirit?'') By observing diverse parapsychological and metaphysical methods of mediums, spiritists and others following ``indigenous'' healing from ancient to contemporary societies, Villoldo and Krippner enhance our concept of health by incorporating ideas that are ignored by allopathic medicine, a process advocated by the World Health Organization. The freshness of their approach results in a steady level of stimulation. (April)

Book about: I Cant Believe This Has No Sugar Cookbook or Meditation As Medicine

Bodies In Treatment: The Unspoken Dimension

Author: Frances Sommer Anderson

Bodies in Treatment is a challenging volume that brings into conceptual focus an unspoken dimension of clinical work'the body and nonverbal communication'that has long occupied the shadowy realm of tacit knowledge. By bringing visceral, sensory, and imagistic modes of emotional processing to the forefront, editor Frances Sommer Anderson and the contributors to this original collection expand the domain of psychodynamic engagement. Working at the leading edge of psychoanalytic theory and practice, and in the forefront of the integrative psychotherapy movement, Anderson has created a collaborative project that stimulates interdisciplinary dialogue on the developmental neurobiology of attachment, the micro-processing of interchanges between the infant and caregiver, the neuroscience of emotional processing and trauma, body-focused talking treatments for trauma, and research in cognitive science.
 
Enlightened by experiencing body-based treatments for thirty years, Anderson reflects onthe powerful impact of these interventions, recounting attempts to integrate her somatically-informed discoveries into the talking frame. Reaching further, her contributors present richly informative accounts of how experiences in body-based modalities can be creatively integrated into a psychoanalytic framework of treatment. Readers are introduced to specialized modalities, such as craniosacral therapy and polarity therapy, as well as to the adjunctive use of yoga, the effectiveness of which can be grounded neurophysiologically. Somatic interventions are discussed in terms of the extent to which they can promote depth-psychological change outside the psychoanalytic consultingroom as well as how they can enrich the relational process in psychodynamic treatment. The final sections of Bodies in Treatment explore the range of ways in which patients? and therapists? bodies engage, sustain, and contain the dynamics of treatment.