Elder Abuse: A Family Guide

Most of us will eventually be responsible for moving an elderly relative into a nursing home or ourselves become a patient in a nursing home. These are wrenching decisions and enormous lifestyle changes, yet how much do any of us know about nursing homes?

Thankfully there is now a source of information as well as guidance on where to find information about this vital topic. Inspired by her mother’s death which was hastened by a brutal beating in a nursing home, Diane Sandell has compiled a much-needed guide to nursing homes and nursing home care.

This thorough guide offers advice on caring for the elderly in your home, how to make the decision to move to a nursing home, what to look for and what questions to ask when looking for a nursing home and most importantly, how to monitor the care that patients receive, how to advocate for them if their needs are not being met and what to do if you suspect that your elderly loved one is being abused.

Just that information alone is invaluable, but Ms. Sandell doesn’t stop there. She offers guidance on how you can form a task force to work with your legislator(s) to pass laws regulating nursing homes and enforcing existing regulations.

Ms. Sandell writes in an engaging style, rendering complex situations and laws understandable to anyone going through these difficult circumstances. Most importantly, she stresses that you are not alone. Many people are going through the same thing or have gone through it in the past. She points out the importance of caring for the caregivers, of reaching out to others for help or just a shoulder to lean on.

This is an invaluable guide to a stage of life that all us will be facing, either ourselves or our loved ones.

Review copy courtesy of QED Press

Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans

The title of this book, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans is a bit off-putting. Reading it, I mentally prepared myself for a diatribe written by a disgruntled low-level employee out to get his pound of flesh. We all know that health insurance companies are in the habit of denying coverage and raising premiums, occasionally exorbitantly, but they aren’t all that bad, right? Surely not as bad as the Wall Street firms that first took away our retirement savings and then our jobs.

I worked in the financial industry for 25 years. Nothing I saw there was as heinous as what is revealed in this book. Put simply, Wall Street may take away people’s money, but health insurance companies take away people’s lives.

Author Wendell Potter was an insurance company executive, heading up a PR department. For years, he participated in the shameless pursuit of profits over lives until he finally came face to face with the effects on real people of what he was doing. Visiting a clinic set up on a fair ground offering free health care to those who had no insurance and no means to pay for health care, he saw ordinary hardworking people reduced to being treated in animal stalls.

He has written about his experience in the health insurance industry, as well as his epiphany, in a straightforward manner, making it more powerful than if he had penned an hysterical screed. He takes us, step by step through the changes in the health insurance industry from a privately held companies offering true health insurance to the modern publicly owned companies whose focus is on profits rather than health.

The lengths to which health insurers go and the collusions in which they participate are extraordinary. They routinely deny coverage to people who need it and drop coverage of people who become ill. They hire outside PR firms who form bogus grassroots groups who lobby in favor of health insurers. They provide statistics to back up all of their false claims that any kind of healthcare reform is bad.

Potter devotes an entire chapter to revealing how health insurers torpedoed Healthcare Reform using all of the dirty tricks he had discussed in previous chapters. The reason we have no public option is because it would put the health insurance industry out of business prompting them to wage all-out war against it.

It took the death of a child who was denied a liver transplant to convince Potter to leave his job with CIGNA. He devotes his time now to healthcare reform advocacy and as a health insurance critic. He testified during the healthcare reform debates, but obviously not enough people listened to him.

In my opinion, this book should be required reading for every member of Congress. They need to know how they have been bribed and manipulated by the health insurers to do what’s best for the health insurance industry instead of what is best for the people who elected them to office.

Review copy courtesy of Bloomsbury Press

The Healing Powers of Chocolate

I have to admit that I didn’t finish reading this book. I made it to page 167 of 294 (the last 60 of those pages are recipes and places to buy chocolate). It is so poorly written that I just couldn’t read it. My initial impression was that it needed a good editor, but after the first couple of chapters, I realized that what it really needed was a good author.

There is very little original writing in this volume. Most of the material in it was previously published in Ms. Orey’s previous two books. It is obvious she merely copied and pasted passages from those books into the manuscript with no regard to narrative flow.

She uses tables of information lifted directly from other sources (with proper attribution) without any discussion. The most egregious fault I found was her description of a tour of a chocolate factory. She was unable to make the tour, so she used the notes of a friend who did go on the tour. Just the notes in raw form, again copied and pasted into her manuscript.

Some of her writing reads likes notes also. I found it very jarring to encounter sentences that were grammatically incorrect or that had no point. She tells the same stories over and over, each time as if it were the first time that the story has been used.

Her tracing of the history of chocolate is marred by her lack of geographical knowledge. Countries wander from Central to South America and back again, depending on which page you are reading.

As for those “healing powers”, she is correct in citing the trace nutrients found in chocolate. However, reputable scientists have pointed out that they are found in such minute quantities that you would have to eat 25 pounds of chocolate every day to gain any benefit from them. Ms. Orley smoothly skates past this little detail by recommending a “dosage” of 1 to 2 squares of dark chocolate per day as part of a healthy diet (she recommends either the Mediterranean diet or the French diet) along with regular exercise. She neglects to mention that it is the diet and exercise, not the chocolate, that is providing the health benefits.

She lives in the San Francisco area and takes us on a tour of the chocolatiers in that city, breathlessly describing their incomparable chocolates, recommending that readers choose those chocolates rather than chocolates from anywhere else. She then goes on to admit that she eats plain old Hershey’s Dark Chocolate. From Pennsylvania.

Review copy courtesy of Kensington Books

The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle Over Food Rights

There is a revolution going on. At first it was a quiet revolution. The initial skirmishes were fought on the fringes of society. Over the past few years, the revolution has become more vocal, more powerful. It has moved from the fringes to the very center of our culture. People are becoming more conscious of the food they eat. And not just what kinds of food. They also want to know where it came from and how it was produced.

The food issue has become so central that the government, normally oblivious to anything that happens outside of the Beltway, has become aware of and is even co-opting the terms and principles of the movement. Manufacturers are legally required to list the ingredients and nutritional values of the food they sell. The term “organic” is no longer a folksy assurance of goodness. It has been quantified and codified. No one may use the term who has not met the stringent standards set by the government.

Still on the fringes but becoming more common with each passing year are those who not only reject the products resulting from the factory farming model, such as enormous feedlots that are so unsanitary that the cows must be fed a steady diet of antibiotics to keep them healthy enough to produce milk or meat (antibiotics that may actually be contributing to rise of “super bugs”, antibiotic resistant bacteria), these consumers are also rejecting the preparation methods mandated by law: the pasteurization and homogenization of milk.

Aficionados refer to it as raw milk. Raw milk producers and drinkers are not the wild-eyed fanatics or zany non-conformists. They live all over the country including the Midwest and New England, areas not known for radicalism. They are people who value milk for its nutrition. Nutrition that is destroyed by the processes of pasteurization and homogenization.

Louis Pasteur, credited with the discovery of pasteurization and long seen as a hero, lived during the era of the rise of feedlots, the factory farming of cows. Those lots were, and still are, breeding grounds for diseases of both animals and humans. Pasteurization is necessary to make milk safe to drink. Prior to the Industrial Revolution which brought first workers and then feedlots into the cities, cows were raised exclusively on farms, grazing in pastures during the summer and eating hay in the winter. The resulting milk was safe to drink. Disease was not a large concern.

The raw milk revolution is an attempt to reach back to our roots. Raw milk dairies raise and nurture their cows the old-fashioned way. They observe strict sanitary methods. They are subject to and welcome constant inspections. The consumers who buy their milk and milk products claim that this “natural” product is more healthful than the pasteurized, homogenized, antibiotic filled product found at the local grocer. These health claims are explored in depth.

I have to confess that when I first picked up this book, my “fanatic alarms” were going off. But once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. I devoured it in two sittings. The author, David Gumpert, is a journalist who uses his training to give as well-rounded a treatment of the subject of raw milk as possible.

The author admits up front that he is a raw milk drinker. He tries to present as many points of view in the debate as fairly as possible. He interviewed dairy farmers who sell raw milk and raw milk products, consumers who buy raw milk, the parents of children who became ill drinking raw milk and the government agencies, both local and federal, who are doing their best to stop the sale of raw milk. It’s that last group that is not well represented but not through lack of trying on Mr. Gumpert’s part. He was constantly stonewalled by the very bureaucrats to whom he was trying to give a voice.

This is a well-written, eye-opening book. Anyone who is interested in healthy eating should definitely pick a copy. Before I read this book, you couldn’t have paid me to drink raw milk. Now that I am better informed, I am admittedly curious. I’ll be keeping an eye out at farmer’s markets for raw milk.

Review copy courtesy of Chelsea Green Publishing