Ideally you will have the luxury of making a fully informed choice. In reality your options are likely to be more limited. If your relative is arriving from the community, the best homes tend to have long waiting lists. Priority is given to patients coming from hospitals. Even if your ideal choice has a wait [...]

The physical plant. Is the home clean, well lit, relatively odor-free, laid out with a disabled person’s needs in mind? Do residents’ rooms contain personal belongings? What is the policy on bringing in such belongings? Is there enough room for privacy and an attractive place to sit outside? You want a place that looks cheerful [...]

I am sure you have noticed that sweets have a calming, relaxing effect on you. They also make you drowsy and less alert. Have you also noticed that when you eat breakfast (which most overweight people do not eat) you feel drowsy and hungry by late morning? That’s not because you ate breakfast but because [...]

Parents have a variety of complaints about their toddlers. Many toddlers refuse to go to bed at night. They will invent an extraordinary variety of reasons why they should stay up a little longer, and some parents dread the approach of bedtime as they know that they will inevitably get involved in a drawn-out struggle [...]

You are constipated if your motions are hard and you have difficulty opening your bowels. It doesn’t really matter if you don’t open your bowels very often, as long as your motions are soft and easy to pass when you do. I’m sure you know some of the simple things that can cause constipation—not eating [...]

You should learn how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and teach it to your older children. If breathing has stopped, place the patient on his back. Check to see whether his heart is beating. The pulse can be felt at the wrist or at the neck, or you can place your hand over his heart and [...]

The defect in vision usually affects the inner or nasal side and this loss is often not noticed because it falls into the binocular area covered by both eyes. Later it may involve the outer area and so lead to “tunnel vision”, where it appears the vision is reduced to seeing straight ahead as if [...]

A generation has grown up not knowing that the large obstetric hospitals developed because of unsatisfactory results in home deliveries of babies. Confinements are normal and mother and baby do well in 70 per cent of cases with no complications so for the majority it really doesn’t matter where the mother has the baby. But [...]

Everybody who has cancer is under some nervous strain some of the time. This shows itself in different ways in different people. Symptoms which can be due to nervous tension include difficulty sleeping, lack of energy, irritability, crying spells, loss of appetite, nausea, difficulty in swallowing, indigestion, stomach pains, diarrhoea, breathlessness, chest pains, palpitations, headache, [...]

Breakfast 1. Start with a bowl of low G.I. cereal served with skim or low-fat milk or yoghurt. 2. Try something like All-Bran™, rolled oats (raw or cooked) or Guardian™. 3. If you prefer muesli, keep to a small bowl of low-fat muesli—check that it doesn’t contain added fats. 4. Add a slice of toast [...]