Speech is commonly affected in Alzheimer’s disease. Difficulty in finding the correct word to use is experienced early, as is the interpretation of complex conversations or proverbs and metaphors. The understanding of simple speech remains intact at this stage. Later, sentences become difficult to finish and the sufferer wanders off onto another subject and words [...]

Bernice Pherigo of Columbus, Indiana, blind for forty-two years, could see again because of an unusual device like a telescope that passes images through a hole in her eyelid to her retina. The device is a Teflon disc in an optical cylinder – a lens developed in the early 1970s by Hernando Cardona, M.D., an [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

Acquiring the teeth is a perfectly normal process. It is certainly not a disorder, nor a disease, nor anything sinister. But it is included in this section because many infants experience difficulty when teething. A large number of disorders have been blamed on the teething process. Diarrhoea, convulsions, coughs and cold and general respiratory illnesses [...]

‘There is no doubt that the psychological value is enormous,’ I agreed. ‘Doctors refer to it as bonding—a link or interaction between mother and baby, which is important. The earlier breast feeding begins, the more intense and successful bonding will be.’ ‘Then why is it some mothers have difficulty?’ Karen asked. ‘Some are simply not [...]