Congenitally defective metabolic pathways adversely affect the quality of life of patients as well as their care givers. Early diagnosis is therefore vital. Frequently, radio-imaging alone raises a strong suspicion and sometimes even provides conclusive evidence of defective metabolic pathways, when the patient presents with signs and symptoms that clinically fail to lead to a definitive diagno...

A man who insisted on having his hat taken off by the staff of his residential home after hours at the day hospital doing things for himself illustrates one of the challenges of geriatric rehabilitation: someone may be encouraged to do more than he or she normally does, but this may be no use unless rehabilitation takes account of the person's actual life, and relatives and care givers are invo...

IGnAz SEmmElWEIS – HAnD WASHInG PIonEEr Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (July 1, 1818 – August 13, 1865) was the Hungarian – Austrian physician who demonstrated that puerperal fever (also known as “childbed fever”) was contagious and that its incidence could be drastically reduced by enforcing appropriate hand washing by medical care-givers. He made this discovery in 1847 while head of the Maternity D...

A functional analysis of prosociality considers how predispositions for prosocial behavior prompt, reinforce, and propagate kind behaviors in the real world. To examine the effects of practicing, receiving, and observing everyday prosociality-as well as the mechanisms underlying these effects-we randomly assigned employees in a Spanish corporate workplace (N = 111) to be Givers, Receivers, and ...

This series will present a variety of current thought and suggested practice bearing on what might be broadly characterized as the science of modern health care chaplaincy. A basic premise underlying this series is that pastoral care in health care can, and should, and needs to make increasingly predictable and evidence based contributions to the holistic care of those who are suffering, and th...