Public school band directors face many work-related hazards in their grueling, yet rewarding job. As a school year progresses, directors are expected to work long hours, while trying to balance professional and personal responsibilities. A band director whose career spans multiple decades can potentially face a number of serious medical problems.…

Hospice care (health care for the terminally ill that emphasizes emotional support for the patient and family) is essential to ease emotional, psychological, and social pain, and can be a factor in addressing spiritual and physical pain. Yet to ease the pain of final illness, therapeutic communication must extend beyond words. Physical contact--in…

The literature on suicide survivors suggests that suicide grief is different than the grief associated with survivorship from other causes. The few studies that have compared groups of survivors from other causes, however, have often not observed as many differences as expected based on the suicide survivors literature. In this study, 230 college…

There is a widely held clincial contention that people use similar coping strategies in facing life-threatening situations as they do in dealing with general life quandries. To examine this hypothesis, male cancer patients (N=74), male heart disease patients (N=77), elderly persons (N=73), male patients with nonlife-threatening illnesses or…

Based on interviews with 20 primary caretakers (the main person responsible for elderly relatives with chronic illness or disabilities) this pamphlet was written for family members who are caring for older relatives, and may also be helpful to professionals and paraprofessionals who work with the elderly and their families. The two main sections…

Proposals have been developed to clarify physician responsibility in withholding treatment to terminally ill patients. These proposals seek to provide a legal shield against malpractice proceedings and to reduce confusion over how to resolve high medical costs through standardizing procedures for withholding treatment. When first published,…

This document considers the problems faced by the children and adolescents who were affected by the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine. It discusses problems with psycho-physical, social, and spiritual development. It is noted that the Chernobyl children do not form a homogeneous population, but can be divided into…

A study investigated the extent to which members of a state agency reported that they are comfortable talking about Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and the attendant topics of sex, homosexuality, intravenous drug use, death, and disease and the extent to which they use direct talk and indirect talk when they communicate about these…

A study of 1,497 nonmetropolitan counties was conducted to test the possible contribution of agricultural chemical use to cancer mortality rates in rural counties. The dependent variables were 20-year age-adjusted mortality rates for 1950 to 1969 for five categories of cancer: genital, urinary, lymphatic, respiratory, and digestive. Because sex…

Ethical decisions are involved in life and death decisions for severely handicapped infants. Although it has become common practice for physicians not to treat severely handicapped infants, the ethical considerations involved in euthanasia are complex. A review of the literature reveals that concerns center around the quality of life of the…