The author of Sweet Remedies offers a straightforward, empowering guide to homegrown herbal remedies for illness injuries, and preventative health. Most of us understand the value of eating and buying local. Taking back our food, goods, and services from multinational corporations and sourcing them from small growers, producers, artisans, and entrepreneurs benefits our families, our environment, and our communities. Heal Local argues that “100-mile healthcare” can be equally valuable in terms of how we treat illness and injury and maintain wellness. This innovative guide demonstrates that by harnessing multifaceted whole plants, we can rely on homegrown or regionally produced herbs rather than importing exotics and non-natives. Based on the small apothecary model, author Dawn Combs explains how to: · Maximize the benefits of homegrown first aid, from increased freshness, potency, and effectiveness to community resilience and local economic growth · Make home herbal healthcare less intimidating and more attainable, by focusing on twenty herbs to effectively treat most common injuries and ailments · Implement a local medicine culture safely and sustainably, while protecting and respecting wild plant populations Many herbals overwhelm their readers, presenting a list of hundreds of herbs, each with a different purpose. Heal Local empowers readers by showing that you don’t need to know everything about every herb on the planet to create a complete home apothecary. Anyone can be self-sufficient with their wellness, regardless of their previous knowledge, experience, or available space. Mother Earth News Books for Wiser Living Recommendation “An excellent reflection on integrating the western medicine model and local medicine communities.” —Cheri Dinsmore, RN, BSN, president, Harmony Farm

Health is political. It entails fierce battles over the allocation of resources, arguments over the imposition of regulations, and the mediation of dueling public sentiments—all conflicts that are often narrated from a national, top-down view. In All Health Politics Is Local, Merlin Chowkwanyun shifts our focus, taking us to four very different places—New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Central Appalachia—to experience a national story through a regional lens. He shows how racial uprisings in the 1960s catalyzed the creation of new medical infrastructure for those long denied it, what local authorities did to curb air pollution so toxic that it made residents choke and cry, how community health activists and bureaucrats fought over who'd control facilities long run by insular elites, and what a national coal boom did to community ecology and health. All Health Politics Is Local shatters the notion of a single national health agenda. Health is and has always been political, shaped both by formal policy at the highest levels and by grassroots community battles far below.

The bestselling environmental health text, with all new coverage of key topics Environmental Health: From Global to Local is a comprehensive introduction to the subject, and a contemporary, authoritative text for students of public health, environmental health, preventive medicine, community health, and environmental studies. Edited by the former director of the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health and current dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, this book provides a multi-faceted view of the topic, and how it affects different regions, populations, and professions. In addition to traditional environmental health topics—air, water, chemical toxins, radiation, pest control—it offers remarkably broad, cross-cutting coverage, including such topics as building design, urban and regional planning, energy, transportation, disaster preparedness and response, climate change, and environmental psychology. This new third edition maintains its strong grounding in evidence, and has been revised for greater readability, with new coverage of ecology, sustainability, and vulnerable populations, with integrated coverage of policy issues, and with a more global focus. Environmental health is a critically important topic, and it reaches into fields as diverse as communications, technology, regulatory policy, medicine, and law. This book is a well-rounded guide that addresses the field's most pressing concerns, with a practical bent that takes the material beyond theory. Explore the cross-discipline manifestations of environmental health Understand the global ramifications of population and climate change Learn how environmental issues affect health and well-being closer to home Discover how different fields incorporate environmental health perspectives The first law of ecology reminds is that 'everything is connected to everything else.' Each piece of the system affects the whole, and the whole must sustain us all for the long term. Environmental Health lays out the facts, makes the connections, and demonstrates the importance of these crucial issues to human health and well-being, both on a global scale, and in our homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods.

Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine

Based on extensive field research, the essays in this volume illuminate the experiences of migrants from their own point of view, providing a critical understanding of the complex social reality in which each experience is grounded. Access to medical care for migrants is a fundamental right which is often ignored. The book provides a critical understanding of the social reality in which social inequalities are grounded and offers the opportunity to show that right to health does not correspond uniquely with access to healthcare.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.