Handbook of Families and Health: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
http://www.100md.com
《新英格兰医药杂志》
The relationship of families to the health and health care of an individual family member is a topic whose clarity diminishes as its study intensifies. Families have many structures and a variety of functional styles, and the confusion between association and causality in how family structure and function relate to the health of a family member is legendary. Families are a source of pathology; a vector for disease; a source of competition for resources and possible ethical conflicts; a unit of health insurance coverage; a frequent casualty of the stress of catastrophic illness or injury; and the primary sociologic unit within which birth, growth, aging, decline, and death occur. In all of these arenas, the relationships between the family and its members can be detracting, supporting, or inconsequential. It is no wonder that health care professionals have been both fascinated and confused by just how a patient's family affects their work. This handbook makes some progress in answering this question.
The book was conceived as a compendium of presentations made at an invitational conference held at Brigham Young University in 2002 and was enhanced by the addition of several papers targeting particularly critical areas. The authors of the various chapters represent expertise in health policy, economics, law, sociology and demography, family therapy, nursing, family medicine, health psychology, and psychiatry. Though primarily intended as a source and a review of the literature for scholars and investigators, with references as recent as 2003, it has much to offer clinicians. It should be of particular value to those who work in the areas of chronic medical illness and mental disorders, death and dying, and health care of minority groups and underserved populations. The chapters on the impact of parents infected with the human immunodeficiency virus on children, on family interventions to improve health, and on working with families of critically ill children are particularly good in this regard. The chapter on health care financing for the uninsured and underinsured should be required reading for all clinicians, so that they can understand the barriers their patients face. The health care financing decision trees in chapter 21, which take patients deeper into the morass of inadequate public financing with each fork in the tree, would be an amusing satire if they did not represent the truth.
In summary, this is one of the better works in a long line of scholarly compendiums of research and reviews on the relationship among families, health, and health care. The book moves the field along for investigators and policymakers and is of reasonable interest to clinicians. Unfortunately, many of the myths, mysteries, uncertainties, and fantasies about families are still unresolved, and the reader continues to be left with the sense that families are important but that, to paraphrase Tolstoy, "every family is important in its own way."
Thomas L. Schwenk, M.D.
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
tschwenk@umich.edu(Edited by D. Russell Cran)
The book was conceived as a compendium of presentations made at an invitational conference held at Brigham Young University in 2002 and was enhanced by the addition of several papers targeting particularly critical areas. The authors of the various chapters represent expertise in health policy, economics, law, sociology and demography, family therapy, nursing, family medicine, health psychology, and psychiatry. Though primarily intended as a source and a review of the literature for scholars and investigators, with references as recent as 2003, it has much to offer clinicians. It should be of particular value to those who work in the areas of chronic medical illness and mental disorders, death and dying, and health care of minority groups and underserved populations. The chapters on the impact of parents infected with the human immunodeficiency virus on children, on family interventions to improve health, and on working with families of critically ill children are particularly good in this regard. The chapter on health care financing for the uninsured and underinsured should be required reading for all clinicians, so that they can understand the barriers their patients face. The health care financing decision trees in chapter 21, which take patients deeper into the morass of inadequate public financing with each fork in the tree, would be an amusing satire if they did not represent the truth.
In summary, this is one of the better works in a long line of scholarly compendiums of research and reviews on the relationship among families, health, and health care. The book moves the field along for investigators and policymakers and is of reasonable interest to clinicians. Unfortunately, many of the myths, mysteries, uncertainties, and fantasies about families are still unresolved, and the reader continues to be left with the sense that families are important but that, to paraphrase Tolstoy, "every family is important in its own way."
Thomas L. Schwenk, M.D.
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
tschwenk@umich.edu(Edited by D. Russell Cran)