Health Promotion Throughout the Life Span

5 Responses to “Health Promotion Throughout the Life Span”

1. Marsha S. Asher says:

   May 15, 2010 at 2:13 am

   This book was required for a class. Pleased to have found it here and it was delivered quick. Thank you.
   Rating: 5 / 5
2. Kara K. Tyson says:

   May 15, 2010 at 5:03 am

   I have NEVER read a book labeled as health promotion that was less about health.

   This book really belongs in a philosophy of new age theory.

   You will learn how to enter into relationships of ethical proportions to help with self esteem issues of transgendered beings of consciousness.

   At the same time you learn how to promote well being through the United Nations and universal transferance of wealth to achieve oneness.

   The definition of disease:
   
   “The failure of a person’s adaptive mechanisms to counteract simuli and stresses adequately, resulting in functional or structural disturbances.”

   I guess we should just forget the ancient fashioned definition of ” a shape up of the living animal or plant body or of one of its parts that impairs normal functioning”

   Define illness “A social hypothesis in which people are in an imbalanced, unsustainable relationship with their environment and are failing in the ability to survive and to make a higher quality of life”

   I used to reckon it was “an unhealthy shape up of body or mind”.

   Rating: 1 / 5
3. d says:

   May 15, 2010 at 5:41 am

   As another reviewer experimental, this textbook is about health and wellness as much as a cookbook is about farming. It’s an insipid mishmash of sociological jargon, a smorgasbord of breathless passages like “A central unifying theme has historically linked definitions, philosophies, and frameworks of nursing, known as holistic attention to pattern recognition during the examination of person-environment relationships throughout the life span.” There’s enough postmodern hot air in these pages to inflate a fleet of Goodyear blimps.

   In this book is an obsession with classifying every phenomena regarding the functioning of the human body as a administer within a pattern within society. No connection is too tortured for the various authors; consider this labored definition of food intake as an example of the so-called “individual environmental focus of Gordon’s framework. Although reference is made within many patterns to environmental influence, it often refers to the corporal environment within and external to the individual. Common to each functional health pattern are environmental influences such as role relationships, family values, and societal mores. Private preference, knowledge of food preparation, and ability to consume and retain food govern the individual’s intake. Cultural and family habits, financial ability to secure the food, and crop availability also influence food intake. Additionally, the person who secures, prepares, and serves the food, such as the mother or father, controls nutritional intake for children.”

   I dare anyone, including the author of that horrendous passage, to clarify to me what in the name of God any of that has to do with actual intake of food by actual persons. To my educated eye it seems that half the paragraph is some sort of intricate explanation of why the rest of the explanation should be taken sincerely!

   Within these pages is an apparent attempt to define nursing as some sort of New Age-y, biopsychosocial-holistic-wellness pseudoscience that has small to do with really improving the health of living people, and everything to do with ensuring its authors and editors get more grant money to blow studying the biopsychosocialspiritual effects of maple tree aesthetics on the anxiety problems of 2nd graders with ADD. You’ll read about interpersonal energy flows; you’ll read sentences like “blood pressure, for example, is a pattern within the activity and exercise pattern.” If you’re like me, you’ll grow more and more enraged as Brobdingnagian helpings of asinine vocabulary and infuriating functional redefinitions of words like “disease” (“The failure of a person’s adaptive mechanisms to counteract stimuli and stresses adequately, resulting in functional or structural disturbances”) and “health” (“A state of corporal, mental, and social functioning that realizes the potential of which a person is capable”) are grubby on page after page like so much flung scat.

   Woven through the textbook like barbed wire is the assumption that the government, especially the federal government, should be the cure-all for societies ills, especially those of disadvantaged minorities. Paragraph which talk about various federal initiatives to combat various broadcast health issues are too numerous to count. Individual responsibility is most certainly NOT a theme here; in fact, were I a “disadvantaged minority” I’d be frankly upset at the quantity of condescending paternalism evinced by the authors.

   For any nurse educators who stumble across this review, I beg you to forgo this particular textbook. If you choose to use it, your students are going to spend time laughing at it that they may possibly be spending learning something helpful. My study groups have had a fantastic time picking various passages apart (and by doing so learning just how absolutely incomprehensible most of this book really is).

   To the authors of this weak-minded nonsense, shame on you. You’ve no business trying to pass any of this bunk off as the art and science of nursing- in fact, you’ve got no business taking it anywhere but your sociology classes. The lot of you are preening PC New Age pseudo-intellectuals who wouldn’t know scientific method if it crawled down your throat. I’ve managed to persuade my nursing department to ditch this atrocity, and I hope all other schools follow suit.
   Rating: 1 / 5
4. Jennifer Vanderlaan says:

   May 15, 2010 at 8:37 am

   This book is required for my Community Nursing course. I have completed more than half the book and am doing well in the class – but not due to really having read it. To learn anything from this book takes mental acrobatics – sincerely.

   The organization seems well-defined, but the actual writing is so poorly executed that reading it is slow torture. The authors use as many words as possible to define every concept, turning what should be simple definitions into paragraph long sentences. The chapters whirr on and on, making it near impossible to simply sit, read and gain an understanding of community health.

   Each chapter takes you through Gordon’s Functional Health Patterns to exhibit how at every stage of life countless influences affect a person’s health. Rather than taking a internal locus of control approach to health promotion, the book sees individuals as victims of life with small hope of overcoming all the obstacles to excellent health. As a previous reader noted, there is an overabundance of relying on government programs to make sure private health.

   But the book really goes beyond describing individuals as helpless and really characterizes individuals of low social-economic status in ways that can only be described as stupid. For example, in the chapter on infancy, a description of the risks for homeless infants is that they will not have cribs or be held. No explanation of why poor parents will not hold their children, no citation of research on parenting styles of homeless (or even poor) parents. Just the assumption that if you are poor you don’t hold your baby. When I showed some of my concerns to my clinical adviser she was really offended at how ridiculously inept the book claims individuals are simply because they are poor.

   Very small helpful in rank is offered, and what is is poorly researched. Citations are few and far between leaving me only to assume most of the in rank in this book is the attitude of the authors and should not be used for evidence-based do.
   Rating: 1 / 5
5. Julie says:

   May 15, 2010 at 10:24 am

   Redundant and dull. I really didn’t get much out of this book at all.
   Rating: 1 / 5