Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Alzheimer’s Disease

  • The power of singing in Alzheimer’s patients

    May LysterDublin, Ireland Throughout the gradual decline of one’s memory and behavior, the ever-changing world can become difficult to understand and comprehend. Around the world, approximately 24 million people currently have Alzheimer’s disease. However, the number of friends and family indirectly affected by this degenerative disease is considerably higher. The experience of watching a loved…

  • A note on circadian clocks

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   I first started to enquire about circadian rhythms when wondering what it was that caused the periodicity of migraines in relationship to such diverse factors as emotions, tiredness, relaxation, hormonal changes, bright lights, and noise.1 The periodic threshold appeared susceptible to hypothalamic function, which in turn was modulated by seasonal…

  • Healing literature

    Scott D. Vander Ploeg Cocoa Beach, Florida, United States   Dr. Vander Ploeg (Ph.D.) checks the lit pressure of the complete works of William Shakespeare published in The Riverside Shakespeare. Photo by Audrey Kon. Courtesy of the author. I taught English courses for thirty years at a community college in western Kentucky. One of the…

  • Ode to baroque and other musical genres

    George ChristopherAda, Michigan, United States Imagine a musical style that is emotionally evocative yet highly organized, thereby conferring structure to emotion; that gives artistic expression of the fusion of emotion and reason; that mimics biology at cellular through ecological levels through its organized complexity; that brings unity from the diversity of multiple simultaneous melodic lines;…

  • Beauty in breaking

    Lealani Acosta Nashville, Tennessee, United States   Photo courtesy of Lealani Mae Acosta. Permission granted by Teresa Briley-Scott.  I had a succulent hanging from my office cabinet, suspended in a clear teardrop-shaped terrarium: its spiny green arches floated above a mound of fake snow, which I intermittently illuminated by touching the built-in switch that electrified…

  • The legacy and maladies of Jonathan Swift

    JMS Pearce England, UK   Fig 1. Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift (Fig 1.) is best known for his popular Lemuel Gulliver’s: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World published in 1726. (Fig 2.) Exciting adventures combine with satirical metaphors that parodied contemporary customs and politics. Lemuel Gulliver, the narrator, begins as a modern man…

  • Up north

    Richard Bentley Amherst, Massachusetts, United States   Lake Michigan. Photo by Qfamily on Flickr. July 15, 2006. CC BY 2.0. He had come to Northern Michigan, and the lake gulls were shrieking at him. He had been on vacation only two days, but he sat around the cabin, springing up now and then to go…

  • “I’m really bad with numbers”: Using the mini mental status examination among farm workers in rural California

    Bernardo Ng Imperial County, California, United States   César Chávez visitas colegio César Chávez en 1974. Movimiento. 1974. In 1975, Dr. Marshal F. Folstein and his colleagues at Tufts University published the seminal paper “Mini-mental state. A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician.”1 Since then, this test has been…

  • Cold autumn nights

    Maria Magdalena Geanovu Stroesti, Romania   Veronica Geanovu, on the right, with her grandson, Alexandru, on the left. One of the last walks in the park, enjoying, as it is, the mild weather and remembering her youthful past. It is said that balance exists, that for every misery an equal amount of happiness is about…

  • The perfection of illness

    Zohaib AhmadPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States It is often but little appreciated that the creative and the consummate can be conceived in the throes of disease. The process of being ill can change people, not only through the mental stress, but also through the neurological changes inherent in neurodegenerative diseases such as in Alzheimer’s disease, where…