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 PearceHull, 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 patterns and…

  • Healing literature

    Scott Vander PloegCocoa Beach, Florida, United States I taught English courses for thirty years at a community college in western Kentucky. One of the more robust programs we offered was in nursing, and we also offered training for physical therapy assistants and respiratory therapists, grouped under the umbrella of “Allied Health”. We also had a…

  • 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 AcostaNashville, Tennessee, United States 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 interwoven fairy lights. It was a Christmas present from James’s sister. She had come…

  • The legacy and maladies of Jonathan Swift

    JMS PearceEngland, UK 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 but ends ironically as a mad…

  • Up north

    Richard BentleyAmherst, Massachusetts, United States 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 to the window and back. It was too chilly to go out to the beach.…

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

    Bernardo NgImperial County, California, United States 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 widely used by clinicians both to screen for cognitive deficits when a…

  • Cold autumn nights

    Maria Magdalena GeanovuStroesti, Romania It is said that balance exists, that for every misery an equal amount of happiness is about to come . . . Sometimes I wonder . . . when you see death every day of your life, those random strains of thought begin to gravitate around one single, simple question: WHY?…

  • 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…