An ethics primer for nurses and nursing students that advances a vision for a holistic Christian notion of health and explores what Christian faith means, on a practical level, for the practice of nursing.

ABSTRACT The emergence of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has wide-ranging implications for the field of professional psychology. As clinical practice has rapidly adapted to ensure continuity of care, doctoral students have encountered unique opportunities for ethics-related competency development across practicum training settings. This article discusses the relevant American Psychological Association Ethics Code standards and additional ethical considerations facing trainees as they navigate their foundational clinical experiences and develop as professional psychologists in light of a pandemic.

Veganic agriculture, often described as farming that is free of synthetic and animal-based inputs, represents an alternative to chemical-based industrial agriculture and the prevailing alternative, organic agriculture, respectively. Despite the promise of veganic methods in diverse realms such as food safety, environmental sustainability, and animal liberation, it has a small literature base. This article draws primarily on interviews conducted in 2018 with 25 veganic farmers from 19 farms in the United States to establish some baseline empirical research on this farming (...) community. Its qualitative perspectives illuminate farmer perceptions of and experiences with veganic growing, including definitions, knowledge acquisition, values, and challenges. Results highlight a lack of agreement about the meaning of veganic agriculture in terms of allowable inputs and scope. Participants have drawn on a wide array of veganic and non-veganic resources to ascend their veganic production learning curves, also relying on experimentation and trial-and-error. Their farming is motivated by a diversity of real and perceived benefits, most notably consistency with veganism, food safety advantages, and plant and soil health benefits. Veganic product sourcing and the dearth of veganic agriculture-specific resources present considerable challenges to farmers. The article briefly discusses possibilities for developing veganic agriculture in the United States, such as through a US-based certification system and farmers’ associations, based on considerations of the trajectory of the US organic farming movement and veganic developments in Europe. Finally, the article suggests the importance of expanded research into soil health and fertility in plant-based systems to support practicing and potential veganic farmers. (shrink)

This discussion seeks to highlight the ability of poetry to combat loneliness, a growing public health problem with significant negative health outcomes that potentially impact millions of Americans. We argue that poetry can play a very relevant role and have an impact in medicine. Through a brief literature review of previous studies on poetry in medicine, we demonstrate that poetry can not only combat loneliness but can also play important roles in helping patients, physicians, and other healthcare professionals/providers. Because of (...) the COVID-19 pandemic, we believe now is the perfect opportunity to utilize poetry because the benefits can be experienced even in solitude, which is why this is such a timely and pertinent issue today. (shrink)

All ethnographies, perhaps, contain some mystery: of how humans understand each other, or the way that words and glances, observations and encounters are turned into insights about what it means to be human at a given moment in history. But Sareeta Amrute’s Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin begins with a proper mystery, a person who has disappeared, and this literally missing body adroitly stages the subsequent exploration of IT workers’ missing bodies in scholarship on cognitive labor. (...) -/- Global software and service is often thought of as “immaterial,” a traffic of ideas in which effort is a matter of the mind, rather than a muscled arm. Without collapsing cognitive and manual labor, Amrute argues that both are nonetheless embodied ––and formidably marked by social difference, in particular post-genomic notions of race, and class. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)