April 2019

WYTHEVILLE, Va. — It was cold and snowing, but John Johnson had an appointment to keep. He wasn’t going to let the weather stop him, or the worsening cough he’d been ignoring the past week. He put on his black fedora and drove across town to see a friend. “John, come on in,” she said, and after they settled at her dining room table, she handed him a piece of paper with the names of 12 people, all of them long dead. He squinted at them through his glasses. It had been three weeks since...

A Nashville lawyer hopes to wipe clean some arrest records for 128,000 Tennesseans. The lawyer, Daniel Horwitz, who has worked on multiple cases regarding incarceration and re-entry, has filed a class-action motion in county court to have the case files destroyed for hundreds of thousands of arrests and charges that never resulted in a conviction. Many of those who could benefit from the process, called expungement, do not even know it. "A lot of the people who are affected by this already...

VAUGHAN, Miss. — When Antroine Anderson started kindergarten in this close-knit rural town last August, he knew just three words by sight. He mistook H for G, confused L and I and identified M as F. Accustomed to being called AJ by his family, Antroine didn’t recognize his name in print. His mother, Janice Barton, felt ashamed when she learned some of his peers were already writing their names — until she learned many others weren’t prepared for kindergarten either. In Antroine’s school...

ACEs, Adversity's Impact Adverse childhood events lead to high out-of-pocket medical costs in adulthood 'Change the environment', reduce kids exposure to trauma , says California's Surgeon General at university hospitals 'We've lost so many': Columbine, Sandy Hook and Parkland shooting survivors struggle with suicide, guilt CDC announces adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) research and evaluation fellowship opportunity How childhood trauma results in depression and unhappiness in adulthood...

Photo by James Encinas Raising yellow “Visions & Commitments” cards, 550 attendees at yesterday’s Creating a Resilient Community: From Trauma to Healing Conference pledged their enthusiastic support to create a more resilient Central Florida. The standing-room-only crowd heard Dr. Vincent Felitti deliver a morning keynote address detailing the findings of the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study) . He also shared moving testimonials of people who are...

Listen to my recent podcast interview with an intuitive healer, where I discuss how Kabbalah can guide us in healing all areas of our life by understanding our true destiny and establishing us in balance and harmony, to experience the universe as a loving support system. Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oeJeRmqLUc

Medical treatment that uses culture and tradition allows for more community engagement to help the women, babies, and families. The Indian Health Service is working with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to create an opioid-use treatment program tailored for American Indian and Alaskan Native women who are pregnant or of reproductive age. “American Indian or Alaska Native women have the highest risk of dying from a prescription opioid overdose,” according to the Centers...

Evidence that living near green spaces is good for your health has been steadily building over the past few years. Studies have linked access to nature to better heart health , better brain health , and greater all-around longevity . But for some people, such findings don't fully sink in unless they come with a dollar number attached. New research might hold sway among that group—and among anyone else concerned about health-care costs in an aging society. A new study finds that spending on...

WASHINGTON — It was 1993, and a South Dakota jury was debating whether to sentence a gay man to death. Life in prison, one juror said, would be no punishment at all. Allowing the defendant, Charles Rhines, to spend his days surrounded by men would, the juror reasoned, be a kind of reward. “If he’s gay, we’d be sending him where he wants to go,” the juror said, according to a 2016 sworn statement from Frances Cersosimo, who also served on the jury. She did not name the juror. Another juror,...

BALTIMORE — The latest disaster in Baltimore’s deadly and worsening opioid epidemic was a small one: The addiction treatment van, now 13 years old, wouldn’t start. The white GMC truck, open four mornings a week and parked outside the city jail, is an attempt to close a gap in the city’s struggling addiction treatment system. But as the breakdown showed, even the attempts to plug holes in the system sometimes themselves have holes. With the van out of service, doctors and nurses took to their...

Dennis Mitchell owns a small ground-floor barbershop in the heart of Harlem, where he presides over rows of gleaming salon chairs, cutting fades and shaves and earning the nickname Denny Moe. For years, one of the regular customers sitting in front of Moe's mirrors has been Dr. Joseph Ravenell , an associate professor in the Departments of Population Health and Medicine at New York University's School of Medicine. Barbershops have been havens for Ravenell since he was a kid, when he...

In an excerpt published in Next City from her book BIASED: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do , Stanford social psychologist (and MacArthur Fellow ) Jennifer Eberhardt delves into the impact of implicit bias in perpetuating segregation and racial discrimination. More than half of whites, Eberhardt explains, say they would not move to an area that is more than 30 percent black, because they “believe that the housing stock would not be well maintained and...