Public Health Education

Three out of four people addicted to heroin probably started on a prescription opioid, according to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the United States alone, 16,000 people die each year as a result of prescription opioid overdose. But perhaps the most frightening aspect of the prescription drug epidemic is that it's built on well-meaning doctors treating patients with real problems.

In the US, there is a wide-ranging network of at least 370 food banks, and more than 60,000 hunger-relief organizations such as food pantries and meal programs. And yet hunger still affects one in nine Americans. What are we doing wrong? In Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, Katie Martin argues that if handing out more and more food was the answer, we would have solved the problem of hunger decades ago. Martin instead presents a new model for charitable food, one where success is measured not by pounds of food distributed but by lives changed.

The health-care system in the United States has been called the best in the world. Yet wide disparities persist between social groups, and many Americans suffer from poorer health than people in other developed countries. In this revised edition of Health Disparities in the United States, Donald A. Barr provides extensive new data about the ways low socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity interact to create and perpetuate these health disparities.

Between 1999 and 2017, an estimated 250,000 Americans died from overdoses involving prescription painkillers, a plague ignited by Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin. Families, working class and wealthy, have been torn apart, businesses destroyed, and public officials pushed to the brink. Meanwhile, the drugmaker’s owners, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, whose names adorn museums worldwide, made enormous fortunes from the commercial success of OxyContin.

Antibiotics: What Everyone Needs to Know examines the personal and societal implications of our planet's most important - and frequently misused - medications. Grounded in the latest scientific research and crafted for general listeners, Antibiotics: What Everyone Needs to Know offers a clear-eyed overview of where we are, and what the future holds, as antibiotics lose their power.

Deaths resulting from interactions with the US criminal legal system are a public health emergency, but the scope of this issue is intentionally ignored by the very systems that are supposed to be tracking these fatalities. In order to make a real difference and address this human rights problem, researchers and policy makers need reliable data.

In 2017, seven-year-old Ava in South Carolina wrote a letter to Tyshaun, an eight-year-old boy from Washington, DC. She asked him to be her pen pal; Ava thought they could help each other. The kids had a tragic connection - both were traumatized by gun violence. Ava’s best friend had been killed in a campus shooting at her elementary school, and Tyshaun’s father had been shot to death outside of the boy’s elementary school. Ava’s and Tyshaun’s stories are extraordinary, but not unique.

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured that the velvet glove of antidrug education would be backed by the iron fist of rigorous policing and harsh sentencing.

Now more than ever, the scientific and medical community is under the microscope and in front of the media. Science matters, and in a post-truth world it’s more important than ever for scientists and physicians to be heard. But there’s a challenge. To get people to listen, you can’t communicate in writing alone anymore. You need to speak up and be seen—onstage, online, and on camera. To do this well you need to master the art of influential speaking, which is something you weren’t taught at university or medical school.

LeadWell focuses on 16 of the most sought-after qualities in leaders but emphasizing them for 14- to 23-year-olds. The audiobook can be used as a stand-alone resource for schools and student groups, but it complements the LeadWell training curriculum provided by LeadYoung Training Systems.

Spätestens seit Lockdown und Schulausfall hinterfragen Eltern den Sinn vieler Maßnahmen rund um Schule und Kindeswohl. Zu Recht. Psychotherapeutin Gunda Frey warnt: "Wir erschaffen eine traumatisierte Generation!" Kinder werden heute von Geburt bis Schulabschluss den Zwängen eines auf "Funktionieren" optimierten Systems ausgesetzt - Rücksichtnahme auf ihre Bedürfnisse: meist Fehlanzeige! Das Ergebnis: Kinder, denen Eltern, Erzieher und Lehrer nicht das ermöglichen, was gut, gesund und nötig wäre. Die Resultate sind fatal.

Dopesick (2018) details the explosion of OxyContin use in Appalachia in the 1990s and 2000s and the widespread heroin addiction that ensued when medical providers began restricting access to prescription opioids in the late 2000s and 2010s. Journalist and author Beth Macy, who once worked as a reporter in Roanoke, Virginia, traces the efforts of local activists, doctors, law enforcement officials, and parents to combat opioid dependence.... (Disclaimer: This is NOT the original book. If you’re looking for the original book, it is available from Amazon and Audible.)

For today’s teen, being able to communicate clearly in front of an audience is essential. From class presentations to interviews to online videos, an engaging talk can not only inspire and electrify a room, it can change people’s minds, and even change the world. Thank You for Coming to My TED Talk is the definitive guide to public speaking for a teen audience. Drawing from a teen’s day-to-day world - school, extracurriculars, online videos, college admissions procedures, bat and bar mitzvahs, debates, and more - head of TED Chris Anderson shares proven techniques.