In review: featured book, an app for people living with HIV

Traumatic Scar and tissue Management an app for people living with HIV, providing self-management strategies to improve health and wellbeing and much more.

Featured book : Traumatic Scar by Nancy Keeney Smith and Catherine Ryan ISBN: 9781909141223

Tissue Management: Principles and practice for manual therapy 

People with scarring pass through my hands and heart most days. As a physiotherapist with 30 years’ experience, much of the material in this book resonated with me and was relevant to my practice. But the book would also be useful to recent graduates who want to deepen their understanding and love of manual therapy.
 
I have copied a couple of quotations from the book that summed up for me what the north America-based authors offer: These are: ‘Healing is a matter of time, but it is also a matter of opportunity.’ And: ‘The quality of outcome must be worth the pain of survival.’
 
I found that this well referenced and illustrated book offered me some useful revision material relating to histology and physiology. There was also some encouraging exposition of some of the authors’ work with people with traumatic scarring.
 
As they note, scar tissue can affect the body in a variety of ways. ‘Fibrotic scars and scars that are bound to underlying tissues, organs or skeletal structures can restrict movement and organ motility.’ They go on to suggest that excessive scarring can result in ‘pain, pruritus, adherences and contractures’, which can, in turn, affect people’s quality of life from a physical, physiological and psychological perspective.
 
Therapists in the field are described as ‘visual and palpatory observers of the body’. ‘We may see scars that no one in the client’s family or friends have seen and we may touch scars that no one else, including the individual themselves, have touched. Traumatic scars carry their story within the tissue and mechanisms of the body.’
 
This book contains useful chapters on trauma, assessment and treatment, communication and self-care of the therapist. I shall quote from it when I am teaching other physiotherapists and manual therapists.
 

BeYou+

BeYou+ is an app for people living with HIV, providing self-management strategies to improve health and wellbeing. It offers HIV-specific information in a reliable and accessible way. The app is the brainchild of Darren Brown, a specialist physio at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.  
 
For more information and to watch a short video, visit http://bit.ly/2bGMkbE
 
Stuart Palma, CSP professional adviser 

Black Rain

Physios and self-described ‘dark folk troubadours‘ Alan Taylor and Roger Kerry have teamed up with artist Eugenie Lee, who lives with long-term pain, to create an unusual musical and artistic representation of pain. The physios, who work at the University of Nottingham, performed their song Black Rain at July’s International Federation of Orthopaedic Manipulative Physical Therapists event.  
 

Integrative Pain Management: Massage, movement, and mindfulness based approaches, by Diana Thompson and Marissa Brooks (eds) ISBN: 9781909141261

This book provides an overview of pain mechanisms, and outlines various approaches to pain management used across a range of complementary disciplines. 

Doll Therapy in Dementia Care: Evidence and practice by Gary Mitchell ISBN: 9781849055703

Doll therapy can be a comforting intervention for people with dementia, but ethical issues make it a hotly-debated topic. This pioneering book looks at the issues, drawing on theory and current research.  

Young People and the Aesthetics of Health Promotion: Beyond reason, rationality and risk by Kerry Montero and Peter Kelly ISBN: 9781138898059

This book explores the limits and possibilities of traditional health behaviour change models.
 
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