About Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

Senior editor, American Journal of Nursing; editor of AJN Off the Charts.

AJN Collections of Note: From Women’s Health Issues to Assessment Tools for Older Adults

By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

'Nuff Said by ElektraCute / Elektra Noelani Fisher, via Flickr. Elektra Noelani Fisher/ Flickr

It’s easy to miss, but there’s a tab at the top of the AJN home page that will take you to our collections page. There you can delve more deeply into a wide range of topics—and find many options for obtaining continuing education credits in the process.

For example, you’ll find a collection of recent continuing education (CE) feature articles devoted to women’s health issues, such as menopausal hormone therapy, cardiovascular disease prevention for women, and issues faced by young women who are BRCA positive.

The patient population in the U.S. continues to age. To gain confidence in meeting the needs of these patients, nurses can consult our practical collection of articles and videos devoted to the use of evidence-based geriatric assessment tools and best practices.

For the more creative side of nursing, we have a collection of 20 visual works and poems from our Art of Nursing column.

For those concerned with potential legal issues, it’s a good idea to have a look at the three CE articles from our Legal Clinic column on protecting your nursing license.

For would-be authors and […]

2016-11-21T13:02:31-05:00May 18th, 2015|Ethics, Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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The Challenge of Eating Disorders: A Teacher Learns a New Mindfulness Technique

“She’s brought a cup with her. This is not unusual. Clients often bring food or drinks they’re required to finish—but when Mariko reaches inside the cup, I hear the brittle clicking of ice and look closer. There’s no beverage. She pulls out a piece of ice and, without a word, curls up on her side, cradling the cube tenderly in her palm.”

By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

Illustration by Anne Horst for AJN. Illustration by Anne Horst for AJN.

We hear a lot lately about mindfulness and its benefits in the workplace for dealing with stress, increasing productivity, and the like.

It’s been pointed out lately that mindfulness has become a tool with many uses, some more in keeping with its role in various spiritual traditions than others. Such traditions seem to use meditation practices in order to cultivate compassionate awareness of the varieties of suffering arising from the impermanence of everything from pleasant and unpleasant feelings and the weather to the lives of our loved ones.

This month’s Reflections essay in AJN is by a mindful movement teacher at an eating disorder treatment center. Eating disorders can involve mental and physical suffering that’s unrelenting and self-sustaining. Many clinicians and therapists find patients with eating disorders very challenging to work with. The essay, called “Distress Tolerance,” tells the story of an encounter […]

2016-11-21T13:02:39-05:00April 27th, 2015|Nursing, patient engagement, Patients|0 Comments
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Recent End-of-Life Care Links of Note, by Nurses and Others

nature's own tightrope/marie and alistair knock/flickr creative commons nature’s own tightrope/marie and alistair knock/flickr creative commons

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City currently doing a graduate placement at AJN.

End-of-life care and decision making have been getting a lot of attention lately. The Institute of Medicine released a new report earlier this year, Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life (available for free download as a PDF).

Nurses who write often write about end-of-life matters. A couple of recent examples:

On the Nurse Manifest Web site, a look at the realities and challenges of futile care in America. Here’s a quote:

“I am currently teaching a thanatology (study of death and dying) course for nurses that I designed . . . to support students to go deeply in their reflective process around death and dying, to explore the holistic needs of the dying, and to delve into the body of evidence around the science and politics of death and dying.”

Or read another nurse blogger’s less abstract take on the tricky emotional territory nurses face when a patient dies.

Elsewhere on the Web
Vox reporter Sarah Kliff collects five strong end-of-life essays that recently appeared in various sources.

And here’s something very practical that might catch on: according to […]

2016-11-21T13:02:42-05:00April 13th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement|0 Comments
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Morgellons: Whatever the Cause, the Suffering Is Real

Image, magnified 60 times, depicts fiber-embedded skin removed from a facial lesion of a 3-year-old boy who the Morgellons Research Foundation says has Morgellons. Image, provided by Morgellons Research Foundation to AJN in 2008, described as depicting fiber-embedded skin removed from facial lesion of 3-year-old boy with Morgellons (magnified 60x).

By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

As you may have read, Joni Mitchell was recently found unconscious in her home and is now in the hospital. She has attributed her health issues to a syndrome called Morgellons—a condition in which sufferers experience what they describe as fibers emerging from their skin, along with intense itching, sores that won’t heal, and a host of nonspecific symptoms such as fatigue and concentration problems.

Whether it’s a clinically verifiable illness or, as some have argued, a manifestation of a psychological condition known as “delusional parasitosis,” Morgellons is plenty real to those who experience it.

We covered this controversial illness several years back in an article called “AKA ‘Morgellons.’” I interviewed two nurses and several others about their experiences. One of the nurses (see this sidebar) was convinced she had caught the condition from a patient. I also spoke with Michele Pearson, MD, the lead investigator […]

2016-11-21T13:02:44-05:00April 2nd, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement, Patients|1 Comment
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Two Sons, Similar injuries—Two Very Different Experiences of Pain

Vincent-2015-AJN_The_American_Journal_of_NursingWe are often amazed by the richness of the archives here at AJN. In the April issue, we reprint an essay originally published in the February 2002 issue. “Morphine. Now.” by Peggy Vincent, touches on topics as relevant today as ever: inadequate pain relief and the costs to patients of certain nursing scope-of-practice limitations.

It’s also a story, written by a nurse, of encountering very different attitudes to human suffering in two different health care institutions after injuries sustained by her own children. There may or may not be clinical details or matters of protocol that don’t accord with every reader’s current clinical experiences, but the human interactions are as familiar as ever. Here’s a brief excerpt: […]

2016-11-21T13:02:45-05:00April 1st, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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