About Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

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

Friday Round-Up: When ‘Natural’ Isn’t ‘Safer,’ A Student Nurse Summit, a Walking Crisis, Chronicity

Please pardon the relative quiet of this blog this week. All our in-house and far-flung occasional correspondents are otherwise engaged, it seems. Blame the nice weather, if it’s nice where you are. Our editor-in-chief, Shawn Kennedy, is in Pittsburgh at the National Student Nurses Association (NSNA) convention. She’s presenting this afternoon (I think) on the new AJN iPad app, among other things (no, we don’t yet have one for the Kindle, but that may be on the way).

Shawn should have an update on her adventures with the next generation in nursing sometime early next week. So for now, almost entirely avoiding nursing news and health care reform, here are a few items of potential interest:

The Respectful Insolence blog, in reminding us that “natural” doesn’t always mean safer, points to an AFP article that highlights research drawing a connection between a widely used herbal remedy and the unusually high incidence of urinary tract cancer in Taiwan. Says the AFP article,

A toxic ingredient in a popular herbal remedy is linked to more than half of all cases of urinary tract cancer in Taiwan where use of traditional medicine is widespread, said a US study Monday.

Aristolochic acid (AA) is a potent human carcinogen that is found naturally in Aristolochia plants, an ingredient common in botanical Asian remedies for aiding weight loss, easing joint pain and improving stomach ailments.

While the FDA issued an alert about products containing this […]

2016-11-21T13:10:19-05:00April 13th, 2012|students|2 Comments
Read More

Early Spring Web Roundup: Insomnia, Early Delivery, Persistence, Painkillers, Overtesting

We’ve been a little quiet here on the blog this week. Maybe it has to do with the opening of baseball season or signals a hangover from media coverage of the Supreme Court give-and-take about the Affordable Care Act last week and the endless guesses about how the court is likely to vote come June. Or maybe all our nurse bloggers are using spare time to clean out closets, sweep the cherry blossoms and sale inserts from the sidewalk, purge the inbox, box up the humidifier, watch Mad Men, or whatever. But here are a few things we’d like to draw your attention to:

If the windy spring nights wake you (or your patients) to the sound of a trash can lid flying away, maybe this will help: As described in the Drug Watch column in AJN‘s April issue, a sublingual form of the drug zolpidem (think Ambien) has now been approved, with the fancy name Intermezzo, for people who wake in the middle of the night and start hearing the same song over and over in their heads or thinking of the perfect comeback to that snippy waiter.

Also in the April issue, an AJN Reports looks at efforts to get people not to opt for potentially risky early delivery of their babies, and a Reflections essay called “Giving […]

2016-11-21T13:10:21-05:00April 6th, 2012|health care policy, nursing perspective|0 Comments
Read More

April Apps and Other Good Things

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief

April is one of those months most people like, I think—the weather becomes consistently warmer and flowers appear. And this month, we at AJN are especially delighted because we launch our very own iPad app! As a temporary introductory offer, you can download the app for free (click here, or search under American Journal of Nursing in the iTunes app store) and get the full April issue. (Eventual pricing is still being determined.)

It’s another way AJN is providing you with accurate, evidence-based information in formats that allow you to access it when and where and how you want it. Don’t forget to subscribe to our always free audio podcasts, too—there are monthly highlights and interviews with authors.

And April is a stellar issue. This month we focus on examining how we treat people with disabilities. The cover, the editorial, and two features all deal with how we need to do better in this area. In the original research article, Suzanne Smeltzer and colleagues report on their survey of people with disabilities, querying them on interactions with nurses during hospitalizations. Their findings are sobering and should serve as a wake-up call when providing care to people with disabilities when they are hospitalized.

There’s also a poignant piece, “Hard Lessons from a Long Hospital Stay,” describing the experience of one of the authors of the research article, […]

2016-11-21T13:10:24-05:00April 4th, 2012|nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
Read More

“Let Patients Help”: Nurses and e-Patients

Joy Jacobson is a health care journalist and the poet-in-residence at the Center for Health, Media, and Policy at Hunter College, where she teaches writing to nursing students.

In the March issue of AJN, a letter writer responds critically to my news report, “Leveling the Research Field Through Social Media,” published last October. My report summarizes some recent trends in medical research, including patients using Facebook and other social networking sites to push for the funding of research into treatments that the science may not support. I go on to discuss PatientsLikeMe, which describes itself as “a health data-sharing platform” designed to “transform the way patients manage their own conditions.”

The letter writer objects to the idea of patients sharing their own data online. Can vulnerable, mentally ill patients, she asks, consent to participate in online research? Is enough being done to safeguard them? “I suggest we disseminate information to nurses that helps them steer patients away from Web sites such as PatientsLikeMe,” she concludes, “until programs and processes are in place to better protect the public we’ve pledged to serve.”

Several PatientsLikeMe researchers responded to this nurse’s points; a synopsis of their responses was included along with the reader’s letter in the March issue. “What we are doing is new and as such should be scrutinized frequently and rigorously by peers to ensure we are meeting the ethical standards one would expect for our patients,” they write. “We believe our […]

2016-11-21T13:10:25-05:00March 30th, 2012|digital health, healthcare social media, patient engagement, patient experience|3 Comments
Read More

Grief: The Proposed DSM-5 Gets It Wrong

By Karen Roush, MS, RN, FNP-C, AJN clinical managing editor

Today is my son’s birthday. I remember so clearly the day of his birth, the overwhelming sense of recognition the first time I saw him, as if I had known him forever.

April 16th is the anniversary of his death. When a birth is so closely followed by a death, they are forever intertwined. I remember watching him sleep, how he turned to the music when I turned the key of his music box and “It’s a Small World” unwound its notes against the side of his warming bed. I remember his three-year-old brother holding him, sitting in the rocking chair in their father’s lap. I remember rocking in that chair three weeks later, holding him against my chest as his few last breaths faded. I remember the long walk back down the hall, the drive home, the blur of a funeral. And then the first long cold winter, visiting his grave day after day, distraught that my baby lay in frozen earth, unprotected from the cold. And the months that stretched on into a future I sometimes couldn’t bear to think about, because I couldn’t imagine my way out of the pain of grief into a day when I would feel joy again.

I was grieving. I listened for the phone, certain the hospital would call any minute to tell me it was all a […]

2016-11-21T13:10:26-05:00March 28th, 2012|Nursing|11 Comments
Read More

Comment ground rules

1. Please be respectful.
2. We moderate all comments.

Content disclaimer

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.
Go to Top