MENTAL HEALTH MONTH

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Mental Health America (formerly known as the National Mental Health Association) is celebrating 100 Years of the Mental Health Movement. The organization developed the Live Your Life Well website to help people deal with stress and promote well-being.

Here are the 10 Tools that can help you to live your life well:
1. Connect with others
2. Stay positive
3. Get physically active
4. Help others
5. Get enough sleep
6. Create joy and satisfaction
7. Eat well
8. Take care of your spirit
9. Deal better with hard times
10. Get professional help if you need it
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Burn the Midnight Oil

Remember the Isché Library is staying open until midnight on Fridays & Saturdays this weekend and next. Come get your study on.

LSU Docs & Live Chatting on NOLA.com

Earlier today, two LSUHSC physicians were featured in a Live Chat on NOLA.com regarding Swine Flu. Fred Lopez & James Aiken answered questions from participants for about an hour starting at 12 noon.

Swine Flu

Louisiana is clear for the moment, but human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection have been identified in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control have created a Swine Influenza (Flu) page at http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/index.htm

It includes incidence of U.S. Swine Flu Infection, currently at 20 cases in California, Kansas, Ohio, Texas and New York City.

More from CDC:
Interim CDC Guidance for Nonpharmaceutical Community Mitigation in Response to Human Infections with Swine Influenza (H1N1) Virus: http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/mitigation.htm

Guidance for Clinicians & Public Health Professionals: http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/guidance/

For international information & global statistics, see the the World Health Organization’s Swine flu page:
http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/en/index.html

For folks in Louisiana, the State Dept. of Health and Hospitals encourages “Aggressive Prevention” Against Swine Flu:
http://wwwprd.doa.louisiana.gov/LaNews/PublicPages/Dsp_PressRelease_Display.cfm?PressReleaseID=2019&Rec_ID=0

The White House also issued a press briefing on Swine Influenza:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Press-Briefing-On-Swine-Influenza-4/26/09/

Exam Hours at the Ische Library

Because the Library Commons is not quite finished yet, the Isché Library will have Spring Exam hours and will be open until 12 midnight 7 days a week until May 14th.

Where Circle Bar and Medical History Meet

A recent inquiry to Blake Pontchartrain, New Orleans Know-It-All, revealed a very interesting link between New Orleans and Medical History.

According to Blake, “The last house standing at 1032 St. Charles Avenue. . . was once the office of Dr. Elizabeth Cohen, the first woman to practice medicine in New Orleans.”

The historic building now serves as Circle Bar.

Dr. Cohen was not only the first woman to practice medicine in New Orleans, but also the first female physician licensed to practice medicine in Louisiana.

The life of Dr. Elizabeth Magnus Cohen is one with many challenges and triumphs that not only impacted the history of New Orleans, but the role of women in medicine as well.

This is Your Brain on Twitter

Twitter* is all the rage at the moment. From Oprah signing on to Ashton Kutcher & CNN competing for the most followers, but what are the implications for users at a health sciences center?

One of our fellow medical librarians (PF Anderson at the University of Michigan) has a great slidshare presentation on “Twitter in Health & Healthcare” which demonstrates the various uses of twitter for both professionals and patients.

Twitter is even being used as a form of assistive technology for brain injured adults. The University of Wisconsin Biomedical Engineering Department are developing software that allows the use of a “brain-computer interface” which allows the direct input of thoughts into Twitter.

I am HS_Librarian on Twitter.

*Twitter is a microblogging website where users can disseminate information in 140 character posts.

Consumer health forecast: visibly cloudy

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/cloud.html

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/cloud.html

It just got a little easier to find out what consumer health topics are currently popular with patients. MedlinePlus, your number one authority from the NIH on patient health, just released a search cloud.

The search terms appear in alphabetical order, and their size represents their relative frequency. The bigger the term, the more often it is searched by people who visit MedlinePlus. A term’s exact ranking is found by placing your cursor over the term, and you can click on any term in the search cloud to conduct a search for that term in MedlinePlus.

Anyone who’s been on a camping trip lately can sympathize with why tick bites are so popular right now.

Create a Healthy Environment for Earth Day

As part of National Environmental Education Week and Earth Day, the National Library of Medicine is promoting its toxicology resources. These resources include: ToxMAP, ToxTown, ToxMystery, MedlinePlus, Household Products Database, and Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB). Several of these resources are part of TOXNET which provides access a host of information related to toxicology, hazardous chemicals, and environmental health. For more information on Environmental Health and Toxicology, check out the Special Information Services page at NLM.

Furniture – Sneak Peak

Here’s a quick sneak peak at the furniture that has been setup for the Library Commons.

furniture-front furniture-study
furniture-cafe furniture-av

It came from the stacks: The Knife Man

Welcome to the first installation of an occasional series called IT CAME FROM THE STACKS: an exploration of the hidden gems in our collection

The Knife Man: Blood, body snatching, and the birth of modern surgery by Wendy Moore (2005)
Available on 4th floor Library Stacks: WZ 100 M78k 2005

This book is about John Hunter, an orphaned Scottish boy who grew up to become 18th century London’s premier maverick surgeon, “as reknowned and respected in Georgian England as he was feared and reviled.” The Knife Man explores this larger than life figure, a master surgeon and anatomist who is not only considered the father of modern surgery, but also an inspiration for literary works from Dr. Doolittle to Frankenstein.

Interesting things I learned from this book:

  • John Hunter at one point orchestrated a heist of the corpse of the “Irish Giant“, at the time the world’s tallest man, regardless of the Giant’s explicit orders to the contrary. Hunter was so afraid of getting caught that in preparing the specimen, “he hurriedly chopped the Goliath into pieces, threw the chunks into his immense copper vat, and boiled the lot down into a jumble of gigantic bones. After skimming the fat out of the cauldron, Hunter deftly re-assembled the pile of bones to create [his] awesome skeleton.”
  • In his exploration of sexually transmitted diseases, John Hunter performed a series of experiments on an ‘anonymous subject’ that included inoculating the unnamed man with gonorrhea and recording the effects of various treatments. It is widely postulated the subject of this experiment was Hunter himself. His work Treatise on the Venereal Disease, which stemmed from this research, is available free online.
  • Though Hunter was a renowned & beloved medical teacher, counting Edward Jenner, who developed the smallpox vaccine, and Dr. Philip Syng Physick, American surgeon, among his many students who carried on Hunter’s zeal for medical education. Hunter’s brother-in-law Edward Home would not hold him in such high regard. After his death, Home stole and burnt many of Hunter’s copious notes, but not before plargiarizing several of Hunter’s unpublished experiments as his own.
  • Hunter was an avid collector of exotic animals as well as an anatomist skilled in making medical preparations of human bodies. His collection was so large that he built a museum in his Leicester Square home to house the over 13,700 preparations. Hunter’s home was the inspiration for the house in R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. After Hunter died of heart failure during a meeting with his rivals at St. George’s Hospital in 1793, the collection languished until 1799, when it was bequeathed to the Royal College of Surgeons.
  • Bottom line: The Knife Man offers a lively, educational and sometimes tragic glimpse into the rise of modern surgery, as told through the life of one of surgery’s greatest masters.

    Library Commons Progress

    The Library Commons is getting closer to completion. We hear that furniture may be delivered today.

    commons carpeted area

    commons carpeted area

    Spring Fling @ the Downtown Campus

    Don’t forget the Spring Fling this afternoon; here’s a copy of Chancellor Hollier’s invitation:

    I?óÔé¼Ôäód like to personally invite you and your families to our 2009 Spring Fling, our annual team-building event, on April 17th in the 500 block of Bolivar Street. We have been fortunate to receive generous donations from several sponsors to defray the cost of the event. As the end of work schedules and classes varies, the event will be held from 3:30 – 7:30 PM. There will be something for everyone ?óÔé¼ÔÇ£ delicious food and drink, live music from the Boogie Men, an airbrush tattoo artist and clowns with balloons for the little ones. For those of you coming from off campus, free parking will be available in Student Lot 2 (on the corner of Perdido and Bolivar streets). We?óÔé¼Ôäóre grateful to the Campus Federal Credit Union, the Southeast Louisiana Area Health Education Center, and Acadiana Computer Systems for their sponsorship of the event. It promises to be a great time, and I?óÔé¼Ôäóll look forward to seeing you all there!

    Think Before You Drink

    April is indeed a busy month, adding?é?áAlcohol Awareness Month?é?áto the list?é?áof health observences.

    Drinking one glass of wine per day has been clinically proven to provide health benefits. But what are the risks of drinking more than one glass on the weekend?

    Brush up on facts about alcohol to help keep you and your loved ones safe.

    Also, learn where Louisiana stands in drunk driving statistics.

    The ADA Center for Evidence-Based Dentistry has launched a new EBD Web site

    The ADA Center for Evidence-Based Dentistry has launched a new EBD Web site!

    The site is being promoted as a practical resource for scientific evidence. It includes sections on Systematic Reviews, ADA Clinical Recommendations, Resources, and section that allows the user to suggest clinical ideas.

    While still growing, this site has the potential to be a significant resource in evidence-based dentistry so check it out and suggest some topics!