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Title: Health Promotion Throughout the Life Span
ISBN: 0323031285
Author:
Carole Lium Edelman
Carol Lynn Mandle
Publicate Date: 2005-11-18
Publish: 2005-11-18
List Price: $69.95
Average Customer Rating: 1.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $57.51
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $48.26
Amazon Merchant Price: $62.95
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Worst Textbook Ever
This book is required for my Community Nursing course. I have completed more than half the book and am doing well in the class - but not due to actually having read it. To learn anything from this book takes mental acrobatics - seriously.
The organization seems well-defined, but the actual writing is so poorly executed that reading it is slow torture. The authors use as many words as possible to define every concept, turning what should be simple definitions into paragraph long sentences. The chapters drone on and on, making it nearly impossible to simply sit, read and gain an understanding of community health.
Each chapter takes you through Gordon's Functional Health Patterns to demonstrate how at every stage of life countless influences affect a person's health. Rather than taking a internal locus of control approach to health promotion, the book sees individuals as victims of life with little hope of overcoming all the obstacles to good health. As a previous reader noted, there is an overabundance of relying on government programs to ensure personal health.
But the book actually goes beyond describing individuals as helpless and actually characterizes individuals of low social-economic status in ways that can only be described as stupid. For example, in the chapter on infancy, a description of the risks for homeless infants is that they will not have cribs or be held. No explanation of why poor parents will not hold their children, no citation of research on parenting styles of homeless (or even poor) parents. Just the assumption that if you are poor you don't hold your baby. When I showed some of my concerns to my clinical adviser she was actually offended at how ridiculously inept the book claims individuals are simply because they are poor.
Very little useful information is offered, and what is is poorly researched. Citations are few and far between leaving me only to assume most of the information in this book is the opinion of the authors and should not be used for evidence-based practice.
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2: The Worst Textbook Ever
As another reviewer observed, this textbook is about health and wellness as much as a cookbook is about farming. It's an insipid mishmash of sociological jargon, a smorgasbord of breathless passages like "A central unifying theme has historically linked definitions, philosophies, and frameworks of nursing, known as holistic attention to pattern recognition during the examination of person-environment relationships throughout the life span." There's enough postmodern hot air in these pages to inflate a fleet of Goodyear blimps.
In this book is an obsession with classifying every phenomena regarding the functioning of the human body as a process within a pattern within society. No connection is too tortured for the various authors; consider this labored definition of food intake as an example of the so-called "individual environmental focus of Gordon's framework. Although reference is made within many patterns to environmental influence, it often refers to the physical environment within and external to the individual. Common to each functional health pattern are environmental influences such as role relationships, family values, and societal mores. Personal preference, knowledge of food preparation, and ability to consume and retain food govern the individual's intake. Cultural and family habits, financial ability to secure the food, and crop availability also influence food intake. Additionally, the person who secures, prepares, and serves the food, such as the mother or father, controls nutritional intake for children."
I dare anybody, including the author of that horrendous passage, to explain to me what in the name of God any of that has to do with actual intake of food by actual persons. To my educated eye it seems that half the paragraph is some sort of convoluted explanation of why the rest of the explanation should be taken seriously!
Within these pages is an apparent attempt to define nursing as some sort of New Age-y, biopsychosocial-holistic-wellness pseudoscience that has little to do with actually improving the health of living people, and everything to do with ensuring its authors and editors get more grant money to blow studying the biopsychosocialspiritual effects of maple tree aesthetics on the anxiety problems of 2nd graders with ADD. You'll read about interpersonal energy flows; you'll read sentences like "blood pressure, for example, is a pattern within the activity and exercise pattern." If you're like me, you'll grow more and more enraged as Brobdingnagian helpings of silly vocabulary and infuriating functional redefinitions of words like "disease" ("The failure of a person's adaptive mechanisms to counteract stimuli and stresses adequately, resulting in functional or structural disturbances") and "health" ("A state of physical, mental, and social functioning that realizes the potential of which a person is capable") are smeared on page after page like so much flung scat.
Woven through the textbook like barbed wire is the assumption that the government, especially the federal government, should be the cure-all for societies ills, especially those of disadvantaged minorities. Paragraph which talk about various federal initiatives to combat various public health issues are too numerous to count. Individual responsibility is most definitely NOT a theme here; in fact, were I a "disadvantaged minority" I'd be frankly upset at the amount of condescending paternalism evinced by the authors.
For any nurse educators who stumble across this review, I beg you to forgo this particular textbook. If you choose to use it, your students are going to spend time laughing at it that they could be spending learning something useful. My study groups have had a great time picking various passages apart (and by doing so discovering just how utterly incomprehensible most of this book really is).
To the authors of this weak-minded nonsense, shame on you. You've no business trying to pass any of this bunk off as the art and science of nursing- in fact, you've got no business taking it anywhere but your sociology classes. The lot of you are preening PC New Age pseudo-intellectuals who wouldn't know scientific method if it crawled down your throat. I've managed to persuade my nursing department to ditch this atrocity, and I hope all other schools follow suit.
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3: I didn't learn a thing.
Redundant and boring. I really didn't get much out of this book at all.
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4: This Book is Worst than Illness
I found this to be the worst text book I have ever had to read, the test questions it offers, are based on one sentence out of each chapter rather than concepts.
It has no underlying themes rather than any one of an ethnic minority
MUST have poor health which is of itself racist and discriminating. I would completely disagree by saying that I know plenty of healthy people who are of minority statuses.
The book is extremely boring to read and I agree with the first review, it just very repetetive and does not explain any concept in its own words.
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5: Extremely tedious read
I am a first year nursing student, and this book is in use for my institutions "Nursing Across the Life Span" course. At first glance, I thought that this would be a comprehensive examination of health promotion. However, I have found it to be extremely tedious to read. The authors don't seem to know the meaning of the word "paraphrase", and write some incredibly convoluted explanations for what should be very simple concepts. I am already college educated, and did well in college. Yet, as I read this book, I found myself stopping to say "Huh?" Often, the definitions and explanations are direct quotes from other sources and they are nearly always convoluted and difficult. In short, I hate this book and find it quite a chore to have to read. It's page after page of tedium, and it doesn't have to be that way. Additionally, this book is terrible when it comes to defining important terms. True, it depicts important terms in bold print but often does not provide an in-text definition. Rather, I found myself having to stop and flip to the glossary in order to located the definiton. I don't like having to interrupt the flow of reading, and the way the book was written necessitated that. Several in my class have the same problem with this textbook, and we have asked the instructor to consider changing the text for next years class. This is a topic area that nurses absolutely need to understand, and it could be a very interesting topic. This text, however, does a poor job of presenting it. It's simply too convoluted and tedious to read. It isn't student friendly in the least, and I would not recommend it to anyone in its current form.
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