Reviews for Textbook of geriatric medicine and gerontology

The average rating for Textbook of geriatric medicine and gerontology based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-11-30 00:00:00 Henk Bongers In his book Somatics, Thomas Hanna, Ph.D. tackles the medical assumption that pain and degeneration are the inevitable result of the aging process. Not only that, he offers a simple plan to recover lost flexibility, balance, and posture. His exercises, he assures us, will bring us back into connection with our lost mobility while reducing pain and discomfort. It almost sounds too good to be true. But is it? Most people suffer from pain and discomfort at some point in their lives. When this follows an injury, it is easy to watch the play of cause and effect. This can allow us some feeling of control during our healing process as we regain lost function and strength. When we don’t know why we hurt, we can feel like victims of our own bodies. When we ask our doctors for help, they offer drugs for pain, and tell us to buck up and accept our lot. We are growing older, after all. What else should we expect? Everyone knows that bodies wear out eventually. Hanna challenges this idea. He points out that although this is true for many people today, there are also many circumstances in which people maintain function and vitality right up to the very end. Gerontologists call this “successful aging.” Rather than dismiss such cases as oddities, Hanna thinks we should embrace them as possibilities, and learn how to make our own lives turn out like theirs. Five case studies are reviewed in the course of the book. In each case, through guided movements, flexibility is restored and pain is alleviated. Several of the cases are quite extraordinary; one woman regained the use of her frozen shoulder after just one treatment, despite almost two unsuccessful years of conventional treatment. Another case involved a man who had not been able to straighten his knee for almost two years. He rediscovered how to control what he had once given up as lost. Although Somatics is full of information for the professional, it is very accessible to the lay reader as well. He uses clear language that anyone can understand. After describing commonly seen habits of movement, he gives us the keys to unlock our own blockages through simple exercises that almost anyone can do. These slow movements rebalance our structure by bringing awareness to the way we actually move our bodies, and teach us how to develop more balanced ways of moving. The final chapter includes his basic movement explorations. His exercises are simple, mild, and brief. He offers a series of lessons, in which the reader may explore different areas of the body. By encouraging the reader to reacquaint themselves with their movements, he invites us to take our own steps on this healing path. And if my brief explorations with this work are any guide, change really is possible. I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking to find a new sense of vitality, movement, and freedom in their body. And really, who isn’t?

Review # 2 was written on 2016-10-06 00:00:00 ROBERTO JACOBO Complete honesty: Somatics and Hanna Somatics in particular is one of the most important discoveries of my adult life. I'm 28 now and had incured a series of small muscle pulls in my lower body and then a groin pull (combined with horrible posture and alignment) that eventually threw my whole body into a cycle of degeneration and discomfort. Somatics is the one discipline that is helping me to unravel these patterns. I literally feel 10 years younger. Hanna's greatest insight is that we are both an interior sensing and feeling being as well as an exterior organism. We have a double sense of our physical nature -- inside we feel ourselves as a soma, outside we see and observe ourselves as a body. Most medicine obsesses over the exterior body and denies or supresses the soma. This is unfortunate because the soma, and our inner awareness of our sensations, feelings, pains, and sense of balance, has tremendously useful healing capacities. These are activated by unlocking the potential of our brain and nervous system, which control so much of how well our bodies function and how we hold onto muscular tension and pain By accessing and working with (rather than against) our nervous responses and muscle groups through simple movement exercises, we can allow our bodies to let go of painful patterns and habits of how we hold ourselves. This is accomplished primarily through pandiculation, a method of slowly contracting and relaxing the tight and unresponsive muscles in order to gain better control over them, thereby increasing their strength and flexibility, or their ability to contract and relax. This overcomes what Hanna calls sensory-motor amnesia, or a loss of control and feeling of our musculature. This loss of control can develop over time by poor postural patterns or acutely through injury. In either case our brain rewires the neural connections to the area through reflex patterns that need to be unlearned in order to restore healty functioning. This is only possible if we go slowly and develop an inner awareness of these patterns. Only then can we release them. This work is highly effective and smart. It seems miraculous, since the mechanism is an interior one. I love the implications -- we are basically computers with a self-correcting diagnostic and repair system. Somatics just teaches you how to activate and utilize it for maximum benefit. We do have control of our own bodies and nervous system. We just have to be clever and inwardly-aware and have the right techniques to unlock it. Truly groundbreaking and paradigm shifting work!