Hutchins Library News Blog

Did you know that about 20% of people live with a condition which could be considered an invisible disability. That amounts to approximately 66 million Americans?

Did you know that nearly half of Americans are living with a chronic medical condition, totaling 165 million people? Disabilities, chronic illnesses, chronic pain and injuries can all considered
invisible disabilities and they impact people from minor impairments to completely disabling. Some examples may include, but are not limited to, hearing loss (and the person may be wearing a discreet hearing aid), chronic pain, mental illness, and developmental disabilities such as depression, ADHD, and Schizophrenia. These conditions can hinder a person's ability to function in society, and they often go unknown or unacknowledged by the rest of society.

Thus to raise awareness and educate the Invisible Disabilities Association observes Invisible Disabilities Week in October. This year, the observance falls during the week of Sunday, October 20 to Saturday October 26, 2024. The observance was founded by the association in 2014.

If you want to learn more, here are some resources that may be of interest. Please note that library subscription based resources need the library patron to authenticate with Berea College credentials and DUO if accessing from off campus.

• Gale Virtual Reference is our collection of reference e-books and resources. You can use it to find definitions and basic information on various terms.
• Our library catalog, where you can search for books on specific topics such as disabilities and other health conditions.
• Our article databases where you can find scholarly as well as popular periodical publications. Find our list of databases here. Off the top, I would suggest CINAHL (nursing and allied health), Medline (National Library of Medicine), and PsycInfo (for psychology and mental health), but other options are available.
• On campus, you can also find more information and support through the Office of Disability and Accessibility Services.
• From the web:
  • Wikipedia has an entry on Invisible Disabilities.
  • An article on "The Hidden Challenges of Invisible Disabilities" via the BBC.
  • An article on how "People with invisible disabilities like me are routinely disbelieved" via ABC (Australia).

As always, if you need assistance with reference and research, you can stop by the Reference Desk during library regular hours, use the chat widget on the library website, or set up an appointment with a librarian via the library website. If you want to learn more about research consultations with a librarian, we have a blog post about it here.

Welcome to another edition of "From Our Shelves" where I highlight and briefly review a book from our collection that I have read. Today I present The People's Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine. The hospital is Ben Taub Hospital, in Houston, Texas, and the author is one of their doctors. Ben Taub is the local trauma center. It is also the hospital of last resort, the indigent's hospital. If you are too poor and/or uninsured, and you have nowhere else to go, Ben Taub will take you in. The author provides stories of patients and a look at how the hospital works. We also get some history of hospitals in the United States and health care policy in the United States. The author provides some good information and demystifies a lot of the American health care industry. It is not an easy book to read, but it is well worth reading.

See details below including publisher information and location in the library.

The People's Hospital by Ricardo Nuila

Call Number: Stacks 362.11 N968p 2023

ISBN: 9781501198045

Publication Date: 2023-03-14

This "compelling mixture of health care policy and gripping stories from the frontlines of medicine" (The Guardian) explores the question: where does an uninsured person go when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors? Here, we follow the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital that prioritizes people over profit. First, we meet Stephen, the restaurant franchise manager who signed up for his company's lowest priced plan, only to find himself facing insurmountable costs after a cancer diagnosis. Then Christian--a young college student and retail worker who can't seem to get an accurate diagnosis, let alone treatment, for his debilitating knee pain. Geronimo, thirty-six years old, has liver failure, but his meager disability check disqualifies him for Medicaid--and puts a life-saving transplant just out of reach. Roxana, who's lived in the community without a visa for more than two decades, suffers from complications related to her cancer treatment. And finally, there's Ebonie, a young mother whose high-risk pregnancy endangers her life. Whether due to immigration status, income, or the vagaries of state Medicaid law, all five are denied access to care. For all five, this exclusion could prove life-threatening. Each patient eventually lands at Ben Taub, the county hospital where Dr. Nuila has worked for over a decade. Nuila delves with empathy into the experiences of his patients, braiding their dramas into a singular narrative that contradicts the established idea that the only way to receive good health care is with good insurance. As readers follow the moving twists and turns in each patient's story, it's impossible to deny that our system is broken--and that Ben Taub's innovative model, where patient care is more important than insurance payments, could help light the path forward.

Welcome to another edition of "From Our Shelves," where I do a short book review of a book I read that our library owns.

Kathleen McLauhglin's book, Blood Money: the Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry, is a serious look at the blood trade industry in the United States, mainly focused on the blood plasma trade.

Did you know that the United States is one of a few countries in the world that allows payment for plasma donations?

Well, most Americans are happily clueless about the plasma donation industry in the United States, unless they are one of the millions who donate plasma regularly in order to make ends meet. As this book shows, the reason for donating is pretty much economics. Contrary to what the plasma companies may have you believe, that there is some altruistic reason for donating plasma, the reality in the United States is that people donate plasma in order to get money they need for things like groceries, car fuel, and rent.

An interesting angle of the book is that the author suffers from a rare medical condition that requires plasma as part of her treatment, So she is not only writing as a journalist and researcher; she has a stake in the subject matter.

If you are interested in health and medical topics, socioeconomics in the United States, and other business topics, this may be a good book for you.

Book details from the library catalog:

Blood Money by Kathleen McLaughlin

Call Number: Stacks 362.178 M161b 2023

ISBN: 9781982171964

Publication Date: 2023-02-28

A "haunting" (Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can't Even) and deeply personal investigation of an underground for-profit medical industry and the American underclass it drains for blood and profit. Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she'd found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America's most vulnerable. So begins McLaughlin's ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing an industry that targets America's most economically vulnerable for immense profit. Assigned to work in China, McLaughlin hesitated to utilize that country's scandal-plagued plasma supply--outbreaks throughout the 1990s and early 2000s struck thousands with blood-borne diseases as impoverished areas of the country were milked for blood with reckless abandon. Instead, McLaughlin becomes her own runner, hiding American plasma in her luggage during trips from the United States to China. She finishes the job, but never could get the plasma story out of her head. Suspicions become certainties when a source from the past, a visiting Chinese researcher, warns McLaughlin of troubling echoes between America's domestic plasma supply chain and the one she'd seen spin out into chaos in China. Blood Money shares McLaughlin's decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human blood plasma and learns that twenty million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit--a human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for retail across the globe. She investigates the thin evidence pharmaceutical companies have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. And she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America's southern border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their plasma for substandard pay. McLaughlin's findings push her to ask difficult questions about her own complicity in this wheel of exploitation, as both a patient in need and a customer who stands to benefit from the suffering of others. Blood Money weaves together McLaughlin's personal battle to overcome illness as a working American with an electrifying exposé of capitalism run amok in a searing portrait that shows what happens when big business is allowed to feed unchecked on those least empowered to fight back.