16 - Being and Thinking

Summary

This book is about survival strategies for challenges related to our health and well-being. This chapter is specifically about surviving challenges to our brain health – disorders that render young children overactive and unable to learn or attend well to their tasks, disorders of aging that affect memory and personality, and disorders of cognition and consciousness that arise when a person suffers an injury to the head. The contributing authors of this chapter each tackle one of these topics. Professor Ilina Singh of the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society describes how proper diagnosis and treatment of childhood attention difficulties can provide relief from the associated upheaval that occurs in the home or at school. Professor Claudia Jacova of the University of British Columbia describes dementia as a journey that implicates the full range of a person's network and, ideally, involves a caring team of family members, friends, and health professionals. Professor Paul Ford of the Cleveland Clinic describes the significant uncertainties that can accompany patients in intensive care units specializing in brain injury and disease.

This chapter is a multinational effort involving scholars and clinicians from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The geographic borders are irrelevant, however, as each section contributes to a common theme that we address in our own voices: the life-changing nature of unexpected abnormalities of brain function.