Hey! Thanks for stopping by my blog! This is my little slice of the internet where I talk about books that I love. I love to read paranormal, dystopian, fantasy and contemporary! I live in Long Beach, CA and Mickey Mouse is my boss! I love coffee, funky coffee mugs and the history channel! I hope you enjoy what you read and don't forget to come back!
Share book reviews and ratings with Crystal (Elegantly Bound Books), and even join a book club on Goodreads.
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Well I guess I should start from the beginning. Last year I was seriously considering making a new blog. I just had that itch that I wanted something new. At first I thought that maybe a new blog design would be nice but I felt like it had to be something more. For a few years I had this blog title Books Unbound floating around in my mind that I really wanted to do something with. But did I really want to go through all the trouble of making a new blog, building up a new base of followers and literally start from scratch with blog posts?
YES! I did!! For the past 6 months or so I have been in the process of setting up my new blog with all it's own accounts and to finally have everything separate from my personal social media is such a relief. Now I can finally narrow down all my email accounts and everything else to just one for personal use and one for blogging! But the thing that's even better is that I wouldn't be starting from scratch! I was able to export all my posts from Elegantly Bound Books to Book Unbound and in just a few weeks Elegantly Bound Books will automatically re-direct to Books Unbound! I get to keep all my content on my beautiful new blog!
So for the next 2 weeks everything that I post on Books Unbound will also be posted here on Elegantly Bound books with a reminder that Elegantly Bound Books will not be around for much longer! So if you're an avid reader and follower of Elegantly Bound Books please please please make the move with me to Books Unbound! You can find all my social media icons on my new blog so it's super easy to follow me now! Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter, or Bloglovin; it's your choice!
The topic this week is “Do I write negative reviews?” Don't forget to check out this topic at Nite Lite Reviews, The Reader's Antidote and The Windy Pages.
The simple answer to this question is yes! I don’t think there is anything wrong with a negative review. When an author puts their work out into the world, it’s natural that there are going to be some people who absolutely love it and some people who don’t like it as much and maybe even hate it.
When it comes to writing a negative review, I usually take more care and choose my words more carefully than if I were writing a positive review. I try to be very concise so that my words aren't twisted or taken out of context.
I think negative reviews are really important and I usually want to tell my readers why I didn't like a book. Whether a book had no plot, really annoying characters or a stupid love triangle; these are thing I like to talk about in a negative review even though these likes and dislikes are based purely on opinion.
When it comes to reading reviews, I always read the negative reviews because I really want to know why some readers did not like the book! I always want to weigh the book and the bad before I buy a book. And by writing a negative review I hope that I can help out another reader weigh their pros and cons before purchasing.
The only thing I really have to say about negative reviews is that I'm all for them! I like to write them and I like to read them!
Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine that spotlights upcoming releases that we are eagerly anticipating. This is one of my favorite memes because not only is my TBR pile so much bigger at the end of the night but also the covers are always amazing!
Why I want this: I love Morgan Matson's really fun, summery contemporary reads! I'm currently reading Second Chance Summer right now which is making me even more excited about Since You've Been Gone and the book by her alter ego Katie Finn, Broken Hearts, Fences and Other Things to Mend. I'm so in the mood for summery contemporary reads right now!
This week's topic is the top ten books that we've read that we think are the most unique. The books that I chose are not necessarily unique as in there are no others like them, but I definitely thought they were unique when I first read them. Or they are standouts in their genres.
1. The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan: I don't read very many zombies books but The Forest of Hands and Teeth stood out to be because it's all about how people have survived all these years later. Even though, for me, the series went a little downhill, the first book is pretty great!
2. I Know it's Over by CK Kelly Martin: I Know it's Over is a contemporary novel about teenage pregnancy and abortion told from the guy's perspective. Seeing how a guy feels in a situation like this is what really made this novel stand out for me.
3. Unwind by Neal Shusterman: I have certainly never read a book like this before ever! Talk about a completely new twist on abortion and what makes a person's life worthwhile. The unwinding scene is probably one of the creepiest scenes I've ever read!
4. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: I chose The Hunger Games for this list because I really believe it was unique when it was first released. And even though other books try as they might, there is still nothing like The Hunger Games.
5. Identical by Ellen Hopkins: There are a lot of books out there that are written in free verse but Identical was the first one that I've read so, to me, it stands out as being unique.
6. Skeleton Creek by Patrick Carman: I really love this series and what makes it unique is the mixed media it uses to tell the story. While you're reading the book you'll get to parts where you have to go online to the website it gives you and put in the password that they also give you and watch the video. And you have to watch the videos because they are so important to the story. The story is pretty creepy and scary.
7. The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer: These books are so unique and have so many elements that normally would be really weird but somehow they really work! Cyborgs, moon people and fairy tale characters! It's so awesome!
8. Perfect Ruin by Lauren DeStefano: Perfect Ruin takes place in a community that is in the clouds. In. The. Clouds. It is so good! I'm so excited to see what happens next for these cloud people.
9. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness: To even try to explain this book would make me sound crazy but I've truly never read any book like it.
10. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom: I pretty much cried through every page of this book and even though I read it ten years ago, it still stays with me.
Kimberly Derting has been one of my favorite authors for a very long time. I’m a huge fan of The Body Finder series and even though The Pledge wasn't that great for me, I was super excited when I found out she was releasing a new series! The Taking was literally the first book that I read this year! I was so excited about my ARC that I couldn't wait to dive right in.
The Taking is about a sixteen year old girl named Kyra who, after a softball game, suddenly disappears without a trace. She wakes up behind the dumpster of her local gas station 5 years later but it feels like the next morning to her. She’s still wearing her softball uniform and hasn't aged a day. Soon, a mysterious stranger starts showing up everywhere she goes and Kyra soon discovers that there is a lot more behind her disappearance than she originally thought.
Even though Kyra is a good main character I didn't feel all that emotionally attached to her. Everything that happens, her disappearance and reappearance, all happens so fast in the very beginning that you don’t really get a chance to become attached to the life that she had before. Most of the story is her struggle with accepting that everyone has moved on without her. We, the readers, don’t get the chance to know the Kyra before, we only know the person that Kyra becomes after she resurfaces.
I really enjoyed the relationship between Kyra and Tyler who incidentally is her “before” boyfriend’s younger brother. Since five years has now passed, Tyler is one year older than Kyra. They become really close throughout the book, both trying to figure out what happened to her. Tyler is really super cute! He always admired his older brother's girlfriend and now here she is, she hasn't aged a day and he has the chance to actually get to know her! I really like that he kind of always held a candle for her!
The plotting and the pacing of the book were a little bit slow at times, especially in the middle but it really kicks up towards the end, making me hopeful that book two will be an action-packed adventure. There was also a bit of a cliffhanger at the end which made me really excited! I don’t generally like cliffhangers but this one made me really anticipate the rest of the series! Oh, and since I wasn't super obvious about it, it’s about aliens which we definitely don’t have enough of in YA right now.
The Taking was a really great book to start the year off with and now in just a couple of weeks everyone can enjoy it as well! Not only was it a great start to a really exciting new series, it can really appeal to those readers who are new to sci-fi!
Why I want this: I loved Gilt and Tarnish! I also love that you don't have to have read the books before to know what is going on in the current book! So great! Lovers of historical fiction should pick these up immediately!
Hey there! Welcome to this week's Stacking the Shelves! This awesome meme is hosted by Tynga's Reviews and we get to show each other the books we acquired this week whether bought, from the library or for review!
Thanks for stopping by my blog and checking out the books that have somehow come into my possession this month!
Ous Sala-Meal jars are made to provide adequate energy and health benefits that can substitute for a regular meal, they are presented in an eye-catching, colorful and elegant layers that will change the prevalent idea that healthy food is boring.
Each sala-meal is carefully designed to assure that it contains a unique macro-nutritional distribution that can match the dietary objectives of a wide range of people.
Look for the description of the sala-meal for more details about the healthy benefits and the macro nutritional information
The Green Lantern Corps Message Board - View Single Post - Could Kyle Hook Up With Carol?!? He does.
I hate shots. Every year when flu season rolls around, I think, “what’s in it for me?” The answer is, “it isn’t for me. It’s for the herd.” I am young and healthy enough that I am unlikely to die of the flu but I have children, older people and vulnerable patients I care about it, so I get a flu shot every year.
This is true population health. I get a flu shot for the benefit of others. Population health has been extended to a much larger set of activities that have no communal benefit. One patient with diabetes doesn’t benefit from another getting a foot exam. (Mammograms, colonoscopies, no communal benefit. STD screening, on the other hand, fits in the category of true population health.)
People are much more likely to follow recommendations from people they trust. Points 1 & 2 above undermine trust.
Lively discussion with my fellow panelists at upcoming HIMSS17 panel on consumer engagement highlighted my own misgivings about the absence of the patient’s individuality and voice in population health efforts. We all want better health in the population, but are we going about it in the right way?
Population health puts people into categories by conditions (diabetes, hypertension, depression), age, lab results and medical billing data. These categories presume their own importance. When in fact, psychosocial, behavioral and environmental factors determine individual health far more. Patient goals, preferences and barriers to care tell us what stands between that patient and better health. Without this data, population health efforts are undermined.
Here’s an example from my own practice as a psychologist. I learned that “depression” wasn’t a useful category except when I needed to bill with a diagnostic code to get paid. A person in mourning, a postpartum mom with catastrophic feelings, a socially isolated geriatric patient, a mid-career professional struggling with unmet ambitions, a sad teenager having a first psychotic episode or a disabled veteran unable to sustain relationships have almost nothing in common but all could be labeled as “depressed.” Standard recommendations for depression, especially medication, are useless in treatment planning as the root cause of ‘depression’ is rarely something medicine can treat. Depression, the symptom, risked distracting me from the root cause. Diabetes, hypertension and depression can all be looked at as symptoms that do not necessarily share root causes. Population health groups people by these conditions and risks prioritizing those groupings over other (more important) diagnostic and therapeutic models.
Population health efforts are actually making us dumb, blind and deaf to the patient’s true health needs.
In a 15-minute visit, it’s a zero sum game. When the provider is pummeled with gaps in care alerts and practice guidelines, the more the provider attends to the EHR, the less they attend to, look at, listen to and learn from the patient. When the population health need gets attention, is it at the expense of the individual’s need? Care plans driven by population health diagnostic categories are more formulaic, symptom-focused and may ignore root causes. As such, they are less likely to be successful. Then, when patients fail in flawed care plans, we indulge in blaming and name-calling: “non-compliant” or “non-adherent.”
‘Non-compliance’ is an appropriate act of patient resistance to an inappropriate care plan. Resistance is an act of self-affirmation, a rejection of a care plan that doesn’t match true health needs. Vive La Resistance! We don’t need compliance, we need collaboration.
When 50% of patients don’t adhere to medications or guidelines for screening tests, the “standard recommendations” are failing, not the patients. Resistance is the consumer voice telling us medications cost too much or that they secretly wonder if the medication is working. Resistance communicates the individual’s fear of quit smoking because they will gain weight. Resistance is a form of communication that needs to be welcome. Standard recommendations need to adjust. Then, our patients are co-conspirators, plotting their journey to health, working against all the forces that will undermine them. We need to stop blaming patients for non-compliance and stop pressuring providers to be enforcers.
What if we turn the standard approach inside out and start by asking patients: “what are your health goals?” “What is your biggest health concern?”
If we allow people to build Pathways to Health, to choose their own adventure, at their own pace, we can prioritize steps to health at an achievable pace. (By the way, mammograms, flu shots, colonoscopies, foot exams, and eye exams, medications can all be offered as steps on a Pathway to Health. Population health services like pharmacists, nutritionists, social workers and care managers can all be offered in response to patient needs.)
Technology can support this beautifully and take an enormous workload off providers. Through our work at Vital Score, we have directly observed hundreds of primary care visits. We use Motivational Indexing to capture and categorize people’s goals, needs and barriers to health and we responsively offer patient-driven Pathways to Health. Our results show that when people self-identify needs and self-refer to services, their participation rate increases up to 20x. People own their choices because their choices are personally driven for their own benefit. It’s not only better for workflow, it’s better for outcomes.
I have come to the conclusion that population health will not succeed until it is driven from the ground up from patient needs. The top down approach is a Herculean effort without yet enough reward.
The fact of the matter is that we all, as taxpayers, do benefit from that diabetic patient getting her annual foot exam. Let’s say our patient is over 65. When that sore progresses into a festering osteomyelitis and eventually leads to a below the knee amputation, guess who’s getting the bill? That’s right – we all are. Public health encompasses far more than communicable disease – it’s about utilizing our resources at every level in order to maximize the health benefit to our population as a whole.
Standardization of recommendations to care providers is intended to create a uniform set of metrics to determine how we are doing and whether our interventions are resulting in improvement. While it’s true they are generally process measures and not outcome measures, I believe most to be evidence-based and well chosen. Like a runner without a watch, without the ability to measure, we cannot gauge improvement. Standardization is key to taking waste out of our system.
Putting the issue of improvement aside, moving away from standardized care recommendations toward customized recommendations would cause a tremendous drop in efficiency in healthcare. It’s only in the (appropriate) standardization of care processes that we can make efficiency gains. It’s the same reason a suit made just for you by Enzo the tailor costs a lot more than one you get from Men’s Wearhouse. No healthcare provider wants to feel like a factory worker. But efficiency matters, particularly in Medicaid and Medicare patients because this care is being paid for by taxpayers. Most taxpayers, myself included, want to make sure tax revenue is spent wisely. We are being asked to care for more and sicker patients every day, with many systems at the breaking point. We need to design our healthcare system for the world we have, not the one we want.
You can’t deny that we already know that people of different ethnic backgrounds respond differently to different antihypertensives. So standardization could hurt some minorities. You would probably also agree that reaching a target blood pressure in a frail elderly diabetic woman who then falls and breaks her hip is not as good as it might look on your NCQA diabetes scorecard. And speaking of NCQA, I temporarily lost my cert. when I started following the 2013 lipid guidelines. They took a year and a half to change their metrics. So much for evidence based care. And efficiency in healthcare can’t be a top priority when practices’ cost burdens keep piling up and the middlemen are raking in profits on the backs of exhausted and distracted providers.
They would have been better off developing a targeted drug for South Koreans (certain cancers) or Indians (diabetes, related) …
Thanks for post; a population’s “health” has nothing to do with medical care. Health is personal responsibility. Second, a population’s “medical care” is best when individual’s choose based on knowledge of the best scientific comparisons of outcomes, and, then, their preferences for those outcomes, and then each best individual choice is summed to a population. Averaging out is not only bad medicine, it is a useless prophecy. Last, public health has nothing to do with medical care; when the outcomes of my choice affect yours, that is public health and not my choice. I hope we begin to realize that the entire process and philosophy of medicine has been on a down hill course; only individuals matter; only a cottage industry matters, and the money makers planning against that reality can go jump in the lake. Hope you get a chance to read my book; http://www.uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=3788
Spot on. I think PHM can be added to good patient care, but it has essentially replaced patient care with obsession over metrics and documentation. Right now, data mining is prioritized over everything, including listening to a patients acute concerns.
In Sweden, where I trained and first worked, childhood immunizations, developmental screenings and basic anticipatory guidance were handled at free nurse-run clinics with a physician available for on-the-spot consultations. Each child’s chart was returned to the parents after completion of the visit documentation.
People still had pediatricians or family practitioners they brought their families to for sick visits and the personal physician would review the clinic notes from the Barnavårdscentral (BVC).
This system seemed to me the antithesis of the idea of family practice to me back then, when I wanted to be everything to each one of my patients.
But now, with the top-down, heavy handed American view of for example immunization compliance, which, as you so eloquently point out, benefits the herd more than the individual, I find myself not enjoying being rated on my performance on the metrics that have become substitutes for quality today.
Physicians have cared for individual patients for thousands of years. And yes, we didn’t always have the best understanding of disease processes or the best tools at our disposal. But we are now entering an era of “precision medicine”, “personalized medicine”, “patient centered care” and “accountable care” (and I think that should be accountability to our patients). So now is not the time to burden us or to clutter up our precious fifteen minutes with work that amounts to nothing more than being an instrument for political or public health ambitions that sometimes actually harm some of our individual patients.
Public health is perhaps best done by professionals that are less focused on individual patient relationships and more responsible to the larger community. Doctors sometimes have to be like lawyers, defending the rights of those who go against the norms of society. You can’t always be both those things at the same time with your patients.
“What if we turn the standard approach inside out and start by asking patients: “what are your health goals?” “What is your biggest health concern?”
My dear Ms. Hatch – you are singing my song. Alas, a physician used to be able to do this. However, nowadays if someone comes in for a flu shot and wants to discuss their health goals and I dare to speak with them about something else — well I get audited (happened this week.) The insurance company found nothing (except actual patient care occurring.) But they are of course angry that they could not “find” more money for their CEO by taking it back from me.
Healthcare in the US is no longer about patients or physicians. It is about CEO’s, administrators, and pharmaceutical company profits. Many of us are interested in the patients biggest health concern, but this is falling on deaf ears. Keep spreading your message. It is a good one. I am listening… every good movement has to start somewhere.
[S50555] "United States Census, 1900," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/MSZN-DQ2 : accessed.
[S6742] "United States Census, 1930," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:3ZT5-V3Z : accesse.
[S6658] "Warren County,TN Marriages: 1900-1950", transcribed & compiled by A.C.Hillis, p. 51 (Reliability: 3).