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Devan Southerland knows she wants to purchase a home in Baltimore City. She is cautious, though, after hearing about how predatory lenders disproportionately targeted minority homebuyers a decade ago. "I just want to be smart about it," Southerland says. "Because I know a lot of black people suffered during the whole housing crisis and whole subprime lending issue that happened a few years ago." In the historic Baltimore neighborhood of Bolton Hill, Southerland and her 10-year-old son, Liam,...

When Kentucky state Treasurer Allison Ball and a colleague talked with high school seniors last year about credit cards and other pieces of the personal finance puzzle, something wasn’t right. “We kept using the word ‘interest’ and we kept getting blank stares,” Ball recalled. Finally, she asked the students who knew what interest is. No one did. “Here they were, about to be adults, two weeks before graduation — and they had no idea about interest on credit card payments,” said Ball, a...

Young children are far more vulnerable to climate-related disasters and the onus is on adults to provide the protection and care that children need. In a paper published in PLoS Medicine, researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Irving Medical Center set out some specific challenges associated with the impacts of climate change on the world's 2.3 billion children and suggest ways to address their under-prioritized needs. "Children and...

Excess traffic, unmitigated pollution, a lack of green space: These problems aren’t unique to Barcelona. But the city’s answer is. Superblocks—40-acre, tic-tac-toe sections of the street grid that the city has transformed into pedestrian-first environments—have shot the Catalonian capital to the cutting edge of urban design since Mayor Ada Colau took office in 2015. Drawing inspiration from the city’s historic plan, Colau centered her transportation policy platform around wide-scale...

When the American Medical Association — one of the nation’s most powerful health care groups — met in Chicago this June, its medical student caucus seized an opportunity for change. Though they had tried for years to advance a resolution calling on the organization to drop its decades-long opposition to single-payer health care, this was the first time it got a full hearing. The debate grew heated — older physicians warned their pay would decrease, calling younger advocates naïve to...

On HBO’s “ Sharp Objects ,” Amy Adams plays a reporter named Camille, who returns to her hometown, Wind Gap, Mo., to investigate a series of child murders. Camille, a journalist in search of her big break, is also an alcoholic who drives around drinking vodka from Evian bottles, a former hometown It Girl and a cutter . At the end of the first episode, as she sinks into a hot bath, her skin is revealed to be a thicket of scar tissue. The show’s subplot of self-harm casts light upon an often...

Young children and their families in poor communities were able to make some achievable and sustainable behavioral changes during the longest and largest obesity prevention intervention, but, in the end, the results were insufficient to prevent early childhood obesity. The results of the Growing Right Onto Wellness (GROW) trial, released in JAMA, showed a short-term reduction in obesity that diminished over the three-year study period even in the face of improved, sustained nutrition and use...

It is likely most readers know someone or they are the someone who has personally experienced alcohol's harm to others | secondhand drinking. The tragedy is we hardly talk about it in ways that can change the lives of those affected -- especially the lives of children. In other words, we hardly talk about it in ways that can prevent, intervene, or treat adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Alcohol’s Harm to Others | Secondhand Drinking and the ACEs Connection One of the 10 ACEs measured in...

Oakland BSC activity: Photo/ Courtesy of Trauma Transformed/East Bay Agency for Children When a group of community organizations in Baltimore came together in 2015, they already knew trauma figured large in many lives. There was violence in the community, in schools, and in community members’ homes. Police brutality occurred. Many suffered the loss of loved ones to incarceration or death. There were house fires and homelessness. Much of the dysfunction was systemic and rooted in racism,...

ACEs, Adversity's Impact ‘First do no harm’. We create too many ACES by moving vulnerable children around like boxes Parents’ adverse childhood experiences and their children’s behavioral health problems Deportation and family separation impact entire communities, researchers say Unspoken: America's Native American Boarding Schools (1 hour - pbs.org) Heitkamp: Bipartisan bill to combat human trafficking in Indian Country (newsmavin.io/indiancountrytoday) Patients' traumatic lives prompt...

However, to aid you on your self-care journey, here are ten kick-start ideas:

Lisa Iezzoni was in medical school at Harvard in the early 1980s when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She started experiencing some of the symptoms, including fatigue, but she wasn't letting that get in the way of her goal. Then came the moment she scrubbed in on a surgery and the surgeon told her what he thought of her chances in the field. "He opined that I had no right to go into medicine because I lacked the most important quality in medicine," Iezzoni recalls "And that was...