Vax Facts is a one-stop-shop for all the information parents and guardians need to make an informed choice about childhood vaccinations.

The challenge for most who are wrestling with whether to give a vaccine is a lack of understanding about what information they really need to make an informed decision.

Written by a pediatrician who witnessed the difference over decades in the health outcomes of the vaccinated, partially vaccinated, and unvaccinated children in his practice, Vax Facts will enlighten parents and guardians and provide the information needed for informed consent.

Covering each of the vaccines recommended by the CDC and doctors, from pregnancy through the teen years, this detailed guide breaks down the ingredients, the lack of safety testing, and the side effects and risks of the vaccines.

With the help of simple data tables that compare the rates of death from the diseases for which we have vaccines and the rates of death from the vaccines themselves, parents and guardians can easily decide what’s right for their children.

With almost four million births per year in the United States, this useful resource will resonate with all who are pregnant or considering pregnancy, and all parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles who are considering whether vaccination is appropriate for a family member or loved one.

At the end of each chapter, Just a Mom (coauthor DeeDee Hoover) shares personal stories and reflections that allow readers to connect with the information.

This information-packed guide is for all those asking “Should I get my child vaccinated?” who want more than just a yes/no answer. After reading Vax Facts, parents and guardians will be able to decide with confidence whether vaccination is the right choice for their loved one.

A practical guide to understanding and using Mexican healing traditions in everyday life.

Arranging ofrendas. Brewing pericón into a healing tea. Releasing traumas through baños and limpias. Herbalist and curandera Atava Garcia Swiecicki spent decades gathering this traditional knowledge of curanderismo, Mexican folk healing, which had been marginalized as Chicanx and Latinx Americans assimilated to US culture. She teaches how to follow the path of the curandera, as she herself learned from apprenticing with Mexican curanderas, studying herbal texts, and listening to her ancestors. In this book readers will learn the Indigenous, African, and European roots of curanderismo. Atava also shares her personal journey as a healer and those of thirteen other inspirational curanderas serving their communities. She offers readers the tools to begin their own healing—for themselves, for their relationship with the earth, and for the people.

The Curanderx Toolkit includes more than 25 profiles of native and adopted plants of Baja and Alta California and teaches you to grow, know, and love them. This book will help anyone who has lost connection with their ancestors begin to incorporate the herbal wisdom and holistic wellness of curanderismo into their lives. Take the power of ancient medicine into your own hands by learning simple herbal remedies and practicing rituals for kinship with the more-than-human world.

The book is a personal account of unmet needs in assisted living and hospice aiming to spark discussions about new approaches for America’s aging population and family decision makers. There are 30 thousand assisted living facilities in the US, but most are unaffordable for middleclass Americans and fraught with staffing deficiencies and mismanagement. Chapters on the author’s experience helping her mother move from an age-restricted community in Florida to independent living in Wisconsin to assisted living will interest seniors and their family members who know the struggle of finding long term affordable care. The chapter on hospice care distinguishes it from assisted living through the author’s experiences and misconceptions, then moves to a broader discussion of Medicare spending, and finally a meditation on dying of old age. The author strikes an effective balance between the personal, political, and cultural aspects of aging. Karofsky dedicates the last chapter of the book to a discussion of recent failures to protect long term care patients during the COVID19 pandemic.

This insightful study of contemporary birthing uses the work of doulas to explore the questions raised near birth: What do we value, and how do we navigate those values when they are tangled in conflict?
 
Pregnancy, birthing, and infant care offer a microcosm of cultural debates. In this ethnography of childbearing in Northern California, Andrea Ford examines how people's birthing decisions and experiences relate to and construct the American ideal of the individual through the values of progress, experience, autonomy, equality, authenticity, immunity, and redemption.
 
Both an anthropologist and a doula who has observed and participated in dozens of births, Ford explores how parents, practitioners, activists, laws, technologies, media, and medical institutions shape the politics of care. Near Birth shows that questions about the best way to have a baby concern much more than health procedures. In the answers lie often-unacknowledged claims about what kinds of personhood matter and what ways of living are valued and valuable.