Just Like Home

Mouthpiece ventilation: just a home-care support?

Noninvasive ventilation (NIV) is recognized nowadays as the first choice of treatment for COPD exacerbation. Compared with standard medical treatment, it can significantly reduce the intubation rate, hospital stay, nosocomial infection, and, above all, mortality rate.1,2 Physiological studies have shown that the mechanism of action of NIV in this population is the ability to sustain alveolar ve...

‘The Hospital was just like a Home’: Self, Service and the ‘McCord Hospital Family’

For more than a century, McCord Hospital, a partly private and partly state-subsidised mission hospital has provided affordable health-care services, as well as work and professional training opportunities for thousands of people in Durban, a city on the east coast of South Africa. This article focuses on one important aspect of the hospital's longevity and particular character, or 'organisatio...

Are dogs just like us?

Dogs have evolved to become the animal species most integrated with human society. Surprisingly, the origins and mechanisms of the remarkable co-evolution are still obscure and provide fuel for debates. Brain imaging studies showing up similarities and recent results implicating the hormone oxytocin also suggest that it makes sense to compare the social mind of dogs to our own. Michael Gross re...

No place like HOME.

Representing others' actions: just like one's own?

Previous research has shown that observing others' actions can affect individual performance of the same actions. In the present study, we developed a new paradigm to investigate whether and how complementary actions at the disposal of another agent are represented and influence one's own actions. A spatial compatibility task was distributed among two people so that each participant took care o...