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So for nursing home residents with advanced dementia, sons and daughters often opt to return the favor - even though the medical consensus is that it's not a favor. Most dementia patients will eventually develop problems with eating and swallowing as the disease progresses, but feeding them through surgically implanted tubes has not been shown to improve their survival, to prevent pneumonia or heal bedsores, or to improve their quality of life. Nevertheless, about a third of nursing home residents with advanced dementia do receive feeding tubes, usually during a hospitalization.

Most prestitious hospitals receive billions to train residents, few of whom go into primary care, where society needs them most.

DALI, China - 'A typical morning for Lin Liya, a native of Shanghai transplanted to this ancient town in southwest China, goes like this: See her 3-year-old son off to school near the mountains; go for a half-hour run on the shores of Erhai Lake; and browse the local market for fresh vegetables and meat. 'She finished her run one morning beneath cloudless blue skies and sat down with a visitor from Beijing in the lakeside boutique hotel started by her and her husband. '"I think luxury is sunshine, good air and good water," she said. "But in the big city, you can't get those things." 'More than two years ago, Ms. Lin, 34, and her husband gave up comfortable careers in the booming southern city of Guangzhou - she at a Norwegian risk management company, he at an advertising firm that he had founded - to join the growing number of urbanites who have decamped to rural China. One resident here calls them "environmental refugees" or "environmental immigrants."'

DALI, China - 'A typical morning for Lin Liya, a native of Shanghai transplanted to this ancient town in southwest China, goes like this: See her 3-year-old son off to school near the mountains; go for a half-hour run on the shores of Erhai Lake; and browse the local market for fresh vegetables and meat. 'She finished her run one morning beneath cloudless blue skies and sat down with a visitor from Beijing in the lakeside boutique hotel started by her and her husband. '"I think luxury is sunshine, good air and good water," she said. "But in the big city, you can't get those things." 'More than two years ago, Ms. Lin, 34, and her husband gave up comfortable careers in the booming southern city of Guangzhou - she at a Norwegian risk management company, he at an advertising firm that he had founded - to join the growing number of urbanites who have decamped to rural China. One resident here calls them "environmental refugees" or "environmental immigrants."'

America incarcerates five times as many people per capita as Canada and 7 times as many as most European democracies. In the early 70s, there were about 200,000 people locked up in the U.S. In 2004 the prison population of 1.8 million represented a growth of over 800% in the past 30 years. Nearly 7 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole -- 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults.

by Paul Moses - Newsday - 6/29/2001 DR. FREDERICK SMITH has the usual textbooks on ambulatory care, surgery and prescription drugs in his office. But the shelves also hold D.T.Suzuki's "Essays in Zen Buddhism," a volume of Cardinal John Henry Newman's writings, books on Confucianism and Judaism, the Quran and alarge-type, 69-year-old Bible a patient gave him, so worn that its cover has fallen off. These, too, are tools of Smith's trade. As associate chief of internal medicine at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, the gray-bearded, 56-year-old physician has found that religious faith can help his patients,and he's trying to teach that to a generation of up-and-coming doctors. His 2-year-old course, Religion and Medicine, is part of a growing move to sensitize doctors to the role faith plays in their patients' lives. It gives residents at North Shore who've completed medical school but are still receiving some training a chance to learn about their patients' religious traditions....