Concerns with Special Populations

There are special considerations related to inequities in the patterns of medication prescribing among certain client populations. These are important considerations as social workers need to ensure that factors such as ethnicity, gender, or age not determine the accessibility to medications or the overprescribing of drugs. 

if a physician specializes in the treatment of a specific mental disorder is it more likely that individuals will be diagnosed and treated for that specific illness Every now and then, the media reminds us of stories in which diagnosing based on a hospital or doctor s specialty and not the client s needs occurred. 

In the case of children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, parents find that a referral to a neurologist is quickly followed by 

It is essential to preserve the ethical values of respect and dignity for all clients and to incorporate the client s cultural context into the helping process. This may sometimes be complicated when clients are struggling with acculturation issues or they may not be in tune with how their cultural backgrounds influence their behaviors, symptoms, or approach to treatment. The importance of integrating the client s cultural beliefs and practices can be illustrated by an incident experienced by one of the authors on a recent trip to Poland. The author s aunt, who was suffering 

It is also important to realize that many times clients may distrust a practitioner who looks or acts differently from them. Therefore, it is important to discuss cultural differences and be sure the social worker is aware of her/his own cultural beliefs and mores and how this may conflict with that of the client s. Unfortunately, in a hurried health care environment and in a society that does not always appreciate differences, this may be overlooked. The social worker can be a vital link in ensuring that culturally based ethnic practices are used and that clients maintain their right to integrate cultural practices as they seek to establish self-determination in regard to health and mental health treatments. 

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Chapter 4 is concerned with population dynamics in the more traditional sense, including birth, death and migration processes. However, the approach includes migration between distant places as well as nonlinear effects. Hence it goes further than most treatments of this dynamics and also seems to be suitable for modelhng migration processes in the human context. Further special cases of the theory are Volterra-Lotka processes combined with migration. Chapter 5 treats non-equilibrium investment fluctuations of the Schumpeter type. The... 

Trapping insects with pheromone-baited devices is now commonplace for many pest species. From a management viewpoint trap-captures can be very useful, simply by showing where populations exist and when they are active. More refined trapping systems may also be used to assess population densities and help predict where and when resource damage might occur. Special baits or traps may be necessary in the latter case, since the concern is with relative numbers caught and not just presence or absence of a species. 

At this moment I only wanted to lay a further point before the meeting, that arises out of these two interesting papers, and that is that it is not merely that the so-called South politically, the tropical countries, have a lower living standard and are at a lower level of development, and have perhaps a more difficult physical environment than the middle latitude countries. It is that special stresses are now arising out of two circumstances, both of which were referred to by both speakers. The first is the population explosion, which is a matter for the scientist to concern himself with and the other is that I must say that in the last two decades the tropical climate, rather climates in the plural, have behaved extraordinarily badly. The timing could not have been worse. 

Food fortification and designer foods specially formulated to prevent chronic diseases are enthusiastically advocated by the vitamin industry and its proponents (16). Unrestrained vitamin fortification added to unrestrained supplementation with these substances has now in some countries led to the potential for rather high cumulative amounts of intake in some populations. There is growing concern about the safety of chronically high doses of some of these, where the therapeutic margin between deficiency and toxicity may not be all that wide (15,17-19). 

Consumer pressure (other than environmental issues) are highlighting needs for higher quality, convenience in use, restriction in so-called overpackaging, the need for special packs (which are easy to open and reclose) for an increasing elderly population, etc. The last of these may conflict with child-resistance, tamper-resistance, tamperevidence, etc. and provide even greater conflict if coupled with environmental concerns. What is the future ... 

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