Fond memories of hands. Strong, firm hands, some with motor grease around the nails.

Motor grease from doing ALL of our own car repairs, in addition to his paycheck job . . .

Sun-browned hands, black hair at thick wrists, clutching motorcycle grips, pulling the front break, twisting the throttle...

Mom's hands alternately pounding and then smoothing bread dough, for 6 loaves, 2 times a week. Or caked with mixing flour and eggs for noodles that would dry in sheets on wooden clothes-drying racks on the back porch . . .

My dad's hand with a crushed thumb-nail, purple black, swollen; without a word, he quickly & expertly used a drill to make a hole to relieve the pressure, then wrapped the palm & thumb in strips of torn dish-towel and took us fishing . . .

Powerful hands full of life and doing,

Not the empty hands of a hollow idle man who mouths that others do, in commands from the sound of silence.

Research progress toward patient-centered guidelines for use in dealing with health care insurance.

It took my first husband over a month, out of the very few he had left, to get the MRI he needed for his doctor to figure out why his back hurt.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/interview-health-reforms-comparative-effectiveness-chief/2012/01/26/gIQAUiPdTQ_blog.html

New, Patient-Centered, Treatment-Effectiveness research underway: An interview with Joe Selby, executive director of the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

"Our mission is to provide useful information that is helpful to patients and their caregivers and clinicians in making medical care decisions. The key things we focus on are questions that patients and clinicians think are important. We want to involve them in the process of doing research and then disseminate information from that research. The novel part of what we were doing is taking substantial guidance from patients. "