Wanterfall eBooks – eBooks on Cancer Pain Treatment and Oral Rehydration

Welcome to our lasts guest blog where Dr Gordon Coates tell us about his eBooks website.  Of particular interesting is his informational section on such areas as treating cancer pain and oral rehydration.  It would be great if you could use the comments section to review any of the books or make any suggestions about the web site and content

Wanterfall eBooks – a website which provides free ebooks and articles about health, happiness, self-help and personal growth by Dr Gordon Coates

Wanterfall eBooks (named after my first book – and  not, as Google may suggest, a misprint for “waterfall”) is a non-profit site where I publish free articles and ebooks about health, happiness, emotions, communication, self-help, travel health and personal growth.

I began my current career (or perhaps retirement hobby) as a writer rather late, having previously spent nearly forty years practising general, hospice and geriatric medicine. Throughout those decades, while the human body was my workplace, the human mind was my personal passion. Most of all, I wanted to understand the origins and effects of human emotions, and the ways in which we human beings try, and often fail, to communicate and coexist.

My first book, “Wanterfall”, drew on both eastern philosophy and western psychology, as well as my many years of experience working with dying patients and their loved ones, to build a simple and practical model for the understanding of the many powerful emotions that all human beings feel from time to time. It then went on to show how this model could be used to work through grief and bereavement, or alternatively to explore one’s own mind more deeply, and thus encourage personal growth.

Because emotions have such a strong effect on the human mind, often stealing the limelight when least expected, “Wanterfall” should also be of interest to readers with a philosophical bent, and perhaps especially to students of meditation. However, it was written primarily to help the many people who experience anxiety, grief or other types of unhappiness, regardless of their causes, who would like to understand themselves better and live happier and more fulfilled lives.

In my second book, “Notes on Communication”, I discussed the basic principles governing the exchange of information (and, to an inevitably incomplete extent, meaning) and included suggestions for improving communication skills. This book sets out to show how both verbal communication (speech and text) and non-verbal communication (“body language”) can improve many aspects of life, if used skilfully – but can also make matters worse, if used unskilfully. While not abandoning the traditional “sender-message-receiver” model of communication entirely, it constantly emphasises the impossibility of exact transfer of meaning.

There are also many articles and booklets about practical matters on the site. For example, “How Cancer Pain is Treated” explains, in non-technical language, the many ways in which cancer pain can, almost invariably, be relieved. Its 85 pages, written specifically for patients and their loved ones, contain the essence of all that I have learned about this subject during my long medical career (many years of which were spent as a palliative care consultant working in teaching hospitals and hospices).

Another booklet with a practical theme is “Oral Rehydration”, which explains how any person, with no prior medical training, can save lives threatened by fluid loss. Whether it is due to food poisoning or gastroenteritis at home, traveller’s diarrhoea while on holiday, epidemic cholera after a natural disaster, or any of many other causes, dehydration can kill. Especially in the case of infants, children and frail or elderly adults, it can sometimes worsen very rapidly, progressing to death within a matter of hours. This article explains how to preserve life by oral rehydration, using readily available ingredients and utensils, until medical treatment is available.

A variety of other topics are also covered on the site, and new articles and ebooks are added from time to time. Everything published by Wanterfall eBooks is free to copy, remix or redistribute, in any format and in any quantity, for any non-commercial purpose.

For those who prefer multi-page PDF files (with bookmarks for all headings) the downloads page is at http://www.wanterfall.com/downloads.htm.

For those who prefer to read web pages, the full menu is at http://www.wanterfall.com/sitemap.htm.

Comments and suggestions are always welcome, and may be sent by email to editor@wanterfall.com.