Books by Rick

A clinical psychiatrist explores the effects of DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known.

Keri, the blacksmith's son, hoped for a little more time between his first kiss and his last, but war and the weather wouldn't wait. One of thirty drafted, he and his friends find their stumbling romances are interrupted by a desperate forty-day trek through a snow-buried wilderness to the king. Disasters both natural and man-made defy their passage. Then the wolfpack shows up: unnaturally large, unnaturally led, unnaturally anxious to stop them. Blood in the snow forces an unsteady Keri into physical and spiritual leadership roles he must master immediately... or die.Placed in Viking Russia, The Ballad of the Blacksmith's Son is a YA adventure following village youth through a new imposed faith, a new future, and the challenges of new bodies with new desires. Haunted by a mute orphan and a one-eyed madman, Keri tries to juggle Christian ideals, secular wisdom, and patriotic duty both at home and into a battle with nature. Author Rick Taylor draws on his military and teaching careers to bring his characters to life. ("I stole their dialogue!") He uses his spiritual and literary background to surround them with layers of meaning.

Joseph Levy leads a quiet life in rural Wheaton Arizona. Retired from a long career in psychiatric research and practice, he reads, writes, and walks in the mountains and hills near the Native reservation. His quiet life ends, however, when a dental crown replacement causes trouble just before meeting an internet date in California. Thus begins a year of back-to-back nightmare infections, a drug overdose, and two failed relationships. At every step, Levy is confronted by matters of life and death, love and hate, faith and doubt, trust and betrayal. Most of all, he faces what it means to be sick and to be healthy. He prays to his God, relies on his friends, examines his dreams, and entrusts his psyche to a new therapist.Joseph Levy Escapes Death is a tale of perseverance in the face of adversity. Strassman uses several lenses to view Levy's life: medical, psychoanalytic, and religious-both Buddhist and Jewish. Pathos and humor fill the tale, while enlightening detours examine the Holocaust, cardiovascular physiology and microbiology, and Jewish-Christian relations.

With collaboration of Dr. Steve Krau, Consulting Editor, Drs. Leming-Lee and Watters have created an issue that provides state-of-the-art content on quality improvement. Top authors have contributed clinical reviews on the following topics: Quality improvement: Application of evidence-based practice; The application of the Virginia Mason production system to improve large scale quality outcomes in an acute care hospital; The application of the Toyota production system Lean 5S methodology in the operating room setting; Chart it to stop it: A quality improvement project to increase the reporting of workplace aggression; Reducing pressure injuries in the pediatric intensive care unit; Improving stress-induced hyperglycemic management in the ICU setting; Evaluation of telemetry utilization on medical-surgical floors; Implementation of a nurse-driven CAUTI prevention protocol; A quality improvement project to test the effectiveness of a patient-centered pathway and discharge tool on heart failure patient engagement; Diabetes self-management education provision by an interprofessional collaborative team: A quality improvement project; Increasing effective patient-triage nurse communication using a targeted history question; and Barriers to the implementation of pediatric overweight and obesity guidelines in a school-based health center. Nurses will come away with the current information they need to improve patient outcomes.