I hope you enjoy this week’s reads, which include topics like wills, funerals, dementia, research ethics and the experience of a hospice nurse who becomes carer for her mother. I hope there’s no typos – I’m rushing off to a communication skills workshop but wanted to post this before I leave.

As always, please leave your thoughts in the comments box below.

• When Doctors Don’t Talk To Doctors. This happens far too often. (New York Times)

• Palliative care nurse Sarah Russell reflects on her experience as carer for her mother. (eHospice)

• Two recent pieces by Australian oncologist and writer Ranjana Srivastava: Happiness and the art of care and conversation on the cancer ward (The Conversation) and Dr Google is here to stay – and here to help (The Guardian). The latter made me think of patient advocate Jen Morris’ advice to doctors – if you tell a patient not to Google their condition, they’re likely to take that as a challenge.

• Adele Horin writes about the Having the Last Word? report on will-making and contesting wills in Australia. The results were surprising to me. (Challenging a will: money or family; Coming of Age)

• To ease pain, reach for your playlist – NPR reports on a recent US study using audio therapy to treat post-operative pain in children (via Pallimed)

• A grieving father sketches lost babies to help bereaved parents (ABC Queensland)

• Nursing homes are no place for young people with disabilities (The Conversation)

• Too poor to die: how funeral poverty is surging in the UK. Has anyone noticed this locally? (The Guardian)

• As though I needed another reason to get some shut-eye. Update: the role of a good night’s sleep in dementia risk reduction (Alzheimer’s Australia Dementia News).

• Anger over Fin Review’s “feral” dementia story. Yes, the Australian Financial Review published a story referring to people with behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia as “feral geriatrics” who are “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” (Australian Ageing Agenda)

Dementia researcher Dr Siobhan O’Dwyer (whose blog we featured in last week’s Weekend Reads) has also written a response to the Fin Review’s article: Just People. (Research that Cares)

• This blog post expands on a recent journal article about increasing participation of older people in research using cohort multiple randomised control trial (cmRCT) design. (British Geriatrics Society blog)

• Here’s a comedic technique – the call-back – to try in your academic writing (The call-back – journal know-how, Patter)

• The Conversation has been running an interesting series on the ethics of human research, including whether it’s ethical to use data from Nazi experiments, and the cost of outsourcing clinical trials to developing countries. (The Conversation)