Month: April 2019

The Most Important Diabetes Supplies You Need on Hand During an Emergency

From Texas Health Resources: For More Info, Go Here…

Natural disasters such as wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes seem to dominate the headlines and 24-hour news cycles these days. But if you’re a person living with diabetes and are caught in a disaster, managing your disease can be a challenge, especially when you need to quickly leave your home and find yourself in an unfamiliar environment.

Betsy Richter-Gifford, an inpatient diabetes specialist at Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital, says the stress of diabetes management, along with unexpected factors like emergencies and natural disasters — or even something as simple as a power outage — can be minimized with a bit of preparedness.

With spring upon us and the potential for major storms, flooding and tornadoes in North Texas, we asked Richter-Gifford for advice on how individuals living with diabetes can keep Mother Nature or man-made disasters from wreaking havoc on their diabetes management.

What steps can people with diabetes — or their family members — take to prepare for natural disasters, power outages or other emergencies like evacuations?

IN-HOSPITAL DELIRIUM PREDICTIVE OF READMISSION, DISCHARGE TO POSTACUTE FACILITIES, ER VISITS

BY CHRISTOPHER CHENEY: For More Info, Go Here…

New research shows that in-hospital delirium patients are vulnerable during the early posthospitalization period.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

In-hospital delirium affects a significant number of general admission patients and is common in intensive care units.

Addressing in-hospital delirium can reduce readmission rates and lower postacute care utilization.

Family members and friends who serve as caregivers can play a pivotal role in addressing in-hospital delirium.

In-hospital delirium is a predictor of readmission, emergency department visits, and discharge to a location other than home, recent research shows.

The development of delirium in the hospital setting impacts about 12.5% of general medical admissions and as many as 81% of intensive care unit patients. Earlier research has shown delirium among hospitalized patients is predictive of prolonged hospital length stay, lengthened mechanical ventilation, and mortality.

Can you Write a new Life Into Being?

By Kitty Hannah Eden: For More Info, Go Here…

The page is the only safe space I have.

When I lost my writing voice for five years as a result of major depressive disorder, that one safe space disappeared. I started withering away; the vocation for which I had sacrificed so much and which defined me became a fading memory.

As my brain began to atrophy and cannibalize itself, the illness attacked everything that made me me. My trademark sunniness and good humor vanished. My playfulness died, and my ability to see beauty in everything and everyone disappeared. A world I had up to then experienced in vibrant technicolor became black and white.

Soon, everything blended into the uniform gray of inescapable sadness reflected in my eyes.

Even when I made a superhuman effort to crack a smile, my gaze betrayed me and remained that of someone who was barely alive. I could no longer recognize the person staring back at me in the mirror.

As my survival instinct kicked in, I realized I’d have to face the page again if I was to save myself. And so I did, eking out fragments of text that were so steeped in angst and pain they were unpublishable. It took me a while until I ended up with an essay, it took me even longer to work up the courage to share it and out myself as a fallible and imperfect human.

Americans Overwhelmingly Want Federal Protections Against Surprise Medical Bills

From Kaiser Health News: For More Info, Go Here…

ngd- Duh! of the week…

Three-quarters of the public — including a majority of Republicans — want the federal government to protect patients from being stuck with surprise medical invoices after they are unwittingly treated by doctors or medical facilities that are out of their insurance network, a poll released Wednesday found.

These unexpected bills, which can be financially crippling, may arise when a patient is taken to the emergency room by an out-of-network ambulance; when the emergency room is not in their insurer’s network; or when their hospital is in their network, but a doctor or specialist within that facility who treats them is not.

Although insurers prohibit in-network doctors from billing more than the insurer agreed to, such bills occur because doctors and medical facilities that do not have such contracts are unconstrained from charging whatever they want. Often they charge list prices multiple times the amount insurers agree to pay.

In urgent medical circumstances, patients are rarely in a position to investigate the financial arrangements of their caregivers or make sure they are brought to a treatment center that works with their insurer. Often patients are not aware they were seen by an out-of-work provider until the bill arrives.

The Dangers and Causes of Repetitive Concussions and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in Athletes

By Jayda Gaston: For More Info, Go Here…

ngd- The takeaway is that it is repeated hits to the head not concussion that produces the highest likelihood of CTE.

Professionals in sports and the medical field have only recently started to recognize the long-term implications of repeated concussions resulting in chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Even though the health risks in many high impact sports have been identified. Many psychological problems have been pushed aside and misunderstood until now. Now there are new ways for people to understand quicker and faster than before. “You get a concussion, and they’ve got to take you out of the game. So if you can hide it and conceal it as much as possible, you pay for it the next day, but you’ll be able to … stay in the game.” Said Washington Redskins fullback Mike Sellers. A concussion is summarized as a mild traumatic brain injury; it either doesn’t knock you out, or it tends to knocks you out for about 30 minutes or less. The short-term symptoms most of the time appear at the exact time of the injury, but can sometimes develop days or weeks later. Symptoms are very hard to identify if you don’t take the time to understand what they are and if you might have them.

The top accessible proof that tells us consecutive hits cause CTE to the head that occurred over a period of years. However, this does not mean that all people that get concussions end up getting CTE. Most people that are diagnosed with CTE have ended up suffering from more than hundreds or thousands of head impacts over the period of many years. Things such as playing contact sports or serving in the military can cause head impacts. Moreover, it is not just concussions that are the leading cause. The best available evidence tends to point to before impacts or the hits to the head that don’t necessarily cause complete concussions or concussions at all.

African Americans with disabilities lose ground in job participation rates, report finds

By Riia O’Donnell: For More Info, Go Here…

Dive Brief:

  • More people with disabilities were employed in 2017 than 2016; 34.6% were employed in 2016 and 35.5% were employed in 2017, according to data in the Disability Statistics Compendium, a report released by the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire.
  • The employment rate for African Americans with disabilities, however, is several percentage points below the overall average at 28.6%. “Employment rates only tell part of the story,” RespectAbility Policy and Practices Director Philip Kahn-Pauli said in a press release. “When you look at the employment rates among people with disabilities across racial lines, you find serious gaps in outcomes.”
  • More than 3 million working-age African Americans have a disability, and, of those, only 934,589 have jobs, the data revealed. The report found African Americans with disabilities made job gains in 22 states, losing ground in 28 states. In Missouri, the worst state for losses, 7,686 African Americans with disabilities exited the workforce.

Medicare Opens Purse for Rural Hospitals, CAR-T Therapy

by Joyce Frieden: For More Info, Go Here…

Rural hospitals would get paid more under Medicare and chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapies would receive higher reimbursement under proposed payment changes announced by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

Under Medicare’s current hospital reimbursement system, hospitals located in areas with wages less than the national average — which are often those in rural areas — receive a lower Medicare payment rate than hospitals located in areas with wages higher than the national average, the agency noted in a press release issued late Tuesday afternoon. For example, a hospital in a rural community could receive a Medicare payment of about $4,000 for treating a beneficiary admitted for pneumonia, while a hospital in a high-wage area (like many urban communities) could receive a Medicare payment of nearly $6,000 for the same case, due to differences in their wage index.

“That’s a large spread and creates serious challenges for rural and low-wage hospitals, and their viability,” CMS administrator Seema Verma said on a phone call with reporters early Tuesday evening. She noted that nearly 40% of hospitals are currently operating with negative margins, and that many rural communities have higher poverty rates and a higher prevalence of chronic conditions than their urban counterparts. In addition, “people are having to travel a lot further to see a doctor and often face a fragmented healthcare delivery system with an overworked and shrinking workforce.”

Chronic Illness Advocacy

From CIAAG: For More Info, Go Here…

Why we advocate?

We stand for compassionate, patient-centered healthcare which promotes quality of life.

We advocate and lobby for federal protections to be enacted to protect the chronically ill and disabled.

We stand up during a time where patients are being neglected due to healthcare policy change, and are being denied life-saving medications.

We support ALL patients, Whether that be:

Patients having access to proper pain management to be able to live without debilitating pain or

Medication-assisted therapy for Substance use disorder or

Someone who needs counseling or medications for behavioral health issues.

We are all human and we are all deserving of compassionate medical care.

The need for an ending

By Andy Owen: For More Info, Go Here…

When a person goes missing, in war or in ordinary life, their story is cut off mid-sentence. A death can be easier to bear.

When I asked if the mission would have gone ahead if they’d known that Lance Corporal Ford was already dead, Rigg answered ‘Yes.’ Would he have wanted others to risk their lives to recover his body if it had been him? He answered ‘No.’ Rigg paused to consider the potential contradiction, and added that in this hypothetical situation it would not be about him. There would be more at stake. For him, the fact that the British military recover their own, alive or dead, is integral to what makes it the organisation it is. But why should accounting for our missing be so important that it is worth risking more lives for? This is a question that, as a former soldier myself, I find puzzling but important.

The US psychologist Pauline Boss, who started working with the wives of missing US airmen in the 1970s, writes that ‘even sure knowledge of death is more welcome than a continuation of doubt’, and describes incomplete or uncertain loss as ‘ambiguous loss’.

People aren’t meant to just disappear. Disappearance can expose an existential fear in those left behind – what could make you question your self-esteem more than the knowledge that you could just go missing without a trace? This is why some states and armed groups have deliberately ‘disappeared’ those seen as their greatest threat: during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, for example, supposed informers on the paramilitary organisation the IRA were at risk of vanishing. As a character in Jez Butterworth’s play The Ferryman (2017) points out, denying information or giving false information can add to the pain of loss, and is a particularly cruel way to treat the living:

The anxiety of having a medical procedure with an unpredictable body

By Claire G: For More Info, Go Here…

Most chronic illnesses bring a degree of anxiety with them. Experiencing symptoms and being diagnosed with a chronic condition often means entering into the unknown — we do not know for sure how we are going to experience the condition, how or whether it is going to progress, and how it will impact upon our lives.

Something I hadn’t anticipated when I first started seeing doctors about my multiple chronic illnesses, however, was that, on occasion, it would be those very doctors that were apprehensive about how to treat my unpredictable body, which then, in turn, made me apprehensive about my very being . . .

One of my conditions, mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), has dramatically changed how doctors treat me, both in terms of ‘treatment’ in the medical sense of prescribing me certain medications and supplements, and ‘treatment’ in the sense of how they respond to me when a procedure or surgery is necessary. As the organisation Mast Cell Action notes, in a person with MCAS, the mast cells are inappropriately triggered to release histamine and other chemical mediators. At its worst, for a minority of patients with the condition, MCAS can cause the person to go into anaphylaxis, a potentially life-threatening event.