Health and Disability

Take the hottest business trend of the mobile era: the marketplace model that matches supply and demand à la Uber or TaskRabbit or Kickstarter. Mix in some special-purpose tech gadgets and some savvy, experienced entrepreneurs. Sprinkle a bit of Apple retail store magic dust.

Is the recipe good enough to solve one of America’s most pressing, intractable, multi-billion dollar societal problems?

Marc Andreessen thinks it is. So does Apple stores creator Ron Johnson and former Sen. Bob Kerrey. And so do Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin and a long, long list of notable Silicon Valley braniacs, entrepreneurs and investors. Jessica Alba and Cash Warren are on board too.

Collectively they are backing Honor, an ambitious new effort to vastly improve home care for the rapidly growing number of elderly Americans.

“We are working to completely modernize in-home care for seniors,” says Seth Sternberg, the co-founder and CEO of Honor, who sold his last company, Meebo, to Google. “Our goal is to keep our parents in their homes for as long as we possibly can.”

The suit claims thin staffing made it impossible to address residents' needs. Some residents were left overnight in soiled diapers and beds soaked with urine, while others fell and injured themselves after their calls for help went unanswered.

New Mexico's lawsuit relies on calculations for how long it takes to complete basic care tasks, from helping residents to the bathroom to feeding and bathing them.

By calculating the total minutes required to properly care for residents and comparing them with the actual number of hours worked, the state found deficiencies of as much as 50 percent in the total hours worked by nursing assistants.

A world first study revealing the presence of two antibodies in a sub-group of children experiencing their first episode of psychosis affirms a longstanding recognition that auto-immune disorders play a significant role in psychiatric illness.

Antibodies defend the body against bacterial, viral, and other invaders but sometimes the body makes antibodies that attack healthy cells. In these cases, autoimmune disorders develop. These include conditions such as multiple sclerosis (MS), rheumatoid arthritis and Type 1 diabetes.

This 'immune hypothesis' is supported by new work colleagues in Biological Psychiatry.

The syndrome is characterized by the perception of abrupt loud noises when waking up or going to sleep. Although typically painless, these noises can cause fear and distress to the person experiencing them, who may be unable to rationalize what has caused their symptoms.

In the study - the largest of its kind - 211 undergraduate students were assessed for both exploding head syndrome and isolated sleep paralysis through interviews conducted by psychologists or graduate students.

Nearly 1 in 5 (18%) of the participants reported experiencing exploding head syndrome at least once. More than a third (37%) of these participants also reported experiencing isolated sleep paralysis.

Participants that had experienced exploding head syndrome frequently reported clinically significant levels of fear, with a small minority (3%) reporting clinically significant distress and impairment in association with these episodes.

Dr. Sharpless states that exploding head syndrome can often lead individuals to interpret their experiences as more severe health problems, such as seizures or bleeding in the brain, or even attribute them to unnatural events.

"Some people have worked these scary experiences into conspiracy theories and mistakenly believe the episodes are caused by some sort of directed-energy weapon," he says. "For this scary noise you hear at night when there's nothing going on in your environment, well, it might be the government messing with you."

A ninth-century Anglo-Saxon remedy for eye infections has been found to kill the modern-day superbug MRSA and disrupt naturally antibiotic-resistant biofilms in tests conducted by researchers from The University of Nottingham and Texas Tech University. Anglo-Saxon expert Christina Lee enlisted the microbiologists who recreated the potion, which includes ingredients such as onion, garlic, and part of a cow’s stomach brewed in a copper vessel.

Dr. Grace Chen's frail and elderly patients can be bewildered by the automated phone directories of their healthcare providers and may give up before getting through for help. Understanding their new medications can overwhelm them. And they may miss medical appointments because they lack transportation. Their confusion and anxiety can end with a trip to the emergency department.

Chen, a geriatrician at the UCLA Health System in Los Angeles, previously worked with clerical assistants to handle her patients' questions and help them with their healthcare logistics. That often took a lot of their time each week.

This changed three years ago when UCLA Health System started hiring full-time care coordinators to work alongside doctors in its primary-care clinics. Care coordinator Maya Arnaout, who has a background in patient services and clinic management, now handles the calls and concerns from Chen's patients, addressing gaps in care and communication as patients move from clinic to home to pharmacy to hospital. 

Standing up and moving around after eating could save older people from some falls caused by a sudden loss in blood pressure, according to new research.

The research, conducted in South Australia, found that the dizziness experienced by older people with post-prandialhypotension can be alleviated by simply walking a short distance after eating.

Post-prandial hypotension is a fall in blood pressure seen within two hours of eating a meal and has linked to a high incidence of falls among older people.

"Although this condition is common in older people, many are not aware of it," said the University of Adelaide's Professor Renuka Visvanathan, Director of the Adelaide Geriatrics Training and Research with Aged Care (G-TRAC) Centre, and Director of Aged and Extended Care Services at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

"Falls among older people often result in fractures, and those who experience a fall may lose confidence as well as lose their independence. Falls can also be fatal for older people," she says.

If you don’t have chronic pain or have never experienced chronic illness, it can be hard to understand just how all-consuming pain–and related symptoms like overwhelming fatigue–can be. Writer Christine Miserandino penned a metaphorical essay, “The Spoon Theory,”in an attempt to explain to nondisabled people what it’s like to live with chronic pain and chronic illness; the essay has struck a chord with chronically ill people online, and “spoons” has become shorthand among many ill folks who find the term useful. But there are some situations where the spoon metaphor falls short–at least for me–and I’ve struggled before with communicating exactly how disabling chronic pain can be, and what it feels like, in talking to both nondisabled people and other people with disabilities.

Lots of people–especially nondisabled people–seem to not understand that chronic pain is ongoing, that it can actually be disabling, and, above all, that it can be beyond their understanding. I have heard people say that chronic pain, especially in young people, is “not a disability disability” and that people who claim to have chronic pain should just take some Advil and shut up (though not in those exact words).

Delirium associated with 7.4 additional hospital days and $8,000 more in hospital costs