Health and Disability

So, what can be done to cope with such chronic pain?

1. Utilizing relaxation techniques can help to reduce the stress caused by the chronicpain, making it easier to cope with stressors of daily life, in spite of the pain. In addition, relaxing the body can help to reduce the experience of pain (i.e., through the release of "endorphins", natural pain-killers released by the brain during deep relaxation and through the decrease of the secondary symptoms caused by stress, such as the fatigue, muscle tension, and insomnia mentioned above). There are many types of relaxation techniques, such as focusing on one's breath, focusing one's mind on a repetitive phrase, progressive muscle relaxation, or visualization.

Example: Close your eyes. Breathe in and out slowly three times. Imagine that you can see your breath entering your body as a pink mist. See and feel that pink mist circulating healing energy throughout your body. See and feel it surround your pain, soothing it. See it leave your body as a blue mist, as you exhale, taking your pain with it.......

Chronic functional abdominal pain (CFAP) is also known as functional abdominal pain syndrome. It is defined as the ongoing experience of abdominal pain without any clear physical explanation. It resembles irritable bowel syndrome and a variety of the treatments that work for IBS can also be used for chronic functional abdominal pain.

The difference between IBS and CFAP is that with CFIT there is no modification of bowel habits like diarrhea or constipation. Those sorts of bowel dysfunctions are required characteristics for diagnosis of IBS.

Chronic functional abdominal pain is diagnosed once other disorders like Crohn’s disease, colon cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, diverticulitis and appendicitis are eliminated. The International Foundation for Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders has some great information for CFAP treatment.

This is the home for a series of websites that focus on product liability information related to lawsuits. The information is good information, but the pitch is to funnel people to lawsuits, however subtlely it is done. If you have concerns about health products you or someone you care about, this is a reasonably comprehensive site of that kind of information.....

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center announced the Accountable Health Communities (AHC) model, which recognizes the same “social co-morbidities” that Dr. Geiger attempted to address decades ago. This is the first Innovation Center pilot to address this gap in the current delivery system by funding interventions that connect patients with the resources they need to be healthy. Through this model, CMS has at last recognized a broader and more realistic view of what counts as health care and brought 70 percent of the modifiable factors that influence health back to the table in a meaningful way (social, economic, physical, behavioral).

The latest moves come from HomeHero, which on Tuesday announced it is launching a care management platform, converting all care providers from independent contractors to W-2 employees, introducing a new HIPAA-compliant mobile app, and bringing on board a chief medical officer and chief nursing officer.

“In order for home care to be the discharge of choice for hospitals and skilled nursing facilities, a lot of other services have to accompany home care,” Hill said. “It’s not just personal care and companionship, but meal delivery, physician house calls, home modification, etc., that makes home care a better discharge.”

The care management platform, dubbed the HomeHero Collaborative, aims to bring all these services together. To create this platform, HomeHero is identifying potential partners in each of its markets and screening them, such as by interviewing their founders or directors. Typically, those companies that join the Collaborative offer a discount to HomeHero clients, such as a 15% to 20% coupon code.

A bad bout of pneumonia sent Bruce Anderson to Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento last May. As soon as he recovered, hospital staff tried to return him to the nursing home where he had been living for four years.

“I’m frustrated,” said his daughter, Sara Anderson. “You cannot just dump someone in the hospital.”

Anderson said her father, who has a brain injury that causes dementia-like symptoms, is confined to the hospital bed and frequently given anti-psychotic medications. She believes the nursing home, Norwood Pines Alzheimer’s Care Center, refused to readmit him because it wanted to make room for more lucrative and less burdensome residents.

“I didn’t have any question this was about money,” she said.

“Federal and state law have created a complicated and expensive process to ensure residents are not abandoned by their nursing homes,” said Tony Chicotel, a staff attorney at the nonprofit California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform. “It fundamentally doesn’t work.”

Cut Off From Ambulance Rides

In a story for Philly.com, Kaiser Health News reporter Lisa Gillespie explores the reasoning behind the pilot program—to cut down on improper payments, including fraud and abuse—and its unfortunate consequences for patients. After Medicare stopped paying for Prozzillo’s ambulance rides to and from dialysis, his wife and daughter took turns driving him, but while getting out of the car in his driveway one day, he fell and broke a hip. He died not long after.

“There should have been another alternative for him,” his daughter says. “He would have lived longer.” CMS expanded the pilot program to the District of Columbia, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia in 2016. While Medicaid pays for nonemergency wheelchair van transport, Medicare does not.

Racism In The Hospital

Muslim-American neurology resident Altaf Saadi learned the hard way that attending a prestigious college and medical school (Yale and Harvard, respectively) could not shield her from experiences of racism and bigotry in America. In a post for Kevin MD, Saadi, the daughter of Iraqi and Iranian immigrants, shares some of the adversity she’s faced from her own patients on the basis of her religion and ethnicity.

Some bigotry is overt, but implicit racism in health care is more commonplace, she notes, and many racial, ethnic, and religious groups are affected. “We—as physicians and society more generally—must realize that the struggles of one marginalized community are struggles of all of us,” she writes.

In the article, Snellman criticises previous scientific findings and a suggested definition of the term of attitude and the phenomenon 'ageism'. According to Snellman, the concept of ageism needs to be redefined to mirror all people's practical experiences of the chronological, social, biological and psychological parts of ageing. Ageism should be portrayed as significant for people of all ages rather than only the older population.

Furthermore, Snellman's study draws parallels to another study that has shown that negative ageism - or negative attitudes about older people and ageing - stands in connection with an increased mortality among the population. The study shows that individuals with a higher level of negative attitudes (confirmed at the age of 50 or earlier) live on average 7.5 years shorter in comparison to those who have a more positive attitude towards ageing. That is proof of why an increased awareness is needed and should in all likelihood arouse people's interest in their own attitudes.

Snellman is critical towards ageism being portrayed as difficulty only for older people despite researchers in the previous study to have express ambition to eliminate the same. Regardless of the strive within science to avoid differentiating between 'us and them - old and young' which often forms the basis of the hidden and rarely questioned way of creating inequality - science upholds the difference.

So far, the 2016 change getting the most attention is that Medicare will pay clinicians to counsel patients about options for care at the end of life. The voluntary counseling would have been authorized earlier by President Barack Obama’s health care law but for the outcry fanned by former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who charged it would lead to “death panels.” Hastily dropped from the law, the personalized counseling has been rehabilitated through Medicare rules.

But experts who watch Medicare as the standards-setter for the health system are looking elsewhere in the program. They’re paying attention to Medicare’s attempts to remake the way medical care is delivered to patients, by fostering teamwork among clinicians, emphasizing timely preventive services and paying close attention to patients’ transitions between hospital and home. Primary care doctors, the gatekeepers of health care, are the focus of much of Medicare’s effort.

Patrick Conway, Medicare’s chief medical officer, says that nearly 8 million beneficiaries — about 20 percent of those in traditional Medicare — are now in “Accountable Care Organizations.” ACOs are recently introduced networks of doctors and hospitals that strive to deliver better quality care at lower cost.

“Five years ago there was minimal incentive to coordinate care,” said Conway. “Physicians wanted to do well for their patients, but the financial incentives were completely aligned with volume.” Under the ACO model, clinical networks get part of their reimbursement for meeting quality or cost targets. The jury’s still out on their long-term impact.

Still, a major expansion is planned for 2016, and beneficiaries for the first time will be able to pick an ACO. Currently they can opt out if they don’t like it.

Hearing loss contributes to dementia and mental decline, according to new medical research by a doctor who plans to begin the first clinical trial to study whether hearing aids could prevent or mitigate brain decline.

On Sunday physician Frank Lin described his research at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC.

“I’m asking how can our peripheral functions, namely hearing, affect our central functions – our brain,” he asked. “Unfortunately this question is completely unknown. This trial has never been done.”

Lin said the prevalence of hearing loss doubles for every decade of life, and that its high frequency has led physicians to dismiss it too often. “The vast majority of dementias in late life are multifactorial,” he said, “but the role of hearing loss has just not been studied.”

He estimated that as much as a 36% of dementia risk is attributable to hearing impairment, though he admitted that theoretical estimate needs testing. When a person needs to strain to listen to “a very garbled message through the ear”, it overtaxes the brain.

This effort, as well as atrophy in underused regions, precipitates changes in brain structure, he continued, eventually causing “cascading effects on brain structure and then brain function”.