Archive for the ‘Chronic Conditions’ Category

Imagine yourself as a young woman who by all accounts appears healthy. One day you experience flu like symptoms, see your physician, and are sent home with the usual: sleep, hydrate, take two of these, and you get better. But do you? Some time passes and you become sick again, this time with a different gamut of symptoms including recurring infections, joint pains, headaches, fatigue, depression, rashes, etc.  As a result, you find yourself in and out of this complicated domestic health care delivery system, seeing one physician/specialist after another and are left with little to no answers.

Fast forward a few years. You’re now in your mid-twenties and have found a personal physician who took the time to listen to your story of diverse symptoms. After reviewing your current symptoms, laboratory tests, and medical history, you finally have the answer to the question you’ve been asking yourself for years: Why am I always sick? You have systemic lupus. (more…)

In a grassland wildfire, when the fire is spreading so quickly that there’s no way to run away from it, there’s one last solution to save yourself: an escape fire. In this technique, you light a ring of fire around you, using up the fuel that is feeding the wildfire so that it has nothing to burn when it reaches you. The problem is, when you’re running for your life, the most effective solution is also the least obvious – stopping in your tracks to light a fire is the last thing a panicked person would think to do. You could die from your inability to face and accept the choice that is right in front of you.

That’s the idea behind the title of the film Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare. I had a chance to see it this weekend on CNN (it’s available now online and on DVD), and it makes a compelling argument that our current system for dealing with rising health care costs and falling positive health outcomes is akin to running away from a seemingly insurmountable problem when there are solutions right in front of us. In example after example, patients dealing with chronic illness, which is the main driver of skyrocketing health care costs, are dealt with by disease management that does nothing in the way of future prevention. (more…)

My 50-year old husband is an insulin-dependent diabetic who, over the years, has accumulated an array of chronic health conditions: his thyroid has failed, his cholesterol is high, and his cardiovascular system no longer works as well as it once did. Keeping these conditions in check requires him to be ever-vigilant about checking his blood sugar, and keeping up with an increasingly complex and demanding treatment regimen in which he takes insulin with every bite of food, as well as a host of prescription and over-the-counter medications.

Some months are better than others—he makes it to repeated visits with the endocrinologist, the lab, his primary care doctor, the pharmacy. He dutifully submits his mail-in prescriptions. And he keeps up with a full-time job, and our full-time life that features five adult children and an 11-year-old. (more…)

Yesterday the Atlantic held the second of three events in its Community Health Tour, in which leaders on the frontlines of community health join panelists in a conversation to identify and solve problems. Yesterday’s conversation in St. Louis, MO featured panelists Robert Fruend, CEO of the St. Louis Regional Health Commission; Joy Krieger, Executive Director of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, St. Louis Chapter; Melba Moore, Health Commissioner for the City of St. Louis; and Dr. Jason Purnell, Assistant Professor at the Brown School of Social Work and Public Health at Washington University.

The panelists weighed in on the progress being made and challenges to be reckoned with in St. Louis. Socioeconomic disparities remain one of the toughest hurdles to overcome in creating healthier communities. Low incomes and lack of education and information tend to be indicators of other health factors such as smoking and poor diet. Add this to a general lack of access to health services and you begin to see a population that is becoming sicker over time, unable to tackle either disease management or prevention. (more…)

In April 2008, at the age of 22, Leslie Rott was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. This post originally appeared on her blog, Getting Closer To Myself, which she started to create awareness about autoimmune diseases.

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So, every once in awhile, I move away from posts that are extremely personal, emotional, and philosophical, to talk about the more practical aspects of being a patient, with some old-fashioned research thrown in for good measure. (more…)

Last month marked the one-year anniversary of the United Nations high-level meeting on non-communicable diseases (NCDs). NCDs (including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and chronic respiratory illness) are the world’s number one killer, causing nearly two out of three deaths worldwide, and they’re on the rise. The amazing thing about these diseases is that – in many cases – they are preventable. Eating well, increasing physical activity, and refraining from tobacco use can save countless lives and livelihoods (if economic development is your cup of tea). (more…)

Coordinating ongoing care for people with chronic diseases or conditions has been a topic of interest among health care policy makers for some time.  A large chunk of the health care budget goes to hospital, medical care and therapy or rehabilitation services for chronic conditions. Case management, nurse-hotlines and medical homes are some of the tools used by payers to try to manage the costs.  In the end, a lot of care and service decisions are made by the patient’s family caregivers, who also provide a significant amount of care to the patient.

My husband, Paul, suffered a stroke many years ago that left him with continuing physical and speech-language deficits.  As Paul’s primary caregiver, I have years of experience in making health care decisions for him and with him, as well as in coordinating and providing care. (more…)

Over 7 million children have asthma in the U.S. Asthma is a leading chronic condition that causes students to miss school, accounting for over 14 million lost schools days in 2008. If your child has asthma, getting her ready to start school is always easier when you have a plan.

The American Lung Association’s Back-to-School with Asthma Checklist offers easy-to-follow steps to help your child start the school year healthy and ready to learn. (more…)

My sense of body image drastically changed when my daughter was misdiagnosed with Lupus when she was 9-years-old.  High dose steroid treatment rapidly added 60 pounds to her slender frame, and overnight, all of her girlfriends renounced their friendships with her.

Lying down on our sofa, with her head on my lap, she would look up at me and say, “Mommy, you’re so beautiful.” Suddenly, I lost my ability to focus on myself. Perhaps I felt guilty. Perhaps, just like my daughter, I was in shock.  I stopped looking in the mirror, stopped wearing make-up and stopped dressing up.  I could only think of how my daughter felt, about her body and her life.  (more…)

Chronic illnesses pose a hefty burden on our current health care system. Chronic diseases are responsible for 7 out of every 10 deaths in the U.S. and account for 75% of annual U.S. medical care costs. Most of these diseases, from obesity to lung disease, are preventable or can be greatly delayed with solutions beyond medical care.

On July 13, the Alliance for Health Reform, with the help of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, held a session called Chronic Disease Prevention: Saving Lives, Saving Money. The briefing featured enlightening presentations from experts whose work sets them on the front lines of this topic. They detailed the impact that chronic disease prevention efforts can have on our population and health care system. (more…)

When it comes to maintaining respiratory health, living in an environment with good air quality is clearly an important factor. In many urban areas inhabited by low-income populations, this clean air is nowhere to be found. Having green space within a city can play a significant role in reducing air pollution as well as mitigating the dangerous urban heat island effect. The need for green space is often recognized in more affluent parts of a city, while low-income areas are neglected. When these less affluent communities are overlooked, there can be serious health consequences such as the extreme disparity in negative asthma outcomes in the black and Hispanic children who inhabit these neglected areas.  In this article, Planet Forward and the National Society of Landscape Architects examine the benefits that parks can have for the health and prosperity of low-income urban communities. (more…)

Kenneth Eisner

Ivor B. Horn, MD, MPH

By Ivor Horn, MD, MPH and Kenneth Eisner. Asthma is the most common chronic pediatric medical condition in the United States.  Its prevalence has tripled in the last three decades with disadvantaged, urban, minority children incurring a disproportionate share: 12.8% of African American children are diagnosed with asthma compared to 7.9% of Whites, and African American children are nearly seven times more likely to die from asthma than Whites. Additionally, African Americans use emergency departments more frequently, incurring higher healthcare costs. (more…)

By Ronnie and Lamar Tyler. I remember when my son was first diagnosed with asthma. I was a single mom living over 600 miles away from my family and friends. He was in the 2nd or 3rd grade, and it seemed like he was always getting sick.

The nurse would call me at work and say, “Please come pick up your son. He has a low grade fever and he threw up on the playground.” Of course any child who throws up at school has to go home. So, I had to leave work to pick him up (it took about 30 to 45 minutes to get to his school). When I picked him up and took him home he was fine. (more…)

By Kathy Lim Ko. When it comes to understanding asthma in Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders (AAs and NHPIs), we hit a road block because we don’t have the full breadth of data that we need — and the limited data we do have paints a concerning picture.  Doctors’ diagnoses alone tell us that the rate of asthma in NHPI children  is three times higher than that of white children and twice that of black or Native American children. But a reliable and accurate rate of asthma in NHPI children simply doesn’t exist. (more…)