Search Results for: health
California V. Trump: The Fight Begins for Health Care, Immigration and the Future of America
Many Californians reject Trump’s values, policy and thinking about climate change, immigration and equality, and they are sending a clear message: they will resist. With the sixth largest economy in the world that contributes billions to the federal budget and huge amounts of America’s domestic food supply, California wields a lot of power and offers a vision of America’s future. But can it influence federal decisions?
The Power of Reddit as a Public Health Advocacy Tool

Writing for Backchannel, Andrew McMillen recently profiled a woman named Tracey Helton. Helton—a former heroin addict who now works as a public health advocate—has taken to Reddit to advocate harm reduction strategies among addicts and to distribute the overdose-reversing drug naloxone. Dubbed the “mother of r/opiates,” Helton’s program “illustrates the unexpected good that can emerge from darker corners of the internet.” But what makes the online forum so well-suited for outreach to addicts?
“There’s an anonymity involved with Reddit that I appreciate, because I know it’s really hard for people to come out if they’re involved with drugs,” she says. She has been open about her own past and identity because she wants her online companions to see her as living proof that recovery is possible. “I used my name so people could Google me and see I’m the same person,” she says. “I thought that, by being a semi-public figure willing to share my own experience, it would help people open up in a different way around their using.”
As her profile grew in this community of social outsiders and outcasts — many of whom feel stigmatized by the poor public perception of intravenous drug use — Tracey realized that her experience in running public health programs in San Francisco could offer another avenue of assistance on Reddit.“People were contacting me saying they had no access to naloxone, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s something I guess I could do.’” She mailed her first care package in August 2013. “I assumed a long time ago that somebody else would take over. I didn’t expect to be doing it for this long.”
The Intersection Between Religion and Mental Health: A Reading List
This week, I’ve compiled four pieces about the intersection of religion, mental illness, safe spaces and alternative caregiving.
The Intersection Between Religion and Mental Health: A Reading List

This week, I’ve compiled four pieces about the intersection of religion, mental illness, safe spaces and alternative caregiving.
“Humanist Caregiving: Do We Need Chaplains or Counselors?” (Walker Bristol, Patheos, October 2014)
Atheist communities at Yale, Harvard and Tufts have chaplains who believe the work they do transcends religion; they provide a safe space for existential exploration. What does it mean to be a humanist chaplain? How does their work differ from social work or therapy?
A Faustian Bargain? What It’s Like To Navigate America’s Healthcare System In The 21st Century
When it comes to elective surgery, you can plan for almost everything except the price:
Here’s what happens when you have urethral surgery. You arrive at the hospital in a tracksuit with your mom and your best friend in tow. They give you hugs. An administrator swipes your credit card for an “estimated payment” of $3,200 and change. Then you change into a gown and hairnet, and sit in a small room while various people ask you to verify your name and date of birth. You sign consent forms. The surgeon and his assistant come to tell you that everything’s going to go great. Your mom and friend are permitted one last hug and squeeze of the hand. Finally you’re escorted down the hall, around the corner, and through a door into a very bright room in which a team of people are moving purposefully. You lie on a large metal bed and are promptly covered with blankets. The IV goes in. Suddenly you’re floating. Someone puts a clear plastic mask over your mouth and tells you to take 10 deep breaths. Your skin prickles all over.
Why Good Health Care Depends on Nurses

What personal care hospitalized patients now get is mostly from nurses. In the MGH ICU the nursing care was superb; at Spaulding it was inconsistent. I had never before understood how much good nursing care contributes to patients’ safety and comfort, especially when they are very sick or disabled. This is a lesson all physicians and hospital administrators should learn. When nursing is not optimal, patient care is never good.
Even in the best of hospitals, with the best of medical and nursing care, the ICU can be a devastating psychological experience for patients—as it was for me. Totally helpless, deprived of cohttp://blog.longreads.com/2014/02/04/why-good-health-care-depends-on-nurses/ntrol over one’s body, ICU patients desperately need the comforting presence of family and loved ones. I was fortunate to have that support, but some others in the MGH ICU were not. I can only hope they received extra attention from their nurses.
Arnold Relman, a physician with more than six decades of experience, broke his neck and discovered what it’s like to be critically ill and cared for under today’s health care system. He wrote about the experience for The New York Review of Books.
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Photo: Army Medicine
What One Woman Discovered About Health Care in the Early 20th Century
“Until then, the Health Department had sought to track down sick children and refer them to physicians, a mostly futile endeavor in the days before antibiotics and modern medicine. Baker decided that the new bureau’s mission would instead be prevention. The city had an established and efficient system of birth registration. As soon as a child was born, her name and address were reported to the Health Department. Baker reasoned that if every new mother were properly taught how to feed and care for a baby and recognize the signs of illness, the mother would have a much better chance of keeping the child alive.
“In her first year at the Bureau of Child Hygiene, Baker sent nurses to the most deadly ward on the Lower East Side. They were to visit every new mother within a day of delivery, encouraging exclusive breast-feeding, fresh air, and regular bathing, and discouraging hazardous practices such as feeding the baby beer or allowing him to play in the gutter. This advice was entirely conventional, but the results were extraordinary: that summer, 1,200 fewer children died in that district compared to the previous year; elsewhere in the city the death rate remained high.”
–How Sara Josephine Baker revolutionized medical care through her work in the New York City Health Department in the early 20th Century. She chronicled her experiences in a memoir, Fighting for Life. Read more from the New York Review of Books.
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U.S. Health Care Spending for Native Americans
“It’s well-documented that the government’s attempts to meet its obligations to the Native Americans have failed miserably; the primary cause is insufficient funding. Currently, prisoners receive significantly higher per capita health-care funding than Native Americans. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reports the federal government spends about $5,000 per capita each year on health care for the general U.S. population, $3,803 on federal prisoners and $1,914 on Indian health care.”
–Tracie White, in Stanford Medicine Magazine, visits doctors on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Read more from Stanford Medicine.
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