I don’t get sick.
OK, perhaps that’s an overstatement. I have conditions, like a heart that had a problem with blockages and a couple other things middle-aged guys get. Every condition I have is being successfully treated and I have a full life.
I don’t get sick. I can count my bouts with colds and flu over the past 15 years on one hand, I don’t get the crud that’s going around. I’m convinced that’s because I don’t because I do some things: • I eat right • I exercise • I don’t smoke • I don’t drink alcohol or take recreational drugs • I don’t participate in drama or other far too emotionally serious matters
Sounds a little dull, but like I said, my life is full.
In a recent AOL News interview, David Feinberg, CEO of the UCLA Hospital System, shared that the argument on capitol hill is not about health-care reform. It’s about health-care insurance reform.
I agree. I haven’t read the entire bill, but that’s the deal on the surface. Democrats are scrambling, Republicans are striking fear into the hearts of senior citizens, and business as usual. It’s intense drama, but has little if anything to do with health care and everything to do with money and how much insurance companies will lose if everybody’s somehow insured under a plan they don’t control.
He goes on to estimate 50% of his 800 patients in his hospital have illnesses that could have been prevented by changes in lifestyle. • Eat right (we all know how, learned in grade school) • Exercise (we all know how, learned in grade school) • Avoid smoking, & alcohol (if you can’t, free help’s available)
I didn’t know that the surgeon general was obese like Feinberg says…so I Googled her. I’m not so sure she’s 100 pounds overweight, but she’s a big woman.
Here’s what she says on the Surgeon General’s home page.
“Americans will be more likely to change their behavior if they have a meaningful reward–something more than just reaching a certain weight or dress size. The real reward is invigorating, energizing, joyous health. It is a level of health that allows people to embrace each day and live their lives to the fullest without disease or disability.”
I am in violent agreement that health gets better if we take care of ourselves and feel powerless over the lies and misdirection coming from Capitol Hill. For now, I write my little blogs and help provider agencies get their EMR running right…and follow Feinberg’s advice.
Read more →The law firm of Moritt, Hock, Hamroff & Horowitz, LLP just won a landmark case for people in early recovery in Suffolk County, NY.
Judge Joseph F. Bianco of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York decided for the benefit of Oxford House, annulling Suffolk County’s local law regulating substance abuse houses on the basis that the law was facially discriminatory and was preempted by the Federal Fair Housing Act. The decision was a huge victory because upholding that law would deprive people disabled by alcohol and substance abuse problems of their ability to maintain recovery housing.
I’m from Oregon, and as far as I know, they don’t have sober houses there. Insomuch as recovering alcoholics and addicts are extremely vulnerable to that first drink or drug in their early sobriety, and it’s the first drink or drug that sets the monster loose, sober houses may be a good environment for a group of recovering folks to try to stay clean.
That being said, alcoholics do relapse, early recovery is a struggle to change the mind. The outcome of this case is a baby step in attempts to make laws more reasonable with regard to addiction and disease, from which nobody’s immune. Better to support recovery than not.
Sober Houses are a controversial subject, and your thoughts count.
Read more →The emergence of computer games as treatment appears to be sensible and effective according to experts like Henry W Mahncke, VP of Research & Outcomes at Posit Science.
I was at Starbucks yesterday, and a woman was there with her grade school-age son. In the Long Island way, she was talking with the boy, loud enough for all to hear, about his upcoming use of a computer game as treatment for his ADHD. As a former aficionado of Duke Nuk’em and Doom, I’ll vouch for the need to pay attention if you’re going to play. It caught my interest.
In a recent presentation I received from Open Minds, a consulting group, Dr Mahncke shared the statistical proof that his game-treatment works with schizophrenics. The more they play, the more it pays off.
So since computer game therapy, or rather “applied brain plasticity”, appears to increase in effectiveness with more hours of play, how will that be charged? Should it be charged? We can bet the insurance companies, funding sources like Medicaid, will resist paying for this.
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