Tagged With "medical issues"

Why I hid ACES from my medical records in order to receive equal treatment.

By Phillip Reese, California Healthline, November 11, 2019 Less than a decade ago, the emergency department at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego would see maybe one or two young psychiatric patients per day, said Dr. Benjamin Maxwell, the hospital’s interim director of child and adolescent psychiatry. Now, it’s not unusual for the emergency room to see 10 psychiatric patients in a day, and sometimes even 20, said Maxwell. “What a lot of times is happening now is kids aren’t getting the...

How can we heal from the implicit bias of “ Mental Illness ” and “ mentally ill ”? I hear these words and it sounds like fingernails scraping down the chalkboard. “ The stain of dehumanization colors the mind, body and spirit and it is not so easily washed away.” - Michael Skinner Recently I read a blog post at the ACEsConnection website, “Erasing My ACES” by Sirena Wheeler. It was posted on April, 19, 2020. It struck a chord with me, many in fact and it put me on a spiral down memory lane.

At the outset of a Zoom visit with 7-week-old son James in my behavioral pediatrics practice, his mother Sondra explained to me that he is “stiff because of my medication.” While feeding him a bottle she told me she was unable to breastfeed due to the effects of MAT (medicated assisted treatment, now called medication for opioid use disorder, or MOUD.) It was not concern about her current use of methadone, which is widely considered to be safe for breastfeeding, but rather the in-utero...

This article was initially published in RACmonitor and appears with the publisher’s permission The country’s smallest hospitals continue to be in peril, as are the patients who rely on them. This issue continues to be the reality for rural health with major challenges for the patients and providers in those regions. 7.4% of babies born in the US are birthed at hospitals handling 10 to 500 births a year, or “low-volume” hospitals. In the context of our industry’s fiscal focus, that number...