Tagged With "chronic illness"

In looking at the impact of childhood trauma, you can’t get much clearer than this: In 2017, ACEs among Tennessee adults led to an estimated $5.2 billion in direct medical costs and lost productivity from employees missing work. That’s just one year, according to the new report, “ The Economic Cost of ACEs in Tennessee ," released on Feb. 1, 2019 by The Sycamore Institute in Nashville, Tenn. And to provide some perspective, $5.2 billion is one-seventh of the state’s annual budget . This $5.2...

By World Health Organization (photo by WHO/Malin Bring) The findings of a new study on the life-course health consequences and associated annual costs of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) show that preventable trauma in childhood costs north America and the European Region US$ 1.3 trillion a year. The article, published in the Lancet and co-authored by Dinesh Sethi and Jonathon Passmore, Programme Manager, Violence and Injury Prevention, WHO/Europe, looks at the legacy of ACEs and their...

By Kevin Sherin, American College of Preventive Medicine, May 7, 2020 There is a growing dialog about COVID-19 and its impacts on childhood adversity (ACEs), chronic stress, and mental health across the lifespan. The fear and social isolation associated with COVID-19 commonly exacerbates existing chronic stresses. Reports are surfacing of increased mental health problems, anxiety, partner violence, depression, suicidality, child abuse, opioid use disorder, other substance abuse, drug...

By Tait Shanafelt, Jonathan Ripp, Mickey Trockel, JAMA, April 7, 2020 The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has become one of the central health crises of a generation. The pandemic has affected people of all nations, continents, races, and socioeconomic groups. The responses required, such as quarantining of entire communities, closing of schools, social isolation, and shelter-in-place orders, have abruptly changed daily life. Health care professionals of all types are caring for...

An ACEs Connection webinar co-sponsored with 4 CA In 2017, California became the first state in the country to pass a law supporting universal screening for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in the 5.3 million children in the state’s Medicaid program. As clinicians around California await the state’s announcement of what this new policy will entail, many are wondering what it takes to integrate ACEs science in a pediatric practice. Meet Drs. Deirdre Bernard-Pearl, R.J. Gillespie and...

Last week, three pediatricians — with a combined experience of 15 years integrating ACEs science into their practices — reflected on the urgency they felt several years ago that prompted them to begin screening patients for childhood adversity and resilience when there was practically no guidance at all. Along their journey , they accumulated a list of lessons learned for other pediatricians and family clinics to use. The three pediatricians participated in the ACEs Connection webinar,...

So pleased that KevinMD published this patient narrative. I was encouraged to share it here as well! https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2...romotes-healing.html By MEGAN R. GERBER, MD | CONDITIONS | JULY 26, 2019 As physicians, we face the formidable task of working with patients who appear angry, never content with care or “made better” by anything we do. They may be known as “difficult,” unpleasant, or demanding. These patients are the most challenging and often the least rewarding to care for.

By Jennifer Abbasi, JAMA Network, May 20, 2020 I n the spring of 2013, Eileen Barrett, MD, MPH, lost a colleague to suicide. The two worked at the Indian Health Service’s Gallup Indian Medical Center in New Mexico, where Barrett was the deputy chief of medicine. Even before the tragic event, she saw workers struggle under administrative burdens and hold themselves personally responsible for problems outside of their control. With her coworker’s death it became painfully clear that clinician...

At this point, COVID-19 has been a part of our lives for nearly six months now. While the most recent current events are not unfamiliar social problems, this pandemic has provided us with a stronger lens with which to see many of the underlying inequities within our communities. This article, “The Moral Determinants of Health,” explores these inequities by illustrating the systemic imbalances within the field of medicine and the amount of resources we allocate to solving problems as opposed...

“In order to cope,” writes Mary Trump, “Donald began to develop powerful but primitive defenses, marked by an increasing hostility to others and a seeming indifference to his mother’s absence and father’s neglect….In place of [his emotional needs] grew a kind of grievance and behaviors—including bullying, disrespect, and aggressiveness—that served their purpose in the moment but became more problematic over time. With appropriate care and attention, they might have been overcome.”

By Tatiana Sanchez, San Francisco Chronicle, August 24, 2020 Elaine Shelly has lived with multiple sclerosis for 30 years. But she said she still panics whenever she has to see a new neurologist because of racial discrimination she’s experienced in the past. Even getting a proper diagnosis for her illness was a battle. “I’d go to these neurologists who would tell me that Black people don’t get M.S. and that I must be mentally ill,” said Shelly, 63, of San Leandro. A former print journalist,...

After his roughest days in a New York City emergency room, physician Matthew Bai feels his whole body relax when he sees his wife and 17-month-old daughter. “My light at the end of the tunnel is going home to family,” Bai says. When Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital started to overflow with COVID-19 patients in late March, however, Bai and his wife decided she should take their toddler and stay with her parents in New Jersey. The risk of spreading the virus to his family was too great. Now...

For all it's worth I am a family doc with 35 years experience in practice and many years mentoring medical students. I also served 8 years on my state's medical licensing and discipline board and 10 years on my community hospital's bioethics committee. Needless to say physicians are human beings too and have the same array of frailties as the rest of humanity. These days in addition to 'ordinary' mental illness and the awesome assumption of responsibility for life and death the docs carry...

A new guide for healing the hidden wounds from ACEs The Adverse Childhood Experiences Recovery Workbook Glenn R. Schiraldi, Ph.D. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, Inc., 2021, 232 pages Practical, powerful skills for healing the hidden wounds of childhood trauma “ Dr. Glenn Schiraldi is one of the world’s most trusted experts on stress and resilience. His Adverse Childhood Experiences Recovery Wor kbook is the most complete, accessible, and evidence-based healing resource available.

By Mary Chris Jaklevic, JAMA, January 13, 2021 D aniel Hao, MD, wasn’t emotionally prepared for the crush of severely ill patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) who came under his care in March 2020. Many were young, sedated, and dying alone. Sometimes while FaceTiming with their families, Hao saw very young children on the screen. “It was frightening,” Hao, an anesthesia resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said in an interview. “A lot of the things that we...

I was a family doctor when the first symptoms of what would turn out to become a disabling chronic illness first began to arise. I didn't know about ACEs back then and even if I had, I would have thought my score was zero and that ACEs didn't apply to me. What I've learned in the 20 years since then is that my ACE score is actually a two, which increases the chances of ever being hospitalized for an autoimmune disease by 70%.

In 2019 and 2020, dozens of states enacted nearly 60 laws and resolutions that reference adverse childhood experiences or trauma. In this post, there's an interactive map that shows them all.

It is really challenging to understand the vociferous rejection of powerful, effective, well proven medical therapies like vaccines even when your children are thus made vulnerable and even when people around you are getting ill and even dying. This obviously not a logical, rational process. Medicine and public health are to be faulted for trying to motivate a change in these attitudes by just repeating established clinical data. This post has a cogent and interesting analysis which adds to...

It is really challenging to understand the vociferous rejection of powerful, effective, well proven medical therapies like vaccines even when your children are thus made vulnerable and even when people around you are getting ill and even dying. This obviously not a logical, rational process. Medicine and public health are to be faulted for trying to motivate a change in these attitudes by just repeating established clinical data. This post has a cogent and interesting analysis which adds to...

The well-timed choice to forgive deep injuries from childhood, though difficult, can greatly improve psychological wellbeing and free us to move ahead. Four keys to forgiveness lay the foundation for cultivating healing forgiveness skills.

Anna Tarazevich on pexels.com Author: To read Sonia Sarkar's article, please click here. In their new book, Inflamed , doctors Rupa Marya and Raj Patel explore how colonialism makes us sick while also shaping our core beliefs about how healthcare providers should make us better. For example, Lakota elders in the book describe the forces that led to widespread prevalence of diabetes in their communities: colonizers arrived and dammed a river that traditionally fertilized a rich river valley...

As a clinician, researcher and policy specialist devoted to the prevention and treatment of the ill effects of child abuse and neglect (CAN) I read “Recommendations for Population-Based Applications of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study: Position Statement by the American College of Preventive Medicine” (Sherin KM, Stillerman A, Chandrasekar L, Went N, Niebuhr DW. Recommendations for Population-Based Applications of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study: Position Statement by the...

As a clinician, researcher and policy specialist devoted to the prevention and treatment of the ill effects of child abuse and neglect (CAN) I read “Recommendations for Population-Based Applications of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study: Position Statement by the American College of Preventive Medicine” (Sherin KM, Stillerman A, Chandrasekar L, Went N, Niebuhr DW. Recommendations for Population-Based Applications of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study: Position Statement by the...

As a clinician, researcher and policy specialist devoted to the prevention and treatment of the ill effects of child abuse and neglect (CAN), I read “Recommendations for Population-Based Applications of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study: Position Statement by the American College of Preventive Medicine”, a position statement by the American College of Preventive medicine, with dismay . (Sherin KM, Stillerman A, Chandrasekar L, Went N, Niebuhr DW. Recommendations for Population-Based...

This splinter story is an APOE metaphor, a term I have coined as "adverse pre-onset experiences" aka APOEs. This builds on the term for our knowledge that ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) influence risk for chronic illness. This is about how chronic illness starts for many of us within weeks or months of a stressful or traumatic event. And how we think, very normally, that this particular event is the cause...