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Vaping-related lung transplant performed at Detroit hospital
Vaping-related lung transplant performed at Detroit hospital
https://ift.tt/2KbEru9 November 12, 2019 at 07:14AM https://ift.tt/1R552o9
Pneumonia kills a child every 39 seconds, health agencies say
Pneumonia kills a child every 39 seconds, health agencies say
Reuters: Health
Pneumonia killed more than 800,000 babies and young children last year - or one child every 39 seconds - despite being curable and mostly preventable, global health agencies said on Tuesday.
Reuters: Health
Pneumonia killed more than 800,000 babies and young children last year - or one child every 39 seconds - despite being curable and mostly preventable, global health agencies said on Tuesday.
Burger King picks Unilever to make plant-based Whoppers in Europe
Burger King picks Unilever to make plant-based Whoppers in Europe
Reuters: Health
Burger King on Monday rolled out a meat-free version of its Whopper burger in 25 European countries, using patties made by Unilever Plc to strengthen its foothold in the exploding market for plant-based food served in restaurant chains. 
Reuters: Health
Burger King on Monday rolled out a meat-free version of its Whopper burger in 25 European countries, using patties made by Unilever Plc to strengthen its foothold in the exploding market for plant-based food served in restaurant chains.
An ODD Diagnosis Doesn’t Make Your Child “Bad”
In recent years, I’ve encountered a growing number of parents in my therapy practice who come to me fearing that their child has oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). According to the American Psychiatric Association, the primary signs of ODD are angry and irritable mood, argumentative and defiant behavior, and vindictiveness.
Often these parents will share that a teacher or doctor told them their child may have ODD, and that when they looked up the condition online, they recognized some of the symptoms in their child’s behavior. As a parent myself, the worry and confusion on my clients’ faces and, in their voices, simply breaks my heart.
One unintended effect of putting the ODD label on a child, in my experience, is that it makes parents feel like something is intrinsically wrong with their child — and wrong with them as parents. The ODD diagnosis can also cloud the process of figuring out why a child is struggling and how to best address their behavioral issues. And parents aren’t the only ones who feel bad when their child is diagnosed with ODD. Kids feel bad, too. With this in mind, I’ve developed my own approach for helping families overcome their fear of the ODD Boogeyman.
The first step is taking the sting out of the label. So, someone thinks your kid has ODD. That’s okay. No matter what anyone says, even someone with a certain level of expertise, your kid is not a bad kid. In my 20 years of practice, I have never met a bad kid. The truth is that most kids have moments when they’re aggressive or defiant. Nothing is wrong with you as a parent, either. You’re going to be alright, and so is your child.
The second step is understanding what brought them to my office. What’s happening? At school? At home? Maybe your kid refuses to take direction from adults or has been aggressive toward their classmates. That kind of behavior is certainly upsetting, and you, of course, don’t want to condone it, but there are a lot of things we can do to address it.
The third — and perhaps most important step — is figuring out the why. Why is your child behaving this way? For the vast majority of kids, there’s a very legitimate reason.
When parents take a moment to reflect on the situations or triggers that may be contributing to their child’s most concerning behavior, they’re usually able to identify something significant. For example, a parent may realize that their child is at their most oppositional after a really hard day at school. Maybe the bully was even meaner than usual. Or the child feels bad about themselves because the other kids read at a higher level. The child manages to keep their cool for the entire school day, but once they get home and are around people with whom they feel safe, all their difficult emotions come out in a way that can be hard to stomach. At the core, this child experiences a deep level of anxiety, and they’ve yet to develop the skills to cope with it.
Other reasons may have less to do with a child’s internal experience and more to do with what’s happening around them. Maybe Mom and Dad are getting divorced. Or the Grandparent they’re really close with is sick. Or a parent is in the military and was recently deployed overseas. These aren’t easily solvable problems.
If the issue is related to the parent, the parent may feel guilty or defensive. What I always remind people is that we’re all doing the best we can at any given moment. Even if the problem can’t be readily addressed, identifying it means moving past labeling and pathologizing and moving towards a remedy for the child’s behavior.
The fourth and final step takes you back to the symptoms, which we have the tools to address. We can help a child with aggression by teaching them to understand the emotions that fuel it. Then, we can work on self-regulation by helping a child develop greater mind-body awareness. One way to do this is with a biofeedback video game that encourages children to practice bringing their heart rate up and then back down. Doing this over and over again familiarizes children with what is happening in their bodies when they enter heightened emotional states and creates an automatic calm-down response. Whatever strategy you decide to employ, the key to success is being creative and treating the child from a positive, compassionate, and strengths-based standpoint.
Diagnosing a child with ODD is an overly simplistic way of naming their behavior. What I find most troubling is that the diagnosis can put a child on a tragic life trajectory, particularly when it comes to children of color in low-income communities. First, it’s ODD. Then, it’s conduct disorder. By the time that child reaches adolescence, the people who are supposed to help them are instead afraid of them. These types of kids tend to receive the harshest form of treatment: the criminal justice system. It may sound extreme, but it happens far too often. What I’m proposing is that practitioners strive to look beyond a child’s disruptive behavior and see the context surrounding them. I believe a holistic approach produces better outcomes for children, parents, and society as a whole.
What is palliative care, and who can benefit from it?
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The American population is getting older and sicker. More Americans are facing life-threatening illness when approaching end of life. Palliative care has grown to meet the complex needs of this population.
And yet, according to a 2017 article in the journal Palliative Care, many people living with a chronic life-threatening illness either do not receive any palliative care, or receive services only in the last phase of their illness. The National Consensus Project Clinical Practice Guidelines for Quality Palliative Care also addressed this issue, stating that a goal of their recently updated guidelines is “to improve access to quality palliative care for all people with serious illness regardless of setting, diagnosis, prognosis, or age.”
There may be many reasons why patients do not access palliative care services. But it’s likely that greater awareness of what palliative care is, and who can benefit from it, may lead to greater adoption of these services.
The philosophy of palliative care
Palliative care improves the quality of life, comfort, and resilience of seriously ill patients as well as their families. Seriously ill patients are those with life-threatening medical conditions, like cancer, organ failure, or dementia, that negatively impact the patient’s daily life or result in a high level of stress for the caregiver.
Palliative care utilizes an interdisciplinary team of physicians, nurses, social workers, and chaplains to assess and manage the physical, psychological, social, and spiritual stressors associated with serious illness. It can be provided by primary care physicians, specialists like cancer or heart doctors, palliative care specialists, home health agencies, private companies, and health systems.
Palliative care can look very different from patient to patient. For a patient with cancer, for example, the palliative care team collaborates with the cancer doctors to manage the pain caused by the cancer, the side effects caused by treatment, and the anxiety and spiritual suffering of having a cancer diagnosis. For a patient with heart failure, the team collaborates with the heart doctors to manage the shortness of breath that makes it hard to walk to the bathroom, the financial stress of being too sick to work, and the social isolation of not engaging in their usual activities. For a patient with dementia, the team collaborates with the primary care doctor to manage the patient’s confusion and agitation while harnessing community resources such as a home health aide or visiting nurse to provide respite and support for the family.
This interdisciplinary approach can be provided throughout the course of an illness and across health care settings. It can span hospitals, clinics, long-term care, assisted living, rehabilitation, and correction facilities, as well as homeless shelters.
Who can benefit from palliative care?
Palliative care is available to all patients with serious illness regardless of age, prognosis, disease stage, or treatment choice. It is ideally provided early and throughout the illness, together with life-prolonging or curative treatments. In other words, patients don’t have to choose between treatment for their illness and palliative care; they can have both.
Palliative care not only improves the quality of life of patients and their families, reducing mental and physical distress and discomfort, but can help patients live longer. The prolonged survival is thought to be due to improved quality of life, appropriate administration of disease-directed treatments, and early referral to hospice for intensive symptom management and stabilization.
Palliative care and hospice care: Not one and the same
Although the overarching philosophy is similar, palliative and hospice care are distinct services. Hospice care is provided to patients near the end of life, with a high risk of dying in the next six months and who will no longer benefit from or have chosen to forego further disease-related treatment.
The focus switches from life-prolonging or curative treatment to comfort care. The interdisciplinary team provides quality medical care to make the patient as comfortable as possible, while supporting loved ones during the dying process and with bereavement support after death.
Hospice care can be provided in an individual’s home, assisted living, long-term care, hospice facility, and in hospitals. Hospice care will neither hasten nor prolong the dying process; instead it will optimize the quality of life for the time remaining.
Making the most of palliative care services
If you or a loved one is living with serious illness, ask your primary or specialty care doctor for a palliative care referral. If palliative services are not available locally, your doctor may explore your palliative or hospice needs with you directly.
Use this discussion and the resulting services as an opportunity to:
- Assess and manage poorly controlled physical, psychological, social, and spiritual stressors.
- Understand your illness, its expected trajectory, and treatment options.
- Explore your hopes, worries, goals, and values; cultural or religious beliefs that impact your care or treatment decisions; treatments you may or may not want; what quality of life means to you.
- Discuss and document your health care proxy and end of life preferences, including medical interventions you do or do not want.
It is never too early to ask how palliative services can help you or your loved one live well. Learn more from the Center to Advance Palliative Care.
The post What is palliative care, and who can benefit from it? appeared first on Harvard Health Blog.
Roche tests 'brain shuttle' in humans in Alzheimer's project
Roche tests 'brain shuttle' in humans in Alzheimer's project
Reuters: Health
Roche is testing its "brain shuttle" in humans, with the Swiss drugmaker hoping to rejuvenate the theory that removing amyloid plaques from the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease will prove effective despite repeated failures. 
Reuters: Health
Roche is testing its "brain shuttle" in humans, with the Swiss drugmaker hoping to rejuvenate the theory that removing amyloid plaques from the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease will prove effective despite repeated failures.
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