IS IT SAFE

To Be Sick

After reading the article below, ask yourself do really want to wait until you have to go to the hospital to develop a wellness plan? As I do more research I am beginning to realize the situation with this trusted institution is far worse than I initially thought. 

Although I appreciate our President’s effort and the fallout he is still experiencing, I hope that I do not have to use Obama Care too often. Infections, bad surgery, misdiagnosis and eventually death seem to be a primary byproduct of an industry with the oath, “Do No Harm.”

The cost of health care and the outcomes seem to be incongruous with our expectations. I know when I am paying someone I expect them to be respectful, courteous and competent. Seems neither of these characteristics is consistent with what many experience. The stories are horrifying and often change lives forever. 

How do you give someone back their life when your avoidable errors have altered it beyond recognition? How do repeat these errors and/or become complicit with the act when you keep the knowledge of the act to yourself?

We speak of corruption usually when it is explicit. Yet we rarely recognize it when it is implicit.  This information is readily available in the age of technology but why is it rarely discussed in the media, politics or community forums? Difficult to say who exactly is complicit in the ongoing lie of do no harm but clearly the medical profession is one of the most powerful special interest groups in this country. And they have friends in the drug industry, universities, and food industry. 

Don’t tell on me and I won’t tell on you is the tacit agreement. The silence, which is the main tenet of corruption, is deafening and the lack of action, the second tenet for corruption to occur, is appalling. We need to speak up not only do we have the right to health care; we also have the right to competent health care.

We have the right and partial responsibility to be well. We need the help of the health care industry not their disdain or incompetence. Beyond the do no harm we want them to do some good. Pay it forward and partner with patients to keep us well. Change their focus from treatment to wellness and not just use it as a slogan. Change begins with you becoming vocal and active about what you want.

How many of you have actually safely come off of your meds? If you have been able to safely eliminate the need for your meds share with me what and how you did it. I fortunately no longer need to take blood pressure medication. The side effects were not pleasant and my blood pressure remained elevated. It is now in the normal range. I increased my cardiovascular routine.

Please know I am not encouraging any one to stop taking meds they now require without supervision and testing to be sure it is safe. Your body may be dependent on some meds and stopping suddenly is not safe. Get well then get off.

So what happens, we go in expecting to get better. Maybe even expecting to get well and we get worse. Over and over this happens and yet we go back to the same people who were not able to provide the required support we needed to get well.

Taking prescriptions to mask symptoms is not getting well unless there is an end to needing to take the prescription. So ask yourself are you well and if not I encourage to take one step today towards your wellness. Just one and it will be easier to take a second tomorrow.

So why are waiting? Don’t ask, “what can me doctor do for me?” Instead ask yourself, “what can I do for me.” 

The answer is Get Up Get Moving and remember,

“CHIT CHAT WON’T BURN FAT”

Thousands of people die every year from infections they get at a hospital. With prodding from the federal government, the health care industry is taking steps to address the problem.

By Maggie Fox

Updated: January 26, 2012 | 10:25 a.m.
January 19, 2012 | 3:00 p.m.

Jennifer Manganello had beaten a staph infection. She won out over a nasty bug called Klebsiella, too, as she lay in the intensive-care unit, suffering from complications of a seven-year-old spine procedure and was breathing with a ventilator.

But the 22-year-old, who had been partly paralyzed since the spine operation when she was 15, was attacked by two more infections as the weeks passed at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut. She finally died, one of the 99,000 Americans killed by a hospital-acquired infection in 2005.

Jennifer’s mother, Susan Manganello, was horrified by the toll that hospital care took on her daughter’s body. “Whatever antibiotic they gave her burned the entire side of her arm. It was like a huge, huge burn,” Manganello, a former transplant nurse, said in a telephone interview. “They kept it wrapped. When they took it down in front of me one day, I actually gagged. And I am a nurse. It was very deep and very nasty. She died with that. It never got healed.”

Doctors used to shrug off cases like Jennifer’s. Infections, they argued, are an unfortunate but inevitable side effect of long-term hospital stays. Germs are everywhere, they are invisible, and they can cause infections in so many ways when patients have multiple tubes inserted in veins, arteries, and other parts of their bodies. People carrying all sorts of microbes go in and out of hospitals all the time, and nurses are busy. It’s impossible to control all the exposures.

Public-health groups disagree, and they have become increasingly vocal about hospital-acquired infections. The influential Institute of Medicine made headlines when it issued a report in 1999 estimating that as many as 98,000 Americans die annually from preventable medical errors, mostly infections, at a cost of up to $29 billion a year.

 But the report changed little. “Hospital stays for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infection have more than tripled since 2000 and have increased nearly tenfold since 1995,” the Health and Human Services Department reported in 2009. “One decade later, we can’t say whether we are any better off today than when the IOM first sounded the alarm about medical errors in 1999,” Arthur Levin, director of the Center for Medical Consumers and a member of the IOM’s Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, said at the time. Health and Human Services estimated that 1.7 million people acquired infections in the hospital, and that 99,000 of them died, in 2002.