Elder Abuse: Sometimes It’s Self-Inflicted

I don't respect the tone of this article, but the problem is significant...

https://goo.gl/gVvmST

This behavior pointed to an under recognized problem called self-neglect. It accounts for more calls to adult protective services agencies nationwide than any other form of elder abuse.

Yet efforts to identify and help older people who neglect themselves often collide with Americans’ emphasis on self-determination.

“If someone has decision-making capacity, do they have the right to live in squalor?” asked Dr. XinQi Dong, a researcher at the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging in Chicago. “As a society, we want to respect autonomy and independence.”

In the Texan’s case, “he wasn’t happy that A.P.S. was there, and he denied that he was being exploited,” said Raymond Kirsch, an agency investigator who became involved. “He also denied that he had a drinking problem.”

Grudgingly, he allowed the agency to set up a thorough housecleaning, to start sending a home care aide and to arrange for Meals on Wheels.

But on a follow-up visit a month later, the caseworker found her client markedly deteriorated. His swollen legs now oozed. He’d become personally filthy and was ranting incoherently. She returned with an ambulance and a doctor who determined that the client lacked the capacity to make medical decisions.


The Complications of Growing Up Bionic

https://goo.gl/9gNved

When my mother and I watched the story later that week (with captions turned on), the focus had shifted. It was no longer about the ethics of animal testing, but about me.

It was one of those “miracle cure” stories. The narrative went along the lines of “this nine-year-old girl who was born profoundly deaf received this revolutionary new technology called a cochlear implant, a bionic ear that has brought her into the hearing world.” The reporter went on to explain how I was one of the first few hundred children to receive a cochlear implant after the FDA approved it for pediatric use in 1991. Interviews with my teacher and other adults popped up where they all said how wonderful I was, making me seem downright angelic, which I most certainly wasn’t.

I felt none of the pride or vanity that might come from having a TV news segment devoted to you. I felt sick and embarrassed. I hoped that my classmates wouldn’t think of me narcissistic or attention-seeking. Something else about the segment made me uneasy. It took me years to pinpoint it. It was the first time I had truly seen that people simply saw what they wanted to see or in this case, heard what they wanted to. The reporter didn’t truly see or hear me. She saw and heard a miracle.

Hearing For the First Time isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

So, when I say getting a cochlear implant changed the course of my life, I am not exaggerating. It introduced a new dimension to my life, which isn’t always a pleasant experience.

What the YouTube videos of babies blinking at the strange sensation and adults crying at the “first sound” don’t tell you is what happens afterwards. The surgery is the easy part. The real work comes afterwards. Nearly all recipients need some training to make sense of their cochlear implants. The time and effort needed for such training varies based on a variety of factors, the most important being the age of implantation and profundity of one’s deafness. I ended up on the more intensive side of the spectrum. I had been too deaf for too long.

After an anticlimactic activation session that wouldn’t have gotten a million views on YouTube, I began to feel — not quite hear — new and disorienting sensations that felt like prickling from within. As a creature of sight and touch, I perceived sound in more familiar terms: feeling. As my brain began to form the neural pathways to perceive and process the noisy world around me, the confusion and disorientation deepened. I understood little of the logic of sound: why some were louder than others; why some elicited people’s attention while others didn’t; and the meaning of any of it. Sound is meaningless until you can ascribe meaning to it. I had to learn how to do that.


Disability Day Of Mourning: A Day To Remember Those Who Were Murdered

People with disabilities are murdered by their families every day, every week, every month, every year. They are killed for being burdens, for being “difficult,” for being different, for being less-than. For being inconvenient.

They are killed for simply being.

Disability Day of Mourning

Disability Day of Mourning is March 1st, but it’s also every day.

It’s a time to remember those who were murdered, it’s a time to say their names and remember them with love. It’s a time to refresh our connections with others in our disabled community and to vow that we will do all that we can to protect each other and ourselves from this horror.

There is a memorial site that holds vigil for those killed.

Please visit the website (linked here) and hold space those who were murdered.

Please also visit the Autistic Self Advocacy Network for their anti-filicide toolkit, linked here.


Big data to show how mixed toxins affect children

Rice University researchers have won a prestigious National Institutes of Health grant to build data analysis tools and analyze how exposure to mixed toxins in the environment affects a population, especially children.

The four-year $1.7 million R01 grant will allow a team led by Marie Lynn Miranda, Rice’s Howard R. Hughes Provost and a professor of statistics, to analyze the massive set of data she and her colleagues gathered for the entire state of North Carolina over more than 20 years.

The data include birth records, blood lead levels for children ages 1 to 6, air pollution, housing quality and educational system information that will provide snapshots of where children resided and when—and what they were exposed to during these periods. These details will improve the researchers’ ability to characterize environmental exposures, social stressors and residential stability.

Miranda expects an assessment of the data set using modern data architecture, statistical and machine learning methods will help reveal how exposure to environmental mixtures shaped educational outcomes for children and identify subtle impacts upon the entire population across space and time.

The Rice team believes the tools it creates will be useful for researchers around the world who model environmental effects on people, especially those in communities that face such social stressors as deteriorating housing, inadequate access to health care, under-resourced schools, high unemployment, crime and poverty.


States of Disgrace: A Flawed System Fails to Inform the Public

Yearlong investigation identifies 500 doctors who elude consequence.

Every physician has heard the horror stories.

Stories about doctors who sexually harass patients, bungle surgeries, or ignore complications in patients who then die. And what's more, they can get away with it by taking advantage of lags and gaps in the medical licensing system. By hopping state lines, or having a fistful of licenses issued by different states, they can continue to practice wherever the grass is greenest.

Now, a MedPage Today/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel investigation reveals the scope of the problem: between 2011 and 2016, at least 500 physicians were chastised by one state medical board and yet able to hang their shingles at a new address with a "clean" license.

They slipped through the cracks even though their actions resulted in suspensions, revocation, remedial classes or a portfolio of "letters of concern" that castigate them for misconduct.

The Players

In Colorado, care of a multiple sclerosis patient by Gary Weiss, MD, prompted four medical school physicians to file a complaint with that state's medical board after the woman died.

The Colorado Board and Weiss agreed that he was "permanently inactivating" his license in 2014.

That did not stop him from practicing in Florida, where he has long held a license.

Despite malpractice lawsuits from at least seven patients all accusing him of misdiagnosing multiple sclerosis, it took Florida more than three years to publicly discuss his case.

In New York, breast reconstruction surgeon John Siebert, MD, had sex with a patient, got his license suspended for three years, and was permanently ordered to have a chaperone in the room whenever he was with a female patient. But he wasn't sanctioned by the medical board in Wisconsin, where he also has a license. Instead, he was named to an endowed chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

That chair is funded by a billionaire patient who also is a major supporter and campaign contributor of the governor -- who appoints the medical board.

Check Jay Riseman, MD, on the website of the Division of Professional Registration in Missouri, and there are no red flags, no disciplinary history.

But in Illinois, where a medical board official once called Riseman an "imminent danger to the public," the families of his three dead patients remain haunted by what he did. They say they are outraged that he continues to practice medicine.