June 8th, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Health Tips
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I have been musing about why, despite our fascination with gadgets and timesaving devices, so few of us use the apps and tools that have been developed to help us take care of ourselves.
The range of options is staggering – my iPhone coughed up 52 applications for medication reminders just now – but most of us don’t make use of the (often free) high-tech help available to us. There are hundreds of websites and portals to help us monitor our diets, physical activity and blood sugar, talk to our doctors by e-mail and understand our test results. Apps can help us watch for drug interactions, unravel our test results, adjust our hearing aids and track our symptoms. Devices can monitor whether our mom is moving around her house this morning or continuously monitor our vital signs.
Interesting ideas. Modest pickup.
In an essay published in the May issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine supplement “Cyberinfrastructure for Consumer Health,” I make some observations about why this may be so, Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
May 31st, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Health Tips
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“The most important thing I learned was that different doctors know different things: I need to ask my internist different questions than I do my oncologist.”
This was not some sweet ingénue recounting the early lessons she learned from a recent encounter with health care. Nope. It was a 62-year-old woman whose husband has been struggling with multiple myeloma for the last eight years and who herself has chronic back pain, high blood pressure and high cholesterol and was at the time well into treatment for breast cancer.
Part of me says “Ahem. Have you been paying attention here?” and another part says “Well of course! How were you supposed to know this? Have any of your physicians ever described their scope of expertise or practice to you?”
I can see clinicians rolling their eyes at the very thought of having such a discussion with every patient. And I can imagine some of us on the receiving end thinking that when raised by a clinician, these topics are disclaimers, an avoidance of accountability and liability.
But all of us – particularly those receive care from more than one doctor – need to have a rudimentary idea of what each clinician we consult knows and does. Why is this clinician referring me to someone else? How will she communicate with that clinician going forward? How and about what does she hope I will communicate with her in the future?
Why does our clinician need to address these questions? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
May 25th, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Health Policy, Health Tips
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You are sick with something-or-other and your doctor writes you a prescription for a medication. She briefly tells you what it’s for and how to take it. You go to the pharmacy, pick up the medication, go home and follow the instructions, right? I mean, how hard could it be?
Pretty hard, it appears. Between 20 percent to 80 percent of us – differing by disease and drug – don’t seem to be able to do it.
There are, of course, many reasons we aren’t. Drugs are sometimes too pricey, so we don’t fill the prescription. Or we buy them and then apply our ingenuity to making them last longer by splitting pills and otherwise experimenting with the dosage.
Some drugs have to be taken at specific times or under specific conditions, posing little challenge when you are taking only one. But it can be devilishly difficult to coordinate the green pill half an hour before breakfast, the yellow ones on an empty stomach four times a day and the orange one with a snack between meals. It’s complicated; we don’t understand. We’re busy; we forget. We’re sick; it’s confusing.
Some drugs produce uncomfortable side effects while others set off an allergic reaction. Every single day, we have to decide if the promised outcomes are worth the discomfort.
Kate Lorig, the developer of the Chronic Disease Self-Management Program, has listened to thousands of people talk about the challenges they face in taking their medications as prescribed. “One of the reasons that folks do not take their meds is that they think they are not doing anything,” Lorig says. “This is especially true of medications that replace something that you no longer produce like thyroxin or medications for chronic conditions that help you get worse more slowly. The trajectory of a disease is not something one can usually sense, and people start feeling that their drugs are not making them better. Another problem is that people expect drugs to work at once like aspirin and antibiotics. Many drugs take days, weeks or even months for people to feel better. They lose patience.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
May 19th, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Health Policy, Health Tips
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Only one in 10 respondents to a national survey could estimate how many calories they should consume in a day.
Seventy-nine percent make few or no attempts to pay attention to the balance between the calories they consume and expend in a day.
These and other piquant findings from the online 2011 Food and Health Survey fielded by the International Food Information Council Foundation (IFIC) struck home last week as I smacked up against my own ignorance about a healthy diet and the difficulty of changing lifelong eating habits.
The confluence of my failure to gain weight after cancer treatment and a blood test suggesting pre-diabetes meant that as of last Tuesday, I have been on an eat-specific-types-of-food-every-hour-and-write-it-down regimen. And despite a lifetime of recommending that people change their behavior to become healthier, I am frustrated as I try to follow my own advice. I am bewildered about what I’m supposed to eat. Finding it, preparing it and then eating it at the right time requires untold contortions and inconvenience. Writing it all down is tedious. I don’t have time for this – I have a job, obligations. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
May 1st, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Health Tips, True Stories
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Nora misjudged the height of the stair outside the restaurant, stepped down too hard, jammed her knee and tore her meniscus. Not that we knew this at the time. All we knew then was that she was howling from the pain.
There we were on a dark, empty, wet street in lower Manhattan, not a cab in sight, with a wailing, immobile woman. What to do? Call 911? Find a cab to take her home and contact her primary care doctor for advice? Take her home, put ice on her knee, feed her Advil and call her doctor in the morning?
Sometimes it is clear that the only response to a health crisis is to call 911 and head for the emergency department (ED). But in this case – and in so many others we encounter with our kids, our parents, our co-workers and on the street – the course of action is less obvious, while the demand for some action is urgent.
The question “which action?” has become more complicated of late because:
- In some communities, there are alternatives to an ambulance or a drive to the nearest ED, such as Urgent Care centers.
- Disincentives exist for going the route of the ED: in many cash-strapped municipalities we are charged for the cost of ambulance ride; we risk not having our ED visit covered by insurance if we make the wrong decision or fail to notify our health plan in a timely manner. Or we don’t have insurance and the ED care is expensive.
- Some of us have a number of clinicians who could guide us about ED versus self care on any urgent health matter, plus our health plan may have a nurse advice line that could do the same. Which among them to call? How long will it take to get an answer in the middle of a busy workday or a late night?
- Many of us have no primary care clinician to call. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
