by Carole Jacobs and Chef Patrice Johnson with Nicole Cormier, R.D. (original article)
Inflammation is your body’s response to infection, toxins, and injury. By soaking up dead cells and tissues, your body helps prevent foreign organisms from entering. Inflammatory responses range from redness and swelling to pain and heat. Everything from minor injuries and infections to more serious conditions such as fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, and colitis can result in inflammation.
Community Wellness Centers of America, LLC is a minority owned company with its office located in Jamaica and founded due to the loss and lack of accessible critical and essential healthcare services in Jamaica.
As founder, President and CEO of Community Wellness Centers of America, LLC, a minority owned company,we have prepared a report on the “Community Benefit” standard applied to our non-profit hospitals which covers the history, controversy, and specific recommendations to hold our hospitals fully accountable to the communities served.
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS (click here for the original article)
We’re all used to hearing that everything we once thought was good for us is not. But even within that framework, the latest science about antioxidants, free radicals and exercise is telling. As many of us have heard, free radicals are molecules created by the breakdown of oxygen during metabolism. Each of us constantly creates free radicals simply by living and breathing. But these molecules are highly reactive and capricious, sometimes attacking other cells and damaging tissue. Wilding free radicals have been linked with a number of diseases and with aging. Exercise, because it requires increased oxygen consumption, also increases the production of free radicals. So, many experts began urging the fitness-minded to pop large doses of antioxidant vitamin supplements, like vitamins C and E, to counteract the presumed damaging effects of the free radicals. Food alone would not supply sufficient levels of the necessary antioxidants, it was thought. The exercising body needed help from vitamins.
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While other problems–high incarceration rates, the education attainment gap, housing instability, disproportionate HIV rates, and violent crime in black communities — are often the topic of discussion and activism, domestic violence is rarely discussed. It should be. Domestic violence is not only as much of a problem in the black community as it is across the nation, but its a bigger problem. More frequent. More lethal.
In 2005, African Americans accounted for nearly a third of the intimate-partner homicides. For years, the (few) studies that have addressed the issue of domestic violence in the black community have told the same story. A study published in 2000 reported that Black females experienced intimate partner violence at a rate 35% higher than that of white females, and about 22 times the rate of women of other races. In 2005, black women accounted for 22% of the intimate partner homicide victims and 29% of all female victims of intimate partner homicide.
istockphoto.com
While politicians and soon, the Supreme Court, are fighting about the fate of the Affordable Care Act, a new government study finds that a growing number of Americans are having difficulty coping with the high cost of health care.
During the first six months of 2011, 1 in 3 people lived in a family that had trouble paying its medical bills within the previous year; was currently paying a medical bill over time; or currently had a medical bill the family was unable to pay at all. That’s according to a survey of more than 50,000 people by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
written by Rich Wildzunas
The Official U.S. Government Site for Medicare (http://www.medicare.gov/quality-care-finder/ ) provides a wealth of information for all citizens regardless of age, and you do not have to be on Medicare to access this free information.
The Official U.S. Government web site from Medicare compares the quality of care and services for Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Physicians, Dialysis Facilities and Home Health services.
Looking for a Good Quality Nursing Home Provider:
As an example, this site helps anyone considering a nursing home let’s say for a family member and you do not know where to start, and provides the following guidance and provides easy to use instructions allowing you to enter your zip code and the distance you would be willing to travel.
taken from AARP.org, click here for original article
Plus, how to protect yourself from medical errors
by: Katharine Greider | from: AARP Bulletin | March 1, 2012
American hospitals are capable of great medical feats, but they also are plagued by daily errors that cost lives. No one knows that better than Ilene Corina. In the 1990s, she saw a medical team rescue her fragile premature newborn, but she also endured the death of another son — a healthy 3-year-old — when, she says, doctors failed to attend to complications from a routine tonsillectomy.
Corina had already joined the patient safety movement when, in 1999, the Institute of Medicine’s now-famous report, To Err Is Human, burst into public consciousness with its startling announcement: Each year as many as 100,000 Americans die in hospitals from preventable medical mistakes.
Med centers protest, but report says rates of infection and readmissions are among worst in U.S.
By Heidi Evans / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
THIRTY NEW York-area hospitals were given a code blue for patient safety by Consumer Reports — and the Bronx’s Jacobi was labeled worst in the country.
Local hospital officials insisted the ratings were misleading, based on older data that don’t reflect more recent strides to protect patients.
By GARDINER HARRISFederal health officials on Tuesday added new safety alerts to the prescribing information for statins, the cholesterol-reducing medications that are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world, citing rare risks of memory loss,diabetes and muscle pain.
Federal health officials said these widely prescribed drugs could cause elevated blood sugar and problems with memory.
It is the first time that the Food and Drug Administration has officially linked statin use with cognitive problems like forgetfulness and confusion, although some patients have reported such problems for years. Among the drugs affected are huge sellers like Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor and Vytorin.
But federal officials and some medical experts said the new alerts should not scare people away from statins. “The value of statins in preventing heart disease has been clearly established,” said Dr. Amy G. Egan, deputy director for safety in the F.D.A.’s division of metabolism and endocrinology products. “Their benefit is indisputable, but they need to be taken with care and knowledge of their side effects.”
By the time 64-year-old Laura Milson decided to undergo total knee replacement after 12 years of suffering from arthritis, even a short walk to the office printer was a struggle.
After her surgery last August at the Rothman Institute at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Ms. Milson spent a week in rehabilitation and says she hasn’t stopped walking since. “My son says to me, ‘You have to slow down,’ and I say, ‘No, I have to catch up!,’ ” she said. “It’s a whole different life.”
For Ms. Milson, who lives in Shrewsbury, Pa., replacing the joint in her right knee came with a surprising bonus: a 20-pound weight loss in two months. “I joked with my doctor, ‘I think you put a diet chip in my knee,’ ” she said. “The weight just sort of came off.”
