Post about "Diabetes"

Health and Fitness – The Cause of Heart Disease

Heart disease has taken its toll on the health of the American population. What doesn’t help is that most people’s lifestyle places little emphasis on health and fitness, which is the main reason this disease is so prevalent and deadly.In order to stay healthy and drastically reduce the risk of contracting heart disease you should switch to an all organic diet of mostly fruits and vegetables. Combine this with one hour of hard fitness exercise everyday and you will become a perfect physical specimen.Your heart will benefit too. Your new diet will keep your cholesterol levels and blood pressure where they should be. The exercise will keep your heart in shape and healthy. If people don’t start taking the benefits of health and fitness more seriously we will only see an increase in the cases of heart disease across the country.Why Does Someone’s Heart Fail?The most common reason someone’s heart fails is because their heart becomes incapable of effectively pumping blood through the arteries. This has increased the curiosity of cardiologists to know and understand exactly what causes heart disease.After much study and research, cardiologists have come up with some answers as to the major causes of heart disease which include:
* Negative Emotion
* High blood pressure
* Diabetes
* Stress
* Valvular heart disease
* Coronary artery disease
* Cardiomyopathy
* Family History
* SmokingAs you can see, each of these causes, besides family history, is itself caused by a poor lifestyle in regards to health and fitness. Now that you understand what the true cause of heart disease is it is now up to you to take action to transform your life into one of health and well-being.Don’t Forget About Your State Of MindIt think that many of us often forget the power of our emotions and thoughts. Virtually all disease is stress of one kind of another on the body. If you can learn to control your thoughts and anxieties so you can live a life of ease, peace and happiness your overall well-being will thrive.It is not something you need to do alone, as there are many effective courses and instructional material that teach you how to reduce stress and anxiety. There is just as much, if not more, material on activities like yoga and tai chi, which, on top of their spiritual components, will also help you improve your health and fitness levels.You may be realizing that preventing heart disease, or any disease for that matter, is not so difficult because it only requires a specific health and fitness regimen. All the resources and material to teach you how to do so is readily available online or at your local health food store.

County Health Department – A Great Resource for Physician Groups and Hospitals

As clinical providers seek ways to improve the health of their patients at the population level, one great resource that they should tap is their county health department. There are many resources and skills that health departments will share with physicians and other providers that will improve their ability to improve the health of their patients.In my work I have had numerous occasions to collaborate with the chief epidemiologist of the Kent County Health Department of Michigan-Mr. Brian Hartl. Through these contacts and through an introductory epidemiology course I have found that health departments are experts at providing population level health services. This is in contrast to most clinical providers who excel at working with their patients on a face-to-face level. Both staff of physician offices and staff of health departments are concerned with the health of individuals and groups of people.Clinicians most often work with individuals during face-to-face encounters. They treat the disease or injury of an individual one at a time. For instance, if a physician is treating a patient with hypertension, she will plan a course of treatment with the individual in mind. If the physician considers the population level in her work, then she is looking at how the treatments and instructions that she provides affect a group of her patients. For instance, she may consider how effective she is in treating her patients with hypertension collectively.The patients of a county health department are the population of the county. Only in a few instances do health departments treat individuals one at a time. Much of their work would not be considered clinical interventions. However, their work does affect the population as a whole. For instance, health departments are responsible for seeing that food at restaurants is handled and cooked correctly. Health departments track reports of communicable disease to identify potential clusters or outbreaks, such as measles, in order to mobilize the community and physician groups to respond and prevent further transmission.Can these two health groups benefit each other in improving the health of their patients and, if so, how? I recently interviewed Brian Hartl about this and he shared some thoughts that I believe can help clinical providers do a better job. As an expert in population level health, Mr. Hartl sees much of his work as preventive in nature. In the emerging world of population level medicine it is important for physicians and other clinical staff to focus on prevention too-prevention of chronic diseases worsening for patients, such as prevention of patients diagnosed with prediabetes advancing to diabetes, and prevention of teen patients from misusing alcohol and other drugs, including tobacco. The Kent County Health Department has many resources that can help physicians achieve their goal and would be very willing to collaborate with clinical groups. In fact, KCHD currently has a grant whose funds can be used to improve patient opportunities for chronic disease prevention, risk reduction or management through clinical and community linkages.Mr. Hartl believes there is potential to work together with physicians to establish a system for prescribing healthy living activities and lifestyles as non-clinical interventions for the prevention/management of chronic disease. For instance, the Kent County Health Department is actively engaged in helping communities develop walking paths in underserved areas in the City of Grand Rapids. He thinks that patients with chronic diseases can greatly benefit if they became more active by walking. He is willing to share maps and information about the location of such paths so that a physician can prescribe a walking agenda for a patient and then point them to nearby paths that they can easily access.The Kent County Health Department is also engaged in working with community partners to bring fresh foods to locations in the county where access to fresh fruits and vegetables is difficult. These are known as ‘food deserts’ and often only have retail food stores that are ‘quick markets’ that have only boxed food, such as those found in many gasoline stations. His group is working with such retailers in the community to overcome the barriers to providing fresh foods. Mr. Hartl is willing to share with physician groups the locations of fresh food sources in the community so that clinicians can inform their patients of the locations and improve their food lifestyles.These are just two examples of information that the health department is willing to share with clinical groups so that their patients can achieve healthy, active lifestyles. Besides information, health departments also have community contacts that could be useful. For instance, the Kent County Health Department works with the YMCA of Greater Grand Rapids, which has a nationally recognized program (the Diabetes Prevention Program) that helps prevent individuals diagnosed with prediabetes from becoming diabetic. The health department also has links with community educators, the Grand Rapids Urban League and prevention groups that focus on the prevention of the misuse of alcohol and other drugs.As you can see there are many resources that are available from health departments. Will it be beneficial to clinical providers to access these resources? I believe that accessing these resources will help physicians and other clinical providers greatly improve the quality of life of their patients. Also, it will help in improving the outcomes of patients at the population level. This is very important for groups that have risk-based contracts with private payers and for those who serve patients who are covered by Medicare. According to an article in Modern Healthcare dated January 16, 2015, about 40% of all private payer contracts are incentive based now; those with such contracts need to focus on population level health.There is a treasure of information at the health department for patient-centered medical homes that have patient care coordinators. One of the responsibilities of these coordinators is inform their patients of community resources that would be useful to them. The health department is an excellent source of such information.The goals of healthcare providers remains to provide safe and high quality care to their patients while their management staff work to improve the bottom line. With the rise of risk based contracts that dictate managing care at the population level, I believe that county health departments can do a great deal to help providers meet their goals.

What is Charcot’s Foot that Occurs in Diabetes?

Charcot’s foot is one of the many problems which might occur in those with diabetes mellitus. The higher blood sugar levels that stem from all forms of diabetes have an affect on numerous body systems including the eyesight, renal system as well as nerves. In long standing cases, particularly if there has been an unsatisfactory control of the blood sugar levels, you can find problems with the nerves supplying the feet. This will make the feet in danger of issues as if something fails, you don’t know it has gone wrong as you can not really feel it due to the harm to the nerves. This might be something as simple as standing on a rusty nail and that getting contaminated and you are not aware that you’ve stood on the nail. Should it be a blister or ingrown toenail which gets infected and you do not know that it is present on the foot unless you have a look. This is why foot care can be so necessary for those with diabetes and why it will be provided a great deal of emphasis. A Charcot foot is the destruction occurring to the bones and joints if you have an injury and you do not know that the injury has happened.

A way of looking at it could be to consider this way: pretend that you sprain your ankle horribly and you also are not aware that you have simply because you do not experience the pain from it. You then carry on and walk around on it. Picture all of the additional harm which you do by walking about on it. The earliest you may possibly discover that there may be something wrong happens when you take a seat and look at the feet and you observe that one is a great deal more swollen compared to the other foot. This is exactly what occurs in individuals with diabetes who develop a Charcot’s foot. There may be some destruction, such as a sprained ankle or maybe a progressive failure of the arch of the foot and as no pain is sensed they carry on and walk around on it. It should be apparent simply how much more injury that gets done to the original injury prior to the problem is finally observed because of the swelling. At times there is not much swelling, but the Charcot’s foot is picked up from the difference in temperature between the two feet as a result of inflammation related process in the damaged foot that generates more warmth.

The development of a Charcot foot really needs to be dealt with as a bit of an urgent situation since the further it advances the much more serious it’s going to be and the more challenging it can be to handle. The individual definitely needs to quit all weightbearing without delay or at least obtain a walking support so that the damage is protected. For the not too major instances and those conditions which were serious and have improved a really supportive orthotic in the footwear is required to support the feet and the injuries. Sometimes surgical procedures are required to straighten the subluxed and dislocated bones. By far the most critical situations can end up with the foot and/or leg required to be amputated as the trauma has been doing an excessive amount of impairment.