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What Doctors Are Facing, In Their Own Words – Rural Hospitals Are Under Siege From COVID-19

20Nov

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

What Doctors Are Facing, In Their Own Words – Rural Hospitals Are Under Siege From COVID-19

It’s difficult to put into words how hard COVID-19 is hitting rural America’s hospitals. North Dakota has so many cases, it’s allowing asymptomatic COVID-19-positive nurses to continue caring for patients to keep the hospitals staffed. Iowa and South Dakota have teetered on the edge of running out of hospital capacity. Yet in many communities, the initial cooperation and goodwill seen early in the pandemic have given way to COVID-19 fatigue and anger, making it hard to implement and enforce public health measures, like wearing face masks, that can reduce the disease’s spread. Rural health care systems entered the pandemic in already precarious financial positions. Over the years, shifting demographics, declining revenue and increasing operating expenses have made it harder for rural hosp...

Hospitals And The Pitfalls Of Seeking Donations From Their Rich Patients

4Nov

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

BUSINESS

Hospitals And The Pitfalls Of Seeking Donations From Their Rich Patients

Most Americans find a number of common hospital fundraising practices ethically unacceptable, according to a new study published in July. Examples of these sometimes troubling approaches included providing people who have a track record of making large donations with concierge services such as nicer rooms or doctor’s cellphone numbers, screening patients to identify those who are wealthy enough to give lots of money to charity and getting doctors directly involved with fundraising efforts that involve their current or former patients. Which conversations about hospital donations are unethical? CDC via Unsplash We found that 85% of the people who took our survey agreed that patients feel good when they donate to the hospitals where they received their medical care. Yet 83% said they felt ...

More Young Adults Are Living With Their Parents – Is That Necessarily A Bad Thing?

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY

More Young Adults Are Living With Their Parents – Is That Necessarily A Bad Thing?

When the Pew Research Center recently reported that the proportion of 18-to-29-year-old Americans who live with their parents has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps you saw some of the breathless headlines hyping how it’s higher than at any time since the Great Depression. From my perspective, the real story here is less alarming than you might think. And it’s actually quite a bit more interesting than the sound bite summary. For 30 years I’ve been studying 18-to-29-year-olds, an age group I call “emerging adults” to describe their in-between status as no longer adolescents, but not fully adult. Even 30 years ago, adulthood – typically marked by a stable job, a long-term partnership and financial independence – was coming later than it had in the past. Yes, a lot of emergi...

Scientists don’t share their findings for fun – they want their research to make a difference

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

TECHNOLOGY

Scientists don’t share their findings for fun – they want their research to make a difference

Scientists don’t take time away from their research to share their expertise with journalists, policymakers and everyone else just to let us know about neat scientific facts. They share findings from their research because they want leaders and the public to use their hard-won insights to make evidence-based decisions about policy and personal issues. That’s according to two surveys of Canadian and American researchers my colleagues and I conducted. Scientists from both countries reported “ensuring that policymakers use scientific evidence” is at the top of their list of communication goals. Helping their fellow citizens make better personal decisions also scores high. Further, scientists say they’re not communicating just to burnish their own reputation. Why it matters In just one rec...

Race and class can color teachers’ digital expectations for their students – with white students getting more encouragement

2Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

EDUCATION

Race and class can color teachers’ digital expectations for their students – with white students getting more encouragement

Schools that rely on remote learning during the pandemic are trying to ensure that all kids have the devices and internet bandwidth they need. While important, it takes more than everyone having comparable equipment and working WiFi for all children to get an equal shot. In my new book based on the sociological research I conducted at three middle schools before the COVID-19 pandemic, I explain how even if all students could get the same hardware and software, it would fail to even the academic playing field. I saw many technologies used in unequal ways. And I observed teachers responding differently to students’ digital skills depending on the race or ethnicity and economic status of most of their students. Learning from digital play Previous research by a team of University of Californ...

When police stop Black men, the effects reach into their homes and families

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS

When police stop Black men, the effects reach into their homes and families

While much of the world was sheltering in place in the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans’ undivided attention was focused squarely on Minneapolis, Minnesota, where George Floyd was killed at the hands – and knees – of the police. Floyd’s murder evoked memories of other murders by the police, including those of Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Philando Castile and Samuel DuBose. Most recently, another unarmed Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot seven times in the back in Kenosha, Wisconsin. We are a sociologist and a social worker who study racism, inequality and families, including a focus on Black men and their interactions with law enforcement. Each of these killings serves as confirmation that concerns about those interactions are warranted. The problem isn’t just that Black ...

Extreme wildfires can create their own dangerous weather, including fire tornadoes – here’s how

26Aug

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IN OTHER NEWS

Extreme wildfires can create their own dangerous weather, including fire tornadoes – here’s how

It might sound like a bad movie, but extreme wildfires can create their own weather – including fire tornadoes. It happened in California as a heat wave helped to fuel hundreds of wildfires across the region, many of them sparked by lightning. One fiery funnel cloud on Aug. 15 was so powerful, the National Weather Service issued what’s believed to be its first fire tornado warning. So, what has to happen for a wildfire to get so extreme that it spins off tornadoes? As professors who study wildfires and weather, we can offer some insights. How extreme fire conditions form Fires have three basic elements: heat, fuel and oxygen. In a wildland fire, a heat source ignites the fire. Sometimes that ignition source is a car or power line or, as the West saw in mid-August, lightning strikes. Ox...

How the old-fashioned telephone could become a new way for some to see their doctor

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS

How the old-fashioned telephone could become a new way for some to see their doctor

Staying home to stay safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, patients and their doctors have embraced telemedicine. Prior to COVID-19, telehealth use was growing but represented a tiny percentage of all health care visits. During the peak of the first wave of infections, many telehealth centers saw a dramatic increase in care – for example, the University of Michigan had a 2,500% increase in telehealth encounters. In fact, according to internal data at the University of Michigan, telehealth visits accounted for more than 75% of all visits during April and May. Another fact that surprised us: Nearly half of those visits were conducted by telephone alone rather with audio and video communication, as is conventionally required by insurance. One of us, Dr. Li, is an emergency physician and health...

Bloodthirsty tsetse flies nurse their young, one live birth at a time – understanding this unusual strategy could help fight the disease they spread

29Jul

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IN OTHER NEWS

Bloodthirsty tsetse flies nurse their young, one live birth at a time – understanding this unusual strategy could help fight the disease they spread

Tsetse flies are bloodthirsty. Natives of sub-Saharan Africa, tsetse flies can transmit the microbe Trypanosoma when they take a blood meal. That’s the protozoan that causes African sleeping sickness in people; without treatment, it’s fatal, and millions of people are at risk due to the bite of a tsetse fly. My entomology research focuses on insects that feed on the blood of people and animals. From a human health standpoint, understanding what makes all these bugs tick is key to developing ways to control them and prevent transmission of the diseases they carry, such as malaria, dengue, Lyme disease, West Nile virus and many others. Tsetse flies stand out from their blood-feeding cousins the mosquitoes and ticks because of their unique reproductive biology. They give birth to live young...

Black men face high discrimination and depression, even as their education and incomes rise

22Jul

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SOCIAL JUSTICE

Black men face high discrimination and depression, even as their education and incomes rise

Are you a highly educated and relatively wealthy Black man in the U.S.? Studies that we have done and also those by others show that you are at increased risk of discrimination and depression. Our research on the intersection of race and gender in the U.S. shows that while education and income reduce the risk of discrimination and depression for whites and Black women, this is not so for Black men. This underscores other research we have done that suggests Black men are especially singled out as dangerous, threatening and inferior. The first author, Shervin Assari, is a physician and an associate professor of family medicine at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. Many of his studies have documented that black men still face depression, which could stem from discrimination,...