Looming over a heart-wrenching image of a hospitalized woman is the grim message that “chronic Lyme disease” is as disabling as congestive heart failure. The online ad aims to spread awareness of the tick-transmitted disease creeping through the state. But health experts say chronic Lyme doesn’t exist and worry that what’s really lurking is misinformation.
May is Lyme disease awareness month, which coincides with the debut of young (nymph-stage) ticks that help transmit the disease. Vocal patient-advocacy groups, such as the California-based LymeDisease.org, which posted the online ad, say the disease is everywhere, difficult to treat and causes debilitating “chronic Lyme.”
But the Infectious Diseases Society of America, backed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, disagrees and is pushing back against what it considers part of a wave of anti-science health movements.
The dispute is heated. In the fall, a group of IDSA physicians and scientists, writing in an opinion piece in the medical journal The Lancet, equated people who believe in chronic Lyme to those who deny the benefits of vaccines and the existence of AIDS.
Yet, many advocacy groups have pushed — successfully — for laws that protect patients and doctors who believe in the chronic illness and don’t follow standard diagnostic procedures or treatments. California passed legislation in 2005 that shields doctors from professional discipline for prescribing alternative Lyme treatments.
To say the least, the divide is unfortunate, says Dr. Robert Lane, a leading tick-born disease expert and epidemiologist at UC Berkeley. “I think that both sides want to get to the truth,” he said. → Continue reading Tick Season Reveals Debate Over Lyme Disease
In the first part of this article, we discussed some general tips about how to lessen the risk for occurrences of back injury at the workplace. I had a chance to further discuss this matter with some of my peers, and I discovered I left out some rather good ideas.
So here are 5 more ways to reduce the risk for workers sustaining back injuries while at work.
1. Use a dolly or other wheeled device for moving boxes and materials.
Instead of having the worker carry boxes by hand or push them across the floor to their destination, require workers to use a dolly. Not only can more material be moved in one trip, but it is easier and safer as well. This may seem like simple common sense, but it may seem surprising how many employers do not have a dolly or wheeled cart. It really is amazing! A dolly or cart is the oldest mode of moving material around, and for an employer not to have one is quite frankly surprising. Using the dolly will lessen the workload for the worker’s muscles, allowing them to be more productive and less prone to injury. Get one with bigger tires, and strong fabrication. Make sure it can handle the weight of the work demands.
2. Wearing lumbar supports
If there are workers that have to manually move material by hand, get them some lumbar supports. In addition to teaching them the proper way to lift, a lumbar support will help to keep the spine in proper alignment, forcing the lower half of the body to carry the burden of the task at hand. This alone will result in decreased injury due to improper lifting. It is possible to still sustain a lumbar strain while wearing a lumbar support, but wearing one lessens the chances. Everyone that works at the plant does not need one; just get enough for dock workers or for any workers that have to do repetitive carrying on a daily basis.
3. Wearing proper footwear
Feet take a beating day in and day out. This is especially true for those on their feet all day, while wearing work boots and walking on hard surfaces. But the woes of foot pain are not just for the construction worker; retail workers and others have job demands where they have to stand for a long time. To lessen this pain, workers should be encouraged to use sole inserts for their boots or shoes. This will lessen the “shock” your spine has to absorb from your work demands, and make feet and legs feel better and less fatigued. These sole inserts are usually pretty cheap, especially when purchased in bulk. → Continue reading 5 More Ways to Reduce the Risk of Back Injuries
Follow it to big savings for California healthcare
Dr. Mehmet Oz joined California state officials Monday in launching a pilot workplace-wellness program aimed at getting public workers to improve their health as a way to save the state money on health care costs.
The host of “The Dr. Oz Show” appeared with the state controller and state treasurer in Sacramento to launch “Health Happens in the Workplace,” which will focus on preventing chronic diseases.
“Remember, for every dollar we invest to make you healthier, the state and you save three bucks,” Oz told a crowd of several hundred state workers gathered in the outdoor courtyard of the California Museum. “It’s the wisest decision.”
A study commissioned by the state controller’s office found that California could save between $18 million and $54 million a year if between 5 percent and 15 percent of its government workers are able to prevent chronic diseases.
The study by the Urban Institute found that California spent $1.6 billion on health care in 2008. About 22 percent, or $362 million, was spent on preventable conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure.
State Controller John Chiang told workers that staying healthy will help control skyrocketing medical costs. State Treasurer Bill Lockyer used himself as an example, noting that he has lost 40 pounds this year through exercise and eating right.
HealthCorps, a Sacramento-based nonprofit founded by Dr. Oz and his wife to fight childhood obesity, will partner with the state on the pilot program along with The California Endowment, Kaiser Permanente and the Service Employees International Union Local 1000, which is the largest state workers union.
Oz said he hopes the workplace-wellness program will be a model for the rest of the country.
“I’m pleading with you. You guys are going first. If we don’t do it right in California, it’s not going to be able to spread across this nation,” Oz said.
Oz told the audience that he performed bypass heart surgery three years ago on a 25-year-old woman. To celebrate, her husband brought her a platter of hamburgers and fries.
“I realized right then and there, that all of you pay people like me a lot of money to do things to you. But that’s not where the value is,” he said. “The reason you ignore that message is that we haven’t given it to you the right way.”
The pilot program, which will start with the Department of Public Health, will focus on health education, employee screenings and supportive physical and social environments.
During the rally, Oz, a heart surgeon, jumped off the stage to tend to a state worker who had fainted while standing in the sun during the event. Department of Public Health worker Eunice Pannell said afterward that she didn’t know she had blacked out. She was treated and released by paramedics on scene.
It’s official: distracted driving is a prominent and serious threat to employee safety, and the Department of Labor is pulling out the big guns to tackle the problem. Last week, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis announced the DOL’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration will partner with the Department of Transportation for a new initiative combating distracted driving. Sec. Solis specifically called out American employers, challenging them to do more to discourage employee cell phone use while driving.
On Monday, OSHA took its first step toward fulfilling its new mandate, launching an online resource aimed at reducing work-related distracted driving:http://www.osha.gov/distracted-driving. The new website will educate employees on their rights to a safe, hazard-free work environment – and employers of their responsibility to maintain that safe workplace.
Announcing the new website, Assistant Secretary of Labor Dr. David Michaels said, “OSHA’s message to all companies whose employees drive on the job is straightforward: It is your responsibility and legal obligation to have a clear, unequivocal and enforced policy against texting while driving.”
OSHA is putting employers on notice: create an employee cell phone use policy andenforce it. The hallmark of modern business is constant connectivity – which puts a burden on employees to be immediately responsive to client or supervisor requests. To be compliant with federal safety regulations, however, employers will have to face distracted driving head-on. It’s not enough to implement a paper policy prohibiting employees from texting or emailing while driving. OSHA’s new initiative says that employers are responsible for ensuring that their workers observe those prohibitions. Leveraging safe driving technology to ensure that compliance is one simple way employers can meet these new safety requirements.
Los Angeles, CA, United States (KaiserHealth) – It would be easy to confuse Dr. Mitch Katz with any other doctor at the Roybal Comprehensive Health Center in East Los Angeles. His desk in a closet-sized, windowless office is littered with patient records, x-rays and cans of Diet Coke.
Dr. Mitch Katz rides his bike to work, defying the commuting norm in Los Angeles. (Photo by Michael Wilson/L.A.County Health Services Dept.)
Dr. Mitch Katz rides his bike to work, defying the commuting norm in Los Angeles. (Photo by Michael Wilson/L.A.County Health Services Dept.)
His everyman demeanor belies his stature: As director of the county’s Department of Health Services, Katz oversees LA’s public hospitals and clinics, the health care of last resort for millions of low-income Angelenos. He has 22,000 employees and a $3.7-billion dollar budget.
Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest city with some 2 million uninsured residents, has long had one of the most disorganized systems. To fix it, Katz, the former director of San Francisco’s health department, insists on seeing patients at this public health clinic one afternoon a week. It’s a demand that struck many as odd, if not impossible. How would Katz have time to treat patients with a system in ruin? Katz is starting one clinic at a time.
On a recent morning, Katz sits opposite his patient, a middle-aged man who is a bundle of nerves. Katz speaks Spanish with his native Brooklyn accent and patiently explains the possible causes of his tumor and what he hopes a visit to a lung specialist will reveal.
“I wanted him to know that he would never be abandoned or alone figuring it out. My view is that this lowers people’s anxiety levels and they don’t wind up in the emergency room because now they’re very frightened about what they have. They need a plan,” he explained.
Katz’s primary aim though, and what he came to Los Angeles to do, is to steer low-income Angelenos away from the overburdened emergency rooms they’ve long relied upon and into primary care clinics where costs are lower, chronic diseases can be managed and problems, like a tumor, can be detected earlier.
He says that when he took the job, “they sent me the LA org chart, I said where’s primary care? They said, ‘Well, it’s under the hospitals.’ [I said] Well, that may explain why you have a problem with primary care!”
It didn’t take long for that to change: In the last six months, his team has assigned nearly 250,000 people to a primary care doctor at county clinics, he says, adding: “In fact, I didn’t have to hire a single additional doctor. What I did is say: ‘No, we’re not running this anymore as a drop-in, see-who-you-see-and-no-one-is-responsible’ system.”
Katz’s predecessors promised many of the same reforms, but government observers here say they were stymied by a Board of Supervisors which often governs Los Angeles like five competing fiefdoms.
Employers are the bedrock of our current health care system. Nearly 55% of Americans, totaling 169 million individuals, receive health insurance through their employer. As the largest purchasers of health care, employers, both large and small, are uniquely situated to help provide leadership in finding solutions, and can exert transformative change.
Workplace wellness programs are a win-win for both the employer and employees. Employees who participate in workplace wellness programs are fitter, more productive, have better morale, and are safer than employees who do not otherwise treat their chronic conditions. Employers who offer wellness initiatives have achieved excellent returns on their investment. Programs that follow best practice guidelines return $2 to $3 dollars for each dollar invested.
Brochure
Please read this brochure for instructional steps on how to set up a workplace wellness program.
Instructional Video Listen to an expert in the field, Anne Marie Ludovici-Connolly, give a brief tutorial on how to set up a workplace wellness program. Ms. Ludovici-Connolly is a subject matter expert in health, wellness and prevention, and author of Winning Health Promotions Strategies, a how-to guide on how to plan, develop, and implement successful worksite wellness programs.
Gamification Boosts Employee Health Behavior. Blue Shield of California finds social apps and rewards engage its employees in wellness programs, sees potential for its insurance customers.
A major West Coast health plan has jumped on the social gaming/networking trend in fitness and wellness applications. Blue Shield of California is already offering one such program to its employees and will soon provide two more. The company is also trying to sell its employer customers on the idea that this approach can help engage workers in their own healthcare.
Blue Shield launched Wellvolution, a wellness initiative for its own employees, in 2009. This program had some impact, but the company eventually realized that it could do even better, Bryce Williams, director of Wellvolution, told InformationHealth Healthcare.
Recent research had shown the power of social connectedness in improving health outcomes, and mobile health apps were suddenly catching on among consumers. “So it made sense to take the technology that people were already using and comfortable with and migrate that to a health platform that included social media and social gaming,” Williams explained.
Blue Shield’s first move was to try an application called Shape Up Shield that focuses on increasing physical activity. “This is an eight-week-long, social-media-fueled challenge that uses an online platform to let employees form teams, post comments in forums, set team and personal fitness goals, and give virtual ‘high fives’ for encouragement,” a Blue Shield spokesman said. “In 2011, over 1,800 Shape Up Shield participants walked, hiked and ran 600 million steps,” about 300,000 miles.
One of Blue Shield’s new programs, The Daily Challenge from MeYou Health, is similar to Shape Up Shield, in that it uses social media, including Facebook, to make wellness fun. But instead of confining itself to physical exercise, it gives participants a series of individually tailored Daily Challenges, Williams noted. The Daily Challenge is “a simple activity that improves your wellbeing.” That might be physical, emotional, or mental, he said. (The MeYou website says, “the Daily Challenge promotes everyday wellbeing by encouraging the small actions and fostering the social ties that drive meaningful change.”) MeYou’s program features the hallmarks of social gaming, such as points, badges, status, and progression.
Another application, Healthrageous, uses mobile devices to get patients involved in wellness and chronic disease care. Based on personal data collected on these devices, Healthrageous advises and supports patients in meeting their health goals. The program also includes a social media element: participants can compete and share their experiences online. → Continue reading Time to Play Games at Work?
A third of U.S. consumers now use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to seek medical information and track and share symptoms. They’re also using the sites to vent about doctors, drugs, treatments, medical devices and health plans.
The survey of 1040 U.S. consumers was put together by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and includes data from a separate survey of healthcare and pharmaceutical executives on how social media is used in their business strategies.
Not unexpectedly, young adults rely on social networks for healthcare information far more than older Americans. The survey found that more than 80 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 24 said they’re likely to share health information through social media channels—and nearly 90 percent said they would trust information found there.
By comparison, less than half (45 percent) of those surveyed between the ages of 45 and 64 said they’re likely to share health information via social media.
The PwC report showed that four in ten consumers have used social media to find health-related consumer reviews of treatments or doctors; one in three have sought information related to other patients’ experiences with their disease; and one in four have posted comments about their health experience.
“The power of social media for health organizations is in listening and engaging with consumers on their terms,” Kelly Barnes, U.S. Health Industries leader at PwC, said in a statement. “Social media has created a new customer service access point where consumers expect an immediate response.”
And 72 percent of those surveyed said they would use social networks for scheduling doctor visits and nearly half said they would expect a response within a few hours after doing so. → Continue reading Paging Dr. Facebook and Nurse Twitter
Still Sour: Sugar Politics vs. Health and the Economy
Every morning I put about half a teaspoon of sugar in my coffee. And I love it. That is the single use I have for the stuff, although I’m aware it’s contained, and often hidden, in so many forms in other things I eat or drink, even though I have always been a healthy eater.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta of 60 Minutes just did a segment titled “Sugar and Kids – The Toxic Truth” Almost a year ago, the New York Times Magazine featured a cover story titled “Is Sugar Toxic?” wherein University of California pediatrics professor Robert Lustig, featured in both these reports, basically answers with an emphatic “yes.”
I’ve been a little reluctant to apply the term “toxic” to sugar, as that often seems to imply that a substance is unhealthy, even deadly, at any level — “the dose makes the poison” is the longstanding toxicological maxim. But that maxim is being challenged on a number of fronts, particularly some industrial chemicals that can impact our health at much lower levels than previously suspected. Plus, we now have to consider the time we are exposed — kids, even embryos, can be particularly vulnerable to some substances, even sugar. But semantics should not be the issue here; if sugar, at levels it is being consumed by many kids and adults, is causing obesity, diabetes, and a host of other conditions, “toxic” might well apply. And thus, when Lustig and his colleagues recommend taxes, controlling access, and restrictions on sales of high sugar products in schools and workplaces, it increasingly makes sense.
One thing is undeniable, though — the politics of sugar can be toxic. When San Francisco considered a penny tax on sodas last year, a couple of reactions were predictable. First, an outburst of mostly anonymous online comments in a frenzy reminiscent of a group of preschool children who had consumed too much sugar. Second came denunciations by the soda industry and at least one so-called “consumer” group funded by them. → Continue reading Is Sugar the Next Political Healthcare Football?
Scientific evidence is growing that adequate sleep is critical in working safely and maintaining optimal health. A recent study warns that a growing number of Americans are not getting enough sleep. This trend for shorter sleep is likely linked to global competition on
businesses, cost of living increases pushing workers to work longer hours, as well as personal choice to spend time on other activities besides sleep because of a lack of knowledge about the importance of sleep…
Inadequate sleep has critical negative impacts on the workplace. The risks from fatigued workers are broad reaching and extend from workers to employers and society. Risks to employers include reduced productivity and increases in worker errors and incidents ranging from medical errors to industrial disasters. Fatigue is a recognized risk factor for vehicle crashes and has been implicated in well-known disasters such as the 2009 Buffalo jet crash and the 2005 BP Texas City explosion.
In December 2010, Healthy People 2020, the US national public health goals for the next 10 years, launched a new chapter for Sleep Health. There are four objectives: 1) increase the proportion of persons with symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea who seek medical evaluation; 2) reduce the rate of vehicular crashes due to drowsy driving; 3) increase the proportion of students in grades 9 through 12 who get 8 or more hours sleep each day; and, 4) increase the proportion of adults who get 7 or more hours sleep each day. NIOSH scientists are working on training programs to improve fatigue and sleep-related issues for workplaces. These will be added to the NIOSH topic page for work schedules as they become available (http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/workschedules/). Check out the latest entry on the NIOSH Science Blog related to Sleep and Work http://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2012/03/sleep-and-work/
For more tips on improving sleep and to learn what scientists are doing to improve societal well-being through sleep research, check out:
