Nurses are raging and quitting after RaDonda Vaught verdict : Shots

April 9, 2022 Vera

The conviction of RaDonda Vaught in an accidental injection death has sparked fear and outrage among many nurses, who have been faced with long hours, mounting responsibilites and staffing shortages.

Nicole Hester/AP

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Nicole Hester/AP

The conviction of RaDonda Vaught in an accidental injection death has sparked fear and outrage among many nurses, who have been faced with long hours, mounting responsibilites and staffing shortages.

Nicole Hester/AP

Emma Moore felt cornered. At a community health clinic in Portland, Ore., the 29-year-old nurse practitioner said she felt overwhelmed and undertrained. Coronavirus patients flooded the clinic for two years, and Moore struggled to keep up.

Then the stakes became clear. On March 25, about 2,400 miles away in a Tennessee courtroom, former nurse RaDonda Vaught was convicted of two felonies and now faces eight years in prison for a fatal medication mistake.

Like many nurses, Moore wondered if that could be her. She’d made medication errors before, although none so grievous. But what about the next one? In the pressure cooker of pandemic-era health care, another mistake felt inevitable.

Four days after Vaught’s verdict, Moore quit. She said the verdict contributed to her decision.

“It’s not worth the possibility or the likelihood that this will happen,” Moore said, “if I’m in a situation where I’m set up to fail.” In the wake of Vaught’s trial ― an extremely rare case of a health care worker being criminally prosecuted for a medical error ― nurses and nursing organizations have condemned the verdict through tens of thousands of social media posts, shares, comments and videos. They warn that the fallout will ripple through their profession, demoralizing and depleting the ranks of nurses already stretched thin by the pandemic. Ultimately, they say, it will worsen health care for all.

Statements from the American Nurses Association, the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, and the National Medical Association each said Vaught’s conviction set a “dangerous precedent.” Linda Aiken, a nursing and sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said that although Vaught’s case is an “outlier,” it will make nurses less forthcoming about mistakes.

“One thing that everybody agrees on is it’s going to have a dampening effect on the reporting of errors or near misses, which then has a detrimental effect on safety,” Aiken said. “The only way you can really learn about errors in these complicated systems is to have

How to reboot from unhealthy pandemic habits : Shots

March 13, 2022 Vera

Scheduling time on the calendar for a workout and setting small, achievable goals are just a couple of ways we can focus on rebuilding healthy habits.

Michael Driver for NPR

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Michael Driver for NPR

The early days of lockdown restrictions had a profound effect on people’s daily lives. Alcohol sales skyrocketed, physical activity dropped off sharply, and “comfort eating” led to weight gain, too.

So, what’s happened since March of 2020? After two years of pandemic life, many of these effects persist. The strategies we used to adapt and cope have cemented into habits for many of us. And this is not a surprise to scientists who study behavior change.

“We know when a shock arises and forces a change in our behavior for an extended period of time, there tend to be carryover effects because we’re sticky in our behaviors,” says Katy Milkman of the University of Pennsylvania, and author of the book How To Change. In other words, our pandemic habits may be hard to break.

Take, for example, alcohol consumption. During the first week of stay-at-home restrictions in March 2020, Nielsen tracked a 54% increase in national sales of alcohol. This came as bars and restaurants closed. A study from Rand documented a 41% increase in heavy drinking among women in the months that followed. (Heavy drinking was defined as four or more drinks for women within a few hours.)

“Of concern is the fact that increases in drinking are linked to stress and coping,” says Dr. Aaron White of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. He points to a study that found a 50% increase in the number of people who said they drank to cope in the months right after COVID began compared to before the pandemic.

After a spike in sales in the spring of 2020, alcohol sales dipped.

If you're trying to take a break from drinking, try these 6 strategies

But the most recent data from Nielsen show sales of beer, wine and spirits at the start of 2022 remain higher than they were in 2019. That trend is also reflected yearly: In 2019, spirit sales totaled about $16.3 billion, compared with $21 billion in 2021. Bottom line: Alcohol sales have remained higher than they were before the pandemic, even after adjusted for inflation.

Changes in physical activity have followed a similar pattern. Scientists at UC San Francisco analyzed data from a wellness smartphone app,

U.S. mental health care needs an overhaul, argues former NIMH director Tom Insel : Shots

March 2, 2022 Vera

For over a decade, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Thomas Insel headed the National Institute of Mental Health and directed billions of dollars into research on neuroscience and the genetic underpinnings of mental illnesses.

“Our efforts were largely to say, ‘How can we understand mental disorders as brain disorders, and how can we develop better tools for diagnosis and treatment?'” Insel said in an interview with NPR.

Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health by Thomas Insel, MD

But in the very first pages of his new book, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health, he admits that the results of that research have largely failed to help Americans struggling with mental illnesses.

“Our science was looking for causes, while the effects of these disorders were playing out with more death and disability, incarceration and homelessness, and increasing frustration and despair for both patients and families,” writes Insel.

But Insel’s book is less about the failure of science in helping people and more a critique of almost every aspect of the mental health system.

NPR sat down with Insel to talk about how he came to realize where America had failed and his journey to find the answers to addressing the country’s mental health crisis.

State by state, here's how well schools are doing at supporting kids' mental health

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What were some of the scientific discoveries and developments you oversaw during your time at NIMH?

We did several large clinical trials for depression, for schizophrenia, for bipolar disorder. The bottom line for most of those was that in the real world of care, medical treatments were not as good as we thought. And I think that was an important insight that really charged us to say we’ve got to do better in terms of developing more effective medications.

At the same time, I think we had a greater awareness, particularly in the later years of my tenure, that we could begin to combine treatments in a way that was very effective. And where we saw this the most was in how we began to address the first episode of psychosis for young people with a disorder like schizophrenia or with a form of bipolar disorder. What we began to understand is, that by combining medication and psychological and cognitive therapies, bringing in families and giving agency to the young person involved, providing academic and employment support, we could actually help kids recover. And that we could get to a point where kids who had

Anti-vaccine group uses telehealth to profit from unproven COVID-19 treatments : Shots

February 17, 2022 Vera

Ben Bergquam was hospitalized with COVID in January. He says he brought his own prescription for ivermectin — an unproven COVID therapy.

Screenshot by NPR/Facebook

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Ben Bergquam was hospitalized with COVID in January. He says he brought his own prescription for ivermectin — an unproven COVID therapy.

Screenshot by NPR/Facebook

Just before Christmas, a right-wing journalist named Ben Bergquam became seriously ill with COVID-19.

“My Christmas gift was losing my [sense of] taste and smell and having a 105-degree fever, and just feeling like garbage,” Bergquam said in a Facebook video that he shot as he lay in a California hospital.

“It’s scary. When you can’t breathe, it’s not a fun place to be,” he said.

Bergquam told his audience he wasn’t vaccinated, despite having had childhood asthma, a potentially dangerous underlying condition. Instead, he held up a bottle of the drug ivermectin. Almost all doctors do not recommend taking ivermectin for COVID, but many individuals on the political right believe that it works.

How ivermectin became the new focus of the anti-vaccine movement

The details revealed in Bergquam’s video provide a rare view into the prescription of an unproven COVID-19 therapy. Data shows that prescriptions for drugs like ivermectin have surged in the pandemic, but patient-doctor confidentiality often obscures exactly who is handing out the drugs.

Bergquam’s testimonial provides new and troubling details about a small group of physicians who are willing to eschew the best COVID-19 treatments and provide alternative therapies made popular by disinformation — for a price.

Ivermectin is usually prescribed to treat parasitic worms, and the best medical evidence to date shows that it doesn’t work against COVID-19. The Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, American Medical Association and two pharmaceutical societies all discourage prescribing ivermectin for COVID-19, and many doctors and hospitals will not give it to patients who are seeking treatment.

But fueled by conspiracy theories about vaccine safety and alternative treatments, many on the political right incorrectly believe ivermectin is a secret cure-all for COVID. As millions of Americans fell ill with COVID last summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported ivermectin prescriptions were at 24 times pre-pandemic levels. The agency says prescriptions again rose during the latest omicron surge.

A significant number of these prescriptions come from a small minority of doctors who are willing to write them, often using telemedicine to do so, according to

For the duration of COVID surges, rural hospitals battle to transfer clients : Shots

February 12, 2022 Vera

It experienced only been about 6 months given that Katie Ripley finished radiation treatment for Stage 4 breast cancer. But now the 33-calendar year-outdated was again in the medical center. This time, it wasn’t most cancers – she was nevertheless in remission – but she’d appear down with a unpleasant respiratory an infection.

It wasn’t COVID, but her immune defenses had been weakened by the most cancers solutions, and the infection had designed into pneumonia.

Most cancers survivor Katie Ripley desired specialized ICU treatment, but there was no mattress to transfer her to in the location for the duration of omicron surge.

Kai Eiselein

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Kai Eiselein

Cancer survivor Katie Ripley necessary specialised ICU care, but there was no mattress to transfer her to in the region for the duration of omicron surge.

Kai Eiselein

By the time Ripley made it to Gritman Clinical Centre, the regional clinic in Moscow, Idaho, on January 6, her affliction was deteriorating promptly. The illness had started off impacting her liver and kidneys.

Her father, Kai Eiselein, remembers the horror of that night time, when he realized she wanted specialized ICU treatment.

“The medical center below did not have the services for what she desired,” he says. “And no beds were readily available anywhere.”

Americans get sicker as omicron stalls everything from heart surgeries to cancer care

Ripley did not just need any bed. She needed a style of dialysis — known as constant renal alternative treatment — which is applied for critically sick sufferers, and is in high demand from customers in hospitals managing a ton of COVID.

In regular occasions, she would have been flown to a greater hospital in just several hours. Like a lot of rural hospitals, Gritman depends on getting capable to transfer patients to greater, improved-geared up hospitals for care that it are unable to give — whether or not that’s positioning a stent following a coronary heart assault or treating a life-threatening infection.

But hospitals all above the Pacific Northwest at the time were being swamped with a surge of COVID-19 sufferers. And like wellness care devices in numerous pieces of the country, the affected individual load indicates there is certainly generally nowhere to transfer even the most essential cases.

Katie Ripley had designed it via months of most cancers remedy — surgical procedures, chemo and radiation– obtaining a new probability at existence with her spouse and two younger young ones. Her father was devastated to see

What to do if you test positive for COVID : Shots

February 8, 2022 Vera

Flat vector illustration depicting Coronavirus 2019-nCoV symptoms and prevention tips

Omicron is so ridiculously contagious that even if you follow recommended precautions, you still might get it. And if your job requires you to interact with people or if you have kids in your household, forget it; it can feel more like a “when” rather than an “if.”

So while it’s still important to try to keep COVID-19 out of your household — since you never know when someone could end up seriously ill — here’s what to do if you or someone you live with does get it.

We talked to four experts who laid out the steps you need to take to care for your physical and mental health, and how to keep your community safe, from the moment you or a member of your household has been exposed to when you can spring back into regular life post-recovery.

Because, yes, this can be a scary, stressful and logistically confusing time. So take a deep breath. You’ve got this. Here we go.

Step 1: Confirm whether you really have COVID

If you are showing signs of a virus (fever, headache, congestion, sore throat, gastrointestinal issues), what you do next might depend on your access to testing, says Dr. Cassandra Pierre, medical director of public health programs at Boston Medical Center and a parent of 4-year-old twins who just had COVID-19.

If you have a decent supply of at-home antigen tests, says Pierre, go ahead and take one as soon as you feel ill. “But do not,” she stresses, “use that test as proof-positive that you can go out and interact in society, thinking it’s just a cold.” Many people are using an early negative test as a false sense of assurance, she says.

“With the omicron variant,” says Pierre, “we’re seeing a lot of antigen tests come back negative within the first two days of symptoms and then after a few days, come back positive.” So if you have access to a number of at-home tests, it’s worth taking that early one because some people will test positive in those first couple of days and then they will know they need to isolate (here’s a refresher on the difference between isolation and quarantine).

For those who are symptomatic and test negative the first time, go ahead and take a second test on Day 3 or 4, says Pierre. That’s when most of the positive test results are