Blog

By Trudy Lieberman, Center for Health Journalism, September 17, 2019 Pity the poor consumer trying to understand the coming Congressional debate over surprise medical bills. Recall they are those staggering amounts of debt heaped on unsuspecting patients after they believed insurance had paid for their care. Those bills are growing rapidly and ensnaring more and more Americans in what has become one of the medical industry’s most unsavory business practices. And yet as unseemly as the...

By Elizabeth Arnold, Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center, May 29, 2018 In July of 2008, as a national broadcast correspondent, I reported on environmental conditions in Newtok, a remote community of roughly 400 Yup’ik people in Northwest Alaska. Newtok was losing forty to a hundred feet of coastline a year to erosion, and sinking because of “permafrost” that is no longer permanent, the direct result of a warming climate. Flooding threatened homes, the school, and the only supply of...

By Taressa K. Fraze, Amanda L. Brewster, Valerie A. Lewis, et al., JAMA Network Open, September 18, 2019 Question: What types of physician practices and hospitals self-report screening patients for food, housing, transportation, utilities, and interpersonal violence needs? Findings: In a cross-sectional study of US hospitals and physician practices, approximately 24% of hospitals and 16% of physician practices reported screening for food insecurity, housing instability, utility needs,...

By Joan L. Luby, Rebecca Tillman, Deanna M. Barch, JAMA Network Open, September 18, 2019 Question: Is there developmental timing and regional specificity to the associations among adverse childhood experiences, caregiver support, and structural brain development in childhood? Findings: This cohort study of 211 children and their caregivers during 4 waves of neuroimaging and behavioral assessments from preschool to adolescence found an association between the interaction of preschool adverse...

I’m Peter Chiavetta, 1st Assistant Fire Chief in my local fire department. I respond to EMS 911 calls every week. I received this dispatch during the evening. Meet PD for mental health transport. Upon my arrival I am briefed by PD that I have a victim of a suicide attempt. My patient put a shot gun in their mouth and pulled the trigger. 99.9997 percent of the time a bullet primer will fire. That’s how reliable it is. This time there was a missed fire. My patient gets a second chance at life.

By Bridgette L. Jones, Vincent Staggs, and Brianna Woods-Jaeger, Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, September 17, 2019 African American and Hispanic children are more likely to have a diagnosis of asthma and significantly higher disease related morbidity in comparison to non-Hispanic white children. Mortality rates are likewise higher as African American children are 8 times more likely than non-Hispanic white children to die from asthma 1. The cause of this striking health...

By Jeff Grabmeier, Ohio State News, September 17, 2019 Researchers have long known that childhood trauma is linked to poorer health for women at midlife. A new study shows one important reason why. The national study of more than 3,000 women is the first to find that those who experienced childhood trauma were more likely than others to have their first child both earlier in life and outside of marriage – and that those factors were associated with poorer health later in life. The findings...

By Claudia Deschamps, NBC News, September 16, 2019 There are significant long-term effects of not addressing trauma early. Building resilience is key to helping children overcome traumatic events, like a school shooting or a hurricane. Dr. Julie Kaplow, director of the Trauma and Grief Center at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, leads several initiatives focused on understanding how resilience works and how it can be used to heal trauma. [ Please click here to read more .]

By Laura Santhanam, Public Broadcasting Service, September 16, 2019 A staggering one in 16 women said they were raped by force or coercion the first time they had sexual intercourse, according to a new study of government survey data. Survivors reported higher rates of unwanted first pregnancy, abortion and an array of other physical and mental health problems, study authors wrote in an analysis published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. What does the study say?

By Conor P. Williams and Rosario Quiroz Villareal, LA School Report, September 16, 2019 It was a busy, if often frustrating, summer for the Trump administration’s many efforts to destabilize U.S. immigration policies. Federal judges ruled in August that, under a longstanding legal agreement, the administration was required to provide detained children at the border with “edible food, clean water, soap and toothpaste.” So the administration announced that it would write new regulations to...

Sonoma County ACEs Connection members Allen Nishikawa and Lena Hoffman at California Policymaker Education Day, 2018 Allen Nishikawa, a sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, majored in political science and American history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he participated in antiwar (Vietnam) marches. But it was his experience as a military brat — moving from school to school across the U.S. and even to Japan as a child — that shaped his own childhood experiences and...

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris (l) and Karina Chicote, Churchill Fellow from western Australia meet after congressional hearing After watching the hearing on a monitor in the overflow room, Karina Chicote, a Churchill Fellow from western Australia, and I hustled to the hearing room in hopes of speaking to the lead witness, Nadine Burke Harris, MD, the first Surgeon General of the State of California. She was deep in conversation with others, including a young woman who wanted to tell her how...