COVER STORY
Post-pandemic healthcare By Elizabeth Morse Read
We’ve all just emerged from fifteen months of enforced hibernation, an incredibly stressful period of isolation, lockdowns, and serious disruptions of everyday routines, leaving people cut off from family, friends, and familiar faces. Many people were so afraid of catching the Covid-19 virus by going to a doctor’s office, urgent care center, or hospital that they waited until they were literally dying before they would seek medical help. It will take years to recover from that sudden gap in medical care, both personal and institutional. Sixty percent of Americans have at least one chronic disease, and 25% have two or more, all of which require regular monitoring. So delayed health care during the pandemic has resulted in worsening
chronic diseases and missed opportunities for early detection of new diseases. During the worst months of the pandemic, many Americans ignored or just endured warning symptoms of serious
NOT JUST FOR GLASSES ANYMORE Most people think that going to the eye doctor is just for getting a new prescription for glasses or contact lenses. However, if you have any chronic medical condition or you wear glasses or contact lenses, you need to schedule an annual appointment with an eye doctor. Regular dilated eye exams with an ophthalmologist (not an optician or a work/ school nurse) are not just a test for visual acuity – eye exams not only detect early signs of eye-related health problems like glaucoma or cataracts, but can also detect early symptoms of non-vision-related disorders like high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s disease, arteriosclerosis, diabetes, metastatic cancer, herpes, lupus, and even Crohn’s disease. They provide the eye doctor with a window into your overall health, not just your vision.
disease – chest pain, severe headaches, numbness – all because they were terrified of catching Covid-19 in a doctor’s waiting room. As a result, deaths caused by chronic conditions like heart disease, stroke and diabetes increased, even though visits to the emergency rooms for those conditions were noticeably down. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), by June of last year, emergency room visits for heart attacks had dropped 23%; for strokes, 20%; and for uncontrolled high blood sugar, 10%. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the states hit hardest by Covid-19 deaths in March and April 2020 (e.g., Massachusetts and New York) also reported a huge spike in deaths caused by chronic CONTINUED ON PAGE 24
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July 2021 | The South Coast Insider
