Grace Ross: Stalked By A Death That Was Actually Preventable
Tuesday, October 08, 2013
We had a friend, Cindy Chapman, who may be familiar to those around Worcester since she kept her hands in on many community concerns who died of cancer. She had Medicare but there were no doctors taking new patients. It was as if she had no health coverage. She had been feeling very ill and had gone to one emergency room to the next in the city. Doctors who looked at her could not figure out what the problem was and sent her home. She went back in and the doctors once again said they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. She kept getting worse and worse: pain symptoms, weakness, until she simply was too sick to really function. She went to an emergency room and simply refused to leave; they bodily picked her up and dumped her outside! She lost weight and became thin at a noticeable speed and had us all terribly worried. With friends with her, she finally went to an emergency room and really got seen by a doctor who very quickly realized she needed immediate admittance. The next day, she was diagnosed with end stage cancer. It had gone undiagnosed. As somebody without a regular physician, they kept sending her home when they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. She died three weeks later - from a presumably completely preventable death if she had been properly diagnosed early on. But she wasn’t.
It turns out that after heart disease and cancer, which stalk our lives and our neighborhoods, that the next most common cause of death may well be the category known as “preventable”.
We get advice about what to eat, to exercise, medications to take (how many folks are on Coumadin?) because of concerns about blood clots and possible heart attacks. We hear extraordinary stories like my friend, Craig, who had a stroke and they caught it so fast that they could give him the medication that literally can reverse the impacts of a stroke; he is miraculously well these days.
Or we get told about early screenings to catch cancer. Even as the incidents of diagnoses of cancer seems to increase, we hear of treatments with frequent success leading to people being in remission or even techniques that allow people to live now with cancer for long periods of time instead of dying. Some cancer researchers and community activists have pointed to and begun to turn the tide on environmental factors such as, believe or not, the shutting down of the Yankee nuclear power plant which has been spewing Strontium 90 all these years.
It turns out that the third most common cause of death is what actually killed our friend. It wasn’t cancer, it was lack of treatment. The U.S., of all the countries in the world, seems to have the highest rate of preventable death.
A recent study, which only looked at the question of preventable death in terms of statistics from hospitals, has found a much higher rate of preventable deaths (220 million) than the common figure quoted which I included in my book, Main Street Smarts (80 million). Researchers have review the methodology of this study and agree it is persuasive. It points to the statistical likelihood that preventable death is the third highest cause of death in the U.S.
What does this mean? You go to a hospital and you don’t get treated. You don’t get treated because you get turned away. There might be an expensive test or treatment but your health insurance won’t cover it or the co-pay is too much or you have no health insurance.
Or you get sent home early before you should’ve been sent home because the insurance only wants to pay for the very minimum of days necessary. There have even been initiatives to try to sanction patients who come back to hospitals for treatment after an operation because they’ve had a complication and the healthcare industry has tried to blame them for not having somehow taken good enough care of themselves after they got sent home too early.
I had a friend who basically said he would commit civil disobedience if they sent him home because he was not physically able yet after his operation. It had been a routine operation, but if he went home unable to take care of himself and unable to dress the wound and do the various things necessary, he might well have been in that statistic of folks who ended up back in the hospital needing additional treatment and potentially dying from it as many people do.
There is no prescription about how to eat and how to exercise and how to make life choices or even fight environmental factors that addresses the issue of preventable illness. The real question is whether we can advocate for each other at the individual level and the policy level so that we don’t fall victim to that disease known as “preventable”. If we can trust what are bodies are telling us, if we need help or treatment, even if the folks with the degrees and the health insurance industry are telling us we don’t. It’s simple. We need to stand up: no more Cindys – not me, not you.
Grace Ross is the author of Main Street Smarts.
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