closer look
Finding ways to be fine, through poetry
Photo illustration: Casey Shenery for STAT
When Leena Danawala's poem "chronicity" was published in JAMA last month, it offered a rare public view into her life with a form of small vessel vasculitis called granulomatosis with polyangiitis. Through her poetry, the 34-year-old rheumatologist said, she can better see how her illness has changed her. She recently spoke with STAT's Isabella Cueto.
You wrote in 2013 about finally getting your diagnosis.
I went through all the stages of grief during that time. The hardest part of getting a diagnosis is a loss of your sense of self — who you were as a person is no longer the same.
The final line in "chronicity" says, "perhaps someday god will tell me i am fine."
I'm always, constantly trying to find ways to be fine. It's very much a balance between pretending you're OK and then letting yourself not be OK.
Read the full interview.
health care
Americans put faith in nurses as overall confidence in health care ebbs
Gallup polls earlier this year indicated that Americans' level of faith in their country's health care system is the lowest it's been in a decade. But if you want to take a glass-half-full perspective, the latest Gallup survey indicates that faith in nurses is still fairly high. Results released yesterday say 82% of Americans rated nurses' medical care as excellent or good — down six percentage points from 2010, but far better than the 69% who said the same of doctors (down 15 percentage points).
Entities with middling scores included hospitals (58%), walk-in or urgent care clinics (56%), and telemedicine or virtual doctor visits (52%). Faring worse were hospital emergency rooms (47%), pharmaceutical or drug companies (33%), health insurance companies (31%), and nursing homes (25%).
addiction
Opinion: The U.S. must raise federal alcohol taxes
Cara Poland, an addiction medicine physician at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, tells a harrowing, heartbreaking story of losing her 24-year-old brother, who was a university graduate and former law student, to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His death, two days before Christmas, followed a decade of hard and continuous drinking interspersed with addiction and mental health treatment, but he could not sustain his recovery.
"Like so many others who survived the loss of someone dear from the chaos of severe substance use disorder, I am too familiar with unspeakable grief," she writes in a STAT First Opinion about what her work has taught her. "To help stop the addiction crisis that has brought so much sorrow to families like mine, policymakers must prioritize prevention at all levels and support evidence-based prevention initiatives — including raising federal excise taxes on alcohol." Read more on how that has worked and why it needs an update.
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. For TTY users: Use your preferred relay service or dial 711 then 988.
On this week's First Opinion podcast, First Opinion Editor Torie Bosch talks with De-Shaine Murray, co-founder of Black in Neuro, about how past and present racism in neuroscience could be reflected in the future, especially as neurotechnology tools such as brain implants become more common. Listen here.
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