This post originally appeared on www.LiveWellNewYork.com By Hulya M. Erhan, PhD, Clinical Neuropsychologist at the Yarmon Neurobehavior and Alzheimer’s Disease Center
Elizabeth Padilla and her mother, Petra, share many of the same qualities. Both are vibrant, chatty and independent. But Elizabeth began to notice that her mother was being robbed of the traits they once shared.
The culprit was Alzheimer’s disease. (more…)
On Tuesday, March 5 a team of physicians from Roosevelt Hospital’s Center for Endovascular Surgery performed the first of a series of procedures to treat a 2-year-old boy from the Dominican Republic who was born with a disfiguring lesion on his face.
The 1½-hour procedure was the first of three or four that Alejandro Berenstein, MD, Director of the Hyman-Newman Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery and his comprehensive team will perform on toddler Joel De La Rosa. (more…)
Dan Foster remembers sitting with his primary care physician as they discussed the results from a colonoscopy. He was hoping his doctor was going to say the first diagnosis was a mistake. Just days before, Dan had been rushed to the hospital with pain that simply wouldn’t go away. Doctors ordered a colonoscopy, and it showed evidence of cancer.
Chronic disease is exactly that, chronic. Therefore, a diagnosis of any chronic disease is life altering. I spend the majority of my days doing my best to take care of patients with diabetes. For their sakes, I ask them to be compliant, that is, to follow the many guidelines carefully so they stay as healthy as possible and avoid long-term complications of their disease.
Many times, a patient’s condition is not well controlled due to barriers that are preventing his successful compliance such as depression, poor insight into the disease, failure to adjust to the change in lifestyle that comes with the condition, or denial. Addressing these compliance barriers will hopefully facilitate future success in preventing complications.
In an attempt to understand a patient’s challenges to stay compliant, I decided to live the life of one of my patients for a bit. I recently wore an insulin pump for 72 hours. This was an extremely insightful experience! (more…)