Living with arthritis can be disconcerting and disruptive. The stiffness and pain make it hard to do the everyday tasks that most people often take for granted. Even simple things like cooking dinner or wearing your shoes can be exhausting.

So, if you have arthritis, it’s essential to take good care of yourself to improve in doing your daily task, relieving the pain as well as coping with difficult emotions. If your loved one is suffering from juvenile arthritis and you need financial assistance, you can ask legal experts who published an article about it to know if their condition is qualified for disability benefits.

Although living with arthritis is hard, there are some things and do-it-yourself strategies that’ll help you conserve your energy, accomplish daily tasks easily, adapt to lifestyle disruptions, and protect your joints.

Below are some of the things you should know about when you’re living with arthritis:

1. Take Extra Care of Yourself

Staying on top of arthritis and taking extra care of yourself is a huge part of your arthritis treatment. For instance, take all your prescribed medicines as directed by your doctor. Don’t skip a dose and always tell your doctor if you experience any side effects.

Even when your stiffness and pain are less of a problem, keep all your medical appointments. Consult your doctor regularly. If possible, consult a rheumatologist to review your treatment plan and if it requires any tweaks.

2. Be Aware of Your Treatment Options

There are countless treatments you can consider to relieve stiffness and pain and slow down the progress of your arthritis. You can work with a healthcare expert to determine the best combination of treatments that are suitable for the kind of arthritis that you have. There are different kinds of arthritis like osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, where joints were mostly affected. The treatment would depend on the amount of pain you experience.

3. Always Eat A Healthy and Well-Balanced Diet

One of the things that you should know about living with arthritis is the importance of eating a healthy and having a well-balanced diet. This kind of lifestyle will help you prevent having an inflammation. Fish, including sardines, tuna, trout, and salmon are full of omega-3 fatty acids that curb cytokines, the chemicals that cause inflammation.

In your diet, it’s also crucial to include fruits and vegetables that have antioxidants that fight the body’s damaging free-radical molecules. Choose whole grains such as barley, oatmeal, and brown rice. This kind of food also helps in reducing inflammation naturally.

If you don’t know what to include or remove from your diet, it’s best to ask for your doctor’s suggestion. He or she may refer you to the best dietitian and nutritionist in your local area.

4. Investing in Yourself Is Essential

You shouldn’t give up your life just because you’re diagnosed with arthritis. If you want to feel better, you must invest in yourself and you can do that by making important changes in your lifestyle like staying active.

Just ensure that your goals are realistic, even if they involve small steps. If necessary, ask your family or friends to help you make those changes possible, and don’t forget to monitor the changes in your body or your behavior.

5. Avoid Stress

Avoid movements or positions that put stress on your joints. For instance, opening a tight lid can be hard if you suffer from hand arthritis. The best solution for this is to set the jar on a cloth, lean on your jar using your palm, and turn its lid with a shoulder motion. If that doesn’t work for you, buying a wall-mounted jar opener may come in handy.

6. Perform Regular Exercise

When you experience painful joints or joint stiffness, you might not like to move around. However, you must try to stay active. It’ll help you ease the symptoms and avoid long-term problems. There are some types of exercise that are best for people with arthritis are stretching, strengthening muscles, and low-impact aerobic exercise.

Slow and gentle exercises, such as yoga, tai chi, and Pilates can also help you boost your flexibility and balance. They can also ease your pain.

All of these exercises aren’t just good for your body, they’re also benefit your mind. They can get rid of your stress and build your strength at the same time. However, if you’re experiencing lots of pain when exercising, stop what you’re doing and talk with your therapist or doctor before starting any exercise again.

Conclusion

Living with arthritis is indeed challenging and frustrating at the same time, especially if you don’t have much money to finance your healthcare needs. However, with the listed tips above, you’ll learn more on how to live well and better even with arthritis. Just don’t forget to consult your doctor regularly to get updates about your condition.

Medicines, like everyday things, go bad after a set of periods. Past that date, drug manufacturers can’t guarantee their drugs’ effectiveness; perhaps it can even cause more harm than good. So, here’s a simple tip on dealing with expired meds: throw them in the trash.

For the record, whether food or drugs, expiration dates are rarely accurate. How long a consumable can remain good depends on too many factors, such as its ingredients and the storage environment. There’s no reliable way to tell the exact date, and there’s neither the time nor interest to come up with one. That’s why manufacturers settle for a conservative estimate based on current knowledge.

Nevertheless, playing Russian roulette with expired meds is practically playing the actual Russian roulette. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has required expiration dates for drugs since 1979, recommends against taking them for the following reasons:

1. Reduced Efficacy

To understand why do drugs lose their efficacy over a period of time, you have to know how they operate. Drugs work by binding themselves to the cell receptors which send out signals to the rest of the cell body, which triggers the intended reaction. For example, ibuprofen reduces pain by blocking the production of prostaglandins, a hormone that triggers pain.

As less intimidating a reduced efficacy may sound, it sets a dangerous precedent. Antibiotics such as amoxicillin can lose their effectiveness after two weeks when dissolved in water (unless stored in the fridge). Taking an expired dose of amoxicillin won’t just be less effective but also give the nasty thing it’s supposed to kill an opportunity to develop immunity to it same is true with other medicines.

2. Drug Addiction

As expired meds are less effective, people tend to increase the dosage to get the desired effect of the meds. This is how the country’s opioid crisis begins, overprescribing and over usage of a drug will lead to developing addiction.

Drug addiction is already a grave problem even with a still-good medicine. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that over 70,000 Americans died from drug overdosage in 2019, 70% from opioids. A person who’s prone to abuse and is within reach of a cabinet full of expired and fresh drugs is a recipe for disaster which can kill or leave lives in ruins. Cleaning out the cabinet will be a great help.

In light of this, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) holds its National Drug Takeback Day twice a year. Households can take steps on how to clean out their expired meds and dispose them at DEA’s collection sites. An event that doesn’t just give time for people to disposed medicines from their cabinet, but also a reminder for people responsibility when it comes to drugs. This year, the first of the two Takeback Days will happen on April 24 (subject to change depending on the COVID situation).

3. Legal Repercussions

Section 829 of Title 21 USC, also known as the Controlled Substances Act, which makes it illegal for a person to give their prescribed medication to another person. Leaving expired meds in the house is a great way to make it happen, even without the intention of giving them away.

Additionally, several states have their respective regulations regarding disposing of expired drugs.

4. Antibiotic Resistance

As mentioned earlier, antibiotics whose efficacy has waned over time can give the disease a chance to grow more resistant to it. Antibiotic resistance, as it’s called, has already been a critical problem before the pandemic. It kills twice as many people in the U.S. as drug overdosage and threatens to render every antibiotic in use to be ineffective.

Antibiotics are so potent that they should only be taken as prescribed by the doctor, from the dosage to the frequency of taking them. Once the time frame for the medication passes, only the doctor can determine if it stops there or continue with another batch.

5. Death

While there hasn’t been any recorded case of someone dying from taking expired meds directly, it can happen as an indirect result. Take epinephrine as an example, a drug which is commonly used to treat life-threatening allergic reactions or anaphylaxes, when it’s mistakenly used or administered, it can cause death.

Multiple studies have shown that anti-allergy meds that use epinephrine like EpiPen can lose most of their efficacy over time. An EpiPen past the date might not be able to deal with the allergy enough to avoid complications, if not death.

Conclusion

Once you’re done reading this article, go to your medicine cabinet and scrutinize every vial or box. The FDA has a four-step procedure you can take to dispose expired meds:

• Take the pills and liquids out of the container.
• Mix them in a bag with an unappealing substance like cat litter or coffee grounds.
• Throw the bag in the garbage or surrender them to a DEA-authorized collection site.
• Mark personal details out of the packaging with a pentel pen and dispose of them.

Throwing away expired medicine, especially if partly used, may seem like a waste. However, you can’t put a price on safety; keeping old pills and syrups around isn’t worth the savings.

Hologic, Inc., a global leader in women’s health, announced a collaboration with leading analytics and consulting firm Gallup, Inc. on the creation of the Hologic Global Women’s Health Index, the largest and most comprehensive assessment of women’s health in the world.

This multi-year initiative is the first survey to track critical markers of women’s health and safety by country over time. It will include individual responses from more than 120,000 people across 116 countries and in 40 languages. Through a series of targeted questions, the Hologic Global Women’s Health Index will provide unique insight on reproductive health, domestic violence, preventive care, access to care and early disease detection. Hologic conducted the survey as part of Gallup’s World Poll, the most comprehensive and farthest-reaching survey of the world. The survey connects with more than 90% of the world’s adult population through annual, nationally representative surveys with comparable metrics across countries.

“In our ongoing work to support women’s health around the world, we’ve struggled to find comprehensive data that measures progress on key issues like access and quality of care on a global scale,” said Steve MacMillan, Hologic’s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer. “Beginning in 2019, we started working with Gallup to develop the Global Women’s Health Index to fill this critical need for a data-driven approach to women’s health. Particularly now, as longstanding disparities in healthcare are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, we hope that the upcoming findings will shine a spotlight on the need to redefine policies and put women at the center of post-pandemic responses and health systems moving forward.”

Hologic and Gallup developed survey questions for the Global Women’s Health Index under the guidance of global women’s health experts and thought leaders from leading institutions such as Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University, RAD-AID, and Popper and Co., among others.

“Women’s health is not just a women’s issue, it’s a human issue,” said Susan Harvey, MD, FSBI, Vice President of Global Medical Affairs, Breast & Skeletal Health, Hologic. “It is well established that women’s health serves as a marker for social progress, as well as economic stability. When women are healthy, their families are more stable as are the communities around them and the socioeconomic environment overall. The Hologic Global Women’s Health Index will bring awareness to the most pressing health issues facing women globally by offering unique regional insights and the ability to benchmark annually to track changes over time.”

To ensure a comprehensive view of women’s health, the index will feature country-level reports as well as rankings of how countries around the world fare on key indicators of women’s health.

“Since launching in 2005, our Gallup World Poll has evolved to provide information that’s critical to understanding the behavior of the world’s population,” said Jim Clifton, Gallup’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “Through our partnership with Hologic, we’ve highlighted eight essential questions to provide meaningful data on women’s health. We hope leaders around the world will use our metrics to correct inequalities and improve women’s health everywhere.”

The Hologic Global Women’s Health Index will be published later this year. For more information please visit womenshealthindex.com

About Hologic, Inc.

Hologic, Inc. is an innovative medical technology company primarily focused on improving women’s health and well-being through early detection and treatment.

Hologic and the Global Women’s Health Index are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Hologic, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries.

About the Gallup World Poll

The Gallup World Poll is the most comprehensive and farthest-reaching survey of the world. The survey connects with more than 90% of the world’s adult population through annual, nationally representative surveys with comparable metrics across countries. Gallup, Inc. works with organizations across multilaterals, NGOs, private foundations, philanthropies and corporations to measure more than 100 crucial issues affecting people’s lives via the World Poll. As a result, the World Poll has become an indispensable tool for global leaders and decision-makers who need to understand the hopes, dreams and behaviors of the people they serve.

Qure4u, the industry leader in patient engagement and virtual care, announces substantial growth in digital health utilization among healthcare provider customers through its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s leading cloud.

Acting early and decisively, Qure4u began working with AWS to enable the company to quickly scale offerings in response to increased provider demand for resources to support virtual patient engagement throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, Qure4u and its customers saw significant growth in the use of Qure4u’s Digital Health Key™ resources throughout 2020, including:

• 14,000% growth in new patient registrations
• 4,000% growth in online appointment scheduling
• 1,150% month-over-month growth in telehealth use

Qure4u’s Digital Health Key, a holistic patient engagement platform that supports contactless “digital front door” capability, positions health systems for greater agility than was typical prior to COVID-19. AWS’s proven global infrastructure and vast portfolio of cloud services is helping Qure4u drive innovation and scale its solutions to play a significant role in digital healthcare adoption. Recent milestones include:

• Execution of an emergency rollout of telehealth solutions to 2,875 care providers serving 5.7 million patients near the advent of the pandemic in March of 2020
• Launch of Qure4u DriveUp™, a solution for drive-thru COVID-19 testing and vaccination designed to keep care providers and patients safe
• Development and execution of an online, mass vaccine self-scheduling portal, resulting in the successful hosting of several mass, arena-based COVID-19 vaccination events

To support this provider growth during the early months of the pandemic, Qure4u worked 24/7 in shifts bringing telehealth deployments live within 24 to 48 hours so customers could provide essential care to patients without disruption. As a result, overburdened providers have become more efficient with a significant reduction in administrative work.

“2020 and the onset of COVID-19 forced Marathon Health to respond quickly and pivot our Patient Care Model. Our partnership with Qure4u and the assistance of their rapid deployment teams enabled us to move from predominantly in-person visits to more than 80% virtual in the span of a week,” said Marathon Health Chief Information Officer Sherry Slick. “Qure4u was there as a responsive partner to quickly enable us to move to Virtual and has been great to work with as we’ve continued to iterate and expand our Virtual offerings.”

“Qure4u’s technology is a core driver of value, not merely a support function,” said Qure4u Founder and CEO Monica Bolbjerg, MD. “With clarity of purpose and tight focus, we continue our push to serve healthcare providers with scalable solutions that can be implemented quickly to streamline operations while keeping staff and patients safe. This has been particularly vital to our customers serving on the frontline of the COVID-19 response. Collaboration with AWS has been essential to our mission.”

“AWS is proud to work with Qure4u to support the needs of healthcare providers grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic. From Independent Practices to Hospitals and Health Systems, Qure4u is using AWS to put data at the heart of patient care,” said Shez Partovi, MD, Director of Worldwide Business Development for Healthcare, Life Sciences, and Genomics at AWS. “We look forward to working with Qure4u to help develop new ways to deliver contactless care and empower patients to facilitate their care journey.”

About Marathon Health
Marathon Health is lighting the way to better health, for everyone. They partner with employers around the United States to provide a modern approach to healthcare that truly meets employees’ needs while saving money. Marathon does this through a combination of onsite, near site and network solutions that integrate the best practices of advanced primary care, analysis and assessment, coaching and advocacy, behavioral health, occupational health, physical therapy, and chronic condition management. Marathon Health was named Best in KLAS 2021 for its excellence in Worksite Health Services.

About Qure4u
Qure4u’s holistic patient engagement platform and contactless “digital front door” offers patients and providers a scalable, EHR-embedded platform that supports the entire patient care journey. Remote check-in, Virtual Waiting Room™, Digital Health Key™, Qure4u DriveUp™, data sharing, telehealth, pre- and post-procedure prep, remote patient monitoring, secure communication, and care plan features close the gap for patients and providers between office visits. By enabling patients with self-service tools to manage their health from anywhere, Qure4u drives practice efficiency and enhances clinical insight. The company’s solutions improve patient engagement, outcomes, and satisfaction.

WELL Health Technologies Corp., a company focused on consolidating and modernizing clinical and digital assets within the healthcare sector, is pleased to announce it has entered into a share purchase agreement dated March 7, 2021 with the shareholders of Intrahealth Systems Limited, a New Zealand company (“Intrahealth”), whereby WELL has agreed to acquire all of the issued and outstanding shares of Intrahealth (the “Transaction”) for total consideration of approximately $19,250,000. Intrahealth is a provider of enterprise class EMR(1) and clinical healthcare software with customers in Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

“The proposed acquisition of Intrahealth expands WELL into a multi-product EMR company that can service small primary healthcare clinics right up to large hospitals and health authorities,” said Hamed Shahbazi, Chairman and CEO of WELL. “We are very excited about the prospect of initially expanding our global footprint into New Zealand and Australia through this acquisition and pursuing further global expansion. Intrahealth is a highly complementary acquisition which will be immediately accretive to WELL’s revenue and profitability.”

Founded in New Zealand, and now headquartered in Vancouver, BC, Intrahealth is engaged in the business of providing a suite of flexible software solutions to a wide variety of customers including health authorities, hospitals, public health outpatient centres, community health, home care, ambulatory care and diverse health care professionals. Intrahealth provides highly configurable software solutions that also support mobile platforms and seamless access to virtual care/telehealth solutions. Intrahealth’s solutions for hospitals include patient administration system, bed management, waiting list management, enterprise-wide scheduling, case management, medication management, emergency room operations and ward management, among many other features. Intrahealth supports approximately 15,000 healthcare professionals across its global network of Canada, Australia and New Zealand providing care for millions of patients in its combined databases. Over the past 12 months, Intrahealth generated more than $9M in revenues with over 20% in EBITDA margin(2). Over 80% of Intrahealth’s revenue is high margin recurring revenue.

Dr. Mark Matthews, CEO of Intrahealth commented, “We are very pleased with the prospect of joining WELL Health, as this will allow us to continue to serve our customers and enhance our product offering while being a part of the larger WELL Health ecosystem and shared services platform. We believe there are many synergies and cross selling opportunities with WELL’s broader product offerings being made available to all Intrahealth customers.”

Post-closing, Intrahealth is anticipated to continue to operate as a stand-alone business within the WELL EMR Group and be operated by its current CEO, Dr. Mark Matthews. Intrahealth’s Profile EMR is an integrated practice management and EMR package which will be marketed and sold alongside WELL’s OSCAR(3) Pro product. The proposed acquisition is a key milestone for the WELL EMR Group as it expands its addressable market to a previously unrealizable level with the restructuring to a multi-product business unit with customers worldwide. WELL also anticipates integrating Intrahealth to the apps.health marketplace in the coming months, paving the way for third party app developers to have their digital health applications available on both OSCAR Pro and Intrahealth.

Arjun Kumar, Head of WELL EMR Group commented, “We’re excited to welcome Mark and the talented team at Intrahealth to the WELL EMR Group family. This transformational acquisition will firmly position WELL as an international EMR operator with multiple industry leading products. We have plans to substantially grow the WELL EMR Group organically and inorganically into additional markets. Our market opportunity will expand globally with the addition of Intrahealth to the portfolio.”

In today’s world technology has made everything easier and simplified. With the help of the latest technology, it is easier to monitor the health parameters and alert health care service providers. Through this, even during the pandemic, we can check up on our health and consult doctors online without contact.

AI and robotics impacting the healthcare sector

Minimising the chances or errors

With the help of an intelligent health approach, healthcare apps minimize errors that may prove fatal for the patient. With accurate monitoring, doctors can prescribe the right medicine with the right dosage to patients. Healthcare apps use sensors to track and monitor various health-related parameters accurately. The patients’ reports and prescription notes can be easily saved in cloud facilities. Even medical staff can store patients’ data in their system very accurately and keep the record in a precise manner.

Easy payment methods

Artificial intelligence has made many systems where you can easily pay medical expenses like your check-ups, medicine, and other medical payments via cards (debit card, credit card, or mobile payment gateways like PayPal). Even if you forget to pay the amount the app will send you notifications from time to time. This is a very secure option and doesn’t consume a lot of time.

Precise and clear measurements

Patients can measure their sugar level, blood pressure level, weight, cholesterol level, and heart rate with the help of artificial intelligence. You can even note it down in the medical app so that you can compare it with this result the next time you check. Your data will remain untouched until you change it yourself, so there is no need to worry about misplacing it.

Quick communications

Through technology, you can easily communicate with your doctor or physician without having to travel to their clinic/ hospital. Artificial intelligence has provided us with so many facilities that the treatment which used to require time can now be done in just a few hours. You not only save travelling fees, but can heal yourself on time without having to wait.

Utilises less time

With the help of artificial intelligence, all medical operations can be done 30 times faster. Face-to-face consultation and prescriptions are easily done which comes out to be very effective and cost-friendly. During the time of covid-19, when one cannot step out of the house, you can consult your respective doctor without coming in contact with them.

Lending a helping hand

Robotics are helping by becoming nurses in hospitals as they take good care of the patients and do lots of other health-related activities. They are trained in such a way that they can treat patients almost like humans. Most of the robots are dressed like nurses in the hospital and they are well maintained. They are made with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning which.

Some other important ways AI is impacting the medical sector

It helps the struggling healthcare network of poor workers and developing nations, which include that of India. It helps cope with vast imbalances in healthcare distribution, lack of trained healthcare practitioners, and affordability of complex clinical procedures in hospitals.

AI has contributed a lot in the medical sector as well as in other sectors, which is why things are getting so easy to complete within a fraction of seconds. Lots of machines have come up which are made with the help of AI and ML.

In cities and other urban places, technology has come up such a long way, helping people in every way they can. Artificial intelligence is going to be a major factor in the upcoming time as the major sector will be covered by them. This includes using AI for medical apps in the future.

Robotics is another major technology of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Most of the robots can feel like human beings and they can treat the patients like humans. Robotics and AI have changed the medical field into a smooth operating system. Kudos to the team of scientists who work day and night for such amazing technologies without which life was very difficult and slow. After lots of research and hard work, they make life so easy.

Primary and secondary serving in nursing

A primary and secondary survey is conducted to know the symptoms a patient before any further procedures are done. A primary survey gives the patient a basic idea of their physical health and mental status. First off, the survey gives you glance. After this they check the necessary conditions of the patients and know how much they are affected. Then they provide them with comfort and the medicines that are required for the body. If there is any breathing issue they should contact the doctor and stabilize the head.

A secondary survey comes directly after the primary survey. This time the nurse gets deeper inside the case and conducts the physical examination process. First, they check the sign and the symptoms then the allergies. After that, they see the past medical history. They take the last oral intake and then the event that leads to the injury. These elements test the patient’s overall conditions after which the doctor prescribed the right treatment.

Importance of nursing surveys

The importance of research in nursing will provide the students with overall assignments. Nursing assignment experts help to proofread and edit academic papers for students in semester exams. Nursing assignments give a wide range of activities that not only focus on the patient but also the family of the patient. Lots of practical approaches are needed and the structure of the essay is important such as the introduction, body, and conclusion. The experts let you know what is important for the content and required in semester exams. They even help in referring to textbooks, journals, research papers, and the proper way to study.

How does AI help nursing students create diet charts?

There are four main elements that nurses look at when they develop a diet plan for the patients. Unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, excess tobacco consumption and lifestyle choices. Artificial intelligence in nursing helps to determine the number of calories that are required by the patients, how to break down a healthy diet, what should natural fat be added to the healthy diet, and ensure a revised diet plan.

Nurses make sure to check whether patients eat red chillies as it can be harmful when they are sick. People should have a habit of eating red chillies whether in the form of powder in food or in vegetables in their raw form. Lots of people are discovering new items in the diet menu which was not there earlier and now love to consume them every day to maintain body shape.

Conclusion

Robotics help in every sector and now human beings have started depending on them for every small thing. AI has lots of things to offer in the medical health sector as scientists are making it in such a way that things become easier and convenient for people. Artificial intelligence is a boon as well as a bane for technological development as any mistake can make the whole system respond in different ways which would be difficult to control.