The reality of the cost of prescription drugs in the United States is that prices continue to go up and up, insurance covers less and less, and our out-of-pocket cost requires bigger and bigger pockets.
There seems to be no end in sight. We can make all the noise we want, but prices still go up, and up, and up.
As many smart patients know, those very high prices in the United States are far higher than prices for the same drugs ...
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(Updated in 2020, regarding Tax Year 2019)
I’ve spent most of the weekend working on my income tax filing. Yeah. You know. The fun never ends.
Then the lightbulb moment arrived when I realized that you, the reader of this blog, might be interested to know whether there is a tax benefit to hiring an advocate.
So we’ll begin with my disclaimer: I am not an IRS (or CRA) agent or specialist. I am not a tax accountant or even a regular accountant ...
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This article popped up in a dozen places over the past week or so. The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Axios, even QVC!
How Chaos at Chain Pharmacies Is Putting Patients at Risk
Reading it will curl your toenails and raise the hair on the back of your neck! You’ll wonder how you have survived your Walgreens or CVS drug prescriptions.
But while I applaud the honesty and real-life approach to the exposé, I am as ...
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Happy 2020 to you, my “patient” readers. I wish you much good health and happiness and importantly, peace-of-mind in this new year.
OK – yes – it’s mid-January, so it might be a wee-bit late to be listing our resolutions for the year, but that doesn’t make this piece of advice any less important.
I want to share something with you that has brought ME some huge peace of mind. And I’m going to challenge you to find some peace-of-mind for yourself, ...
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You may be reading this post because you are curious about that term – “cyberchondria.”
It’s not hard to figure out what it means. It means hypochondriac-ism as a result of doing online searches. More precisely, the act of diagnosing ourselves by using the web, then upsetting ourselves through our findings. It’s when we decide a headache is really brain cancer, or low blood sugar is translated as Parkinsons, or forgetfulness becomes Alzheimers.
The word “cyberchondria” has been around for 20 years ...
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In a recent conversation with Annette, a young woman who has MS (multiple sclerosis), she described to me the first time she went for a drug infusion which had been prescribed by her neurologist.
She arrived for the session using her walker, barely able to keep her balance. Exhausted, she was finally able to get comfortable in the infusion chair. As the nurse began setting up the needle and catheter injection system into her vein, she looked at Annette and asked ...
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Today I’m sharing an experience with you in hopes of preventing something we do but don’t think about; something which can be dangerous.
At a recent doctor appointment, I found two people in the waiting room just hacking away, coughing up a storm, and very likely infecting others. They were together, and there for only a minute before the nurse took them back to the exam room, removing them from proximity to the rest of us who were waiting. I went ...
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When I think of an assembly line, two images pop into my head:
I thought of both when ...
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My friend Janet has a bad wound on her leg. It has been there for two months, and just looks worse and worse. Now it looks so bad she doesn’t even want to leave the house.
“What does your doctor say about it?” I asked her.
“I’ve been back to him five times!”, she responded. “He keeps giving me antibiotics, but it doesn’t seem to get any better.”
“Five times???” I asked her, incredulously.
It was time for “the talk” with Janet.
… the talk ...
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“The cure cannot come soon enough.”
As someone who works in healthcare, and who speaks to patients and their loved ones every day, this is a statement I hear frequently. Whether we’re talking about someone’s cancer diagnosis, or Alzheimer’s Disease, or ALS, or MS, or diabetes… it seems to be everyone’s hope – that a cure is on the horizon.
When my father was alive, and in his 24th year after his prostate cancer diagnosis, he lamented the fact that he had ...
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