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Gov. Gavin Newsom has asked lawmakers to pare down their legislative wish lists and focus on the state’s coronavirus response. But state Sen. Jim Beall plans to forge ahead with his mental health care proposals, including a measure to create a state mental health parity requirement.
Under the national emergency, the government has waived a law that required patients to have an in-person visit with a physician before they could be prescribed drugs that help quell withdrawal symptoms, such as Suboxone. Now they can get those prescriptions via a phone call or videoconference with a doctor. That may give video addiction therapy a kick-start.
Martha Phillips traveled to Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic in 2014 to serve as a nurse. Now, she's working on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, advising her colleagues on how to stay safe.
Twins Edna Mayes and Ethel Sylvester, 92, are relying on each other through the pandemic, in which one of the hidden dangers is to their mental health.
State officials in California have achieved some success in promoting the use of medication-assisted treatment for people with opioid addictions, but they are bumping up against familiar resistance and constraints.
People in recovery from drug or alcohol addiction have to weather a new storm of depression, anxiety and isolation during the pandemic, just as the social supports of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs move online.
To weather uncertain times, it's important to acknowledge and grieve losses — even if they seem small in the scheme of the global pandemic, psychologists and grief experts say.
There’s an array of recommendations about how to adjust our lives to reduce the spread of the novel virus. All are motivated by the same guiding principle: The better the public does in these efforts, the better off everyone will be.
The suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 almost tripled in a decade and is still rising. As parents grapple with loss, some turn to activism.
Sarah and Andy fell in love while working to keep drug users from overdosing. But when his own addiction reemerged, Andy's fear of returning to prison kept him from the best treatment.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom dedicated nearly all of his State of the State address Wednesday to homelessness. To fix that problem, he said, the state must address another one: mental health care.
In the first nine months of an alternative pain management program in Missouri, only a small fraction of the state’s Medicaid recipients have accessed the chiropractic care, acupuncture, physical therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy meant to combat the overprescription of opioids.
Indiana was ground zero for shifting ideas about needle exchanges after a small town had an HIV outbreak in 2015 brought on by needle-sharing. But even as other parts of the country start to embrace needle exchanges amid the ongoing opioid epidemic, the sites remain controversial in Indiana. Only nine of the state’s 92 counties have them, after a series of closures and reopenings.
For Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers, social and emotional isolation is a threat. But hundreds of “Memory Cafes” around the country offer them a chance to be with others who understand, and to receive social and cognitive stimulation in the process.
As the Democratic primary campaign nears pivotal voting, important aspects of health care policy are being overlooked.
Across the U.S., people with early dementia are signing new advance directives to confirm their end-of-life wishes while they still have the ability to do so. But doctors say the documents may offer a false sense of security.
For rural physicians, the burden of responding to the opioid epidemic falls squarely on their already loaded shoulders. For one doctor in a small Wisconsin village, there was no question that she wanted to rise to the challenge.
Nearly a decade ago, Dr. Jeffrey Brenner and his Camden Coalition appeared to have an answer to remake American health care: Treat the sickest and most expensive patients. But a rigorous study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows the approach doesn’t save money. “We built a brilliant intervention to navigate people to nowhere,” Brenner tells the “Tradeoffs” podcast.
California now will pay pediatricians to screen Medi-Cal patients for traumatic events known as adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. The program is based on research showing that children who endure chronic stress have an increased risk of developing serious health problems. Here are five things to know about the new program.
Kaiser Health News senior correspondent Sarah Varney and PBS NewsHour producer Jason Kane report from Tennessee, where the rate of uninsured kids has soared.
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