Anthony Rivas reported that at least one officer with the Los Angeles Police Department has contracted the bacteria that causes typhoid fever, Salmonella typhi, and another one is showing typhus-like symptoms, the police department announced on Thursday.

The officer who had contracted the illness is being treated, and the other officer has yet to be confirmed to be infected, according to the LAPD. Both officers work at the LAPD’s Central Division, according to a statement released by the department.

Salmonella Typhi is uncommon in the U.S. and other modern industrialized nations, affecting only about 350 Americans each year — most of whom recently returned from overseas travel. Worldwide, it affects an estimated 22 million people each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The police department is working with the city to “disinfect any work areas that may have been exposed,” a process that is expected to be completed Thursday evening, the LAPD said in a statement.

Salmonella Typhi is commonly spread through food or water that has been contaminated by someone shedding the bacteria. The bacteria can be spread by both people who are actively ill as well as so-called “carriers” of the bacteria but not showing symptoms — one in 20 go on to become carriers. Salmonella typhi is responsible for causing typhoid fever, according to the CDC,.

It’s unclear what caused the officers’ illnesses.

Los Angeles has been dealing with a growing rat infestation and typhus outbreaks since at least October 2018, according to ABC Los Angeles station KABC.

Typhus is different from typhoid fever, which can come from a variety of sources. Murine typhus (Rickettsia typhi) is caused by bites from infected fleas, epidemic typhus (Rickettsia prowazekii) comes from infected body lice and scrub typhus (Orientia tsutsugamushi) comes from infected chiggers or larval mites.

“Unfortunately, our police officers often patrol in adverse environments and can be exposed to various dangerous elements,” the LAPD said in a statement on Thursday. “We have notified the Police Protective League as well as our employees working at Central Division, about the outbreak and we have further provided them with strategies to stay healthy while we mitigate this issue.”

Typhoid fever and typhus are often diagnosed through blood tests and treated with antibiotics. Symptoms associated with the two infections include fever and chills, body and muscle aches, nausea and vomiting.

The best way to prevent infection by Salmonella typhi is to wash your hands frequently, and for any form of typhus, to avoid contact with the animals that can pass on the infection.

I just read an article regarding the future of healthcare and the focus was on Artificial Intelligence, but this next piece is about what we are seeing right now due to the shortage of physicians. This is happening here in the US but also throughout Europe also.

As nurse practitioners fill the gap, patients say they’re more than satisfied with the care

Findings from a new research study led by Thomas Kippenbrock, a nursing professor at the University of Arkansas, suggest that patients are just as satisfied—or even happier—with care from nurse practitioners as compared with doctors.

Kippenbrock wrote an article titled “A National Survey of Nurse Practitioners’ Patient Satisfaction Outcomes” for Nursing Outlook, a bi-monthly journal that examines current issues and trends in nursing practice, education and research. The journal seeks to help solve challenges facing the profession.

Currently, nurse practitioners are helping to fill a gap in providing primary care across the country and especially in the rural communities, which is why it’s important to determine patients’ satisfaction rate.

Kippenbrock and fellow U of A School of Nursing colleagues, Jan Emory and Peggy Lee, gathered feedback from 53,885 patients through the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey, asking them to identify and rate their perceptions of interactions with their health provider.

Using responses to the survey, which was developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to advance scientific understanding of the patient care experience, researchers found that patients are reporting equal or greater satisfaction rates with care from nurse practitioners when compared to their physician colleagues. The study notes that Medicaid patients rated nurse practitioners’ communication skills as high as other providers.

“The leap in this study was a large national scale investigation,” Kippenbrock said. “Previous findings were derived from small sample sizes isolated to local community clinics. Consequently, we believe patients are highly satisfied with a nurse practitioners’ primary care services.”

So, what about using barbers as our physicians?

Will Barbers Regain Their Role as Medical Practitioners?

Milton Packer highlighted the rediscovery of a 1,000-year-old cure for medical elitism and maybe physician shortage. For most of human history, people did not see the expertise of a physician in the hope of a cure. Physicians relied on patients’ natural healing processes for recovery. Doctors primarily provided comfort — by the compassionate communication of a diagnosis, often accompanied by the symbolic prescription of herbs and salves. The physician acted as a supportive guide to the unfolding of a natural course of events.

This approach is embodied in the many quotations attributed to Hippocrates. “Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease.” “It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.” “Cure sometimes, treat often, comfort always.”

But in the first millennium C.E., physicians were in short supply. The talented few lived an elitist existence, typically attached to wealthy or powerful royal families. Famed physicians, such as Galen and Avicenna, were able to formulate ideas and write books because they were supported by wealthy patrons.

Who provided medical care for the common man, especially the poor? With no access to physicians, the poor turned to the clergy, who spent much of their time practicing medicine. Building on existing relationships of trust, priests could attend to someone’s physical and spiritual needs simultaneously. However, the Church believed that spiritual men should not be focused on worldly cares. Thus, during the latter half of the 12th century, it insisted that priests were “expert physicians of souls rather than to cure bodies.” The practice of medicine was strictly forbidden, especially when it required cutting or burning.

So where would a “commoner” go if he/she required some procedural intervention? Barbers — with their expertise with knives and razors — stepped up to fill the need, by offering a wide range of surgical procedures to their customers. On a given day, they might provide a haircut, an amputation, a tooth extraction, or the application of leeches. All of these filled the barbershop with blood and bandages. When wrapped around a pole, they formed a spiral of red and white stripes and voilà! The modern barbershop pole was born. (Barbershop poles in the U.S. added a blue stripe — for patriotic reasons.)

From the 12th century onwards, the expertise and practices of physicians and barbers became distinct, leading to a troubled relationship between the two groups. Physicians who received university training believed they had privileged access to specialized knowledge and felt superior to the barbers, who had no specialized education and treated only commoners. To highlight the distinction, physicians insisted that they wear long robes, while barbers could wear only short robes. The practice of long white coats for physicians and short white jackets for barbers persisted into the late 20th century.

Surgeons eventually differentiated themselves from barbers in the 17th and 18th centuries, but physicians and surgeons remained distinct specialties for several hundred years. When surgeons eventually commingled with physicians at medical schools, they wore long white coats — to emphasize to the world that they were not barbers, but were now part of an elite profession.

The elitism of physicians and surgeons provided great satisfaction to those with a medical degree, but it provided little comfort to patients. From the 1940s through the 1970s, the relationship between doctors and patients was distinctly hierarchical. Physicians presented themselves as the authoritative source of medical knowledge and did not expect to have their recommendations questioned. That is not to say that physicians lacked compassion. Indeed, if a patient could find a knowledgeable and kind medical doctor, the bond between the two was therapeutically powerful. Under these ideal circumstances, physicians could provide both comfort and a cure, and in return, patients provided gratitude and trust. That trust was the centerpiece of the therapeutic relationship.

However, over the past 30 years, much of the trust that grounded the patient-physician relationship has been shattered. Today, physicians often seem determined to spend as little time with patients as possible. The history and physical exam are perfunctory, and questions are frequently swatted away. All too often, physicians seem more interested in generating revenues than listening to patients. In response, admiration for physicians has waned; and patients have become suspicious of physicians’ motives when prescribing medications or recommending procedures. Adherence to medications is abysmally low.

Adherence is particularly problematic when people need to take multiple medications on a daily basis for years for an asymptomatic condition, such as hypertension. Hypertension is an important and treatable cardiovascular risk factor, but it is poorly controlled in the community — particularly in socioeconomically disadvantaged populations, who are particularly susceptible to hypertension and its sequelae and are also often mistrustful of their interactions with the medical profession.

How can this problem be resolved? Dr. Ronald Victor, a hypertension specialist, came up with a brilliant idea. What if we could identify a trusted individual within the underserved community who could be trained to measure blood pressures and provide emotional support for treatment? People would interact with this trusted individual on a regular basis to obtain repeated measurements of blood pressure and reinforce the use of medications.

Ron Victor’s solution was the barbershop. The barbershop plays a central role in the social fabric of black men in underserved communities. Men visit barbershops on a regular basis, and each has a relationship of trust with his barber, established through repeated (and often personal) conversations that transpire during the haircuts. As a result, the barber was perfectly positioned to measure the blood pressure of every client at regular visits and then could immediately connect those with hypertension to specially-trained pharmacists who would prescribe generic medications on site.

Dr. Victor and his colleagues carried out a cluster randomized trial to prove that his idea would work. A total of 319 black male patrons with hypertension were recruited from 52 black-owned barbershops. In half of the barbershops, men were assigned to the barber-pharmacist intervention, and in the other half, barbers simply encouraged lifestyle modification and doctor appointments. After 6 months, a blood-pressure level of less than 130/80 mm Hg was achieved among 64% of the participants in the intervention group versus only 12% of the participants in the control group. A truly dramatic result!

Why did Ron Victor’s idea work? The men paid attention to their blood pressure and took their medications because the treatment was based on a relationship of trust and transpired in a place of trust. By contrast, their hypertension was not controlled if the men were simply reminded to see their physicians.

The historical parallels are striking. About 1,000 years ago, barbers stepped up to provide essential medical care to underserved communities who had no access to academically-trained physicians. Now, barbers are stepping up again as trusted members of the community to link people to essential treatments that they would be reluctant to take if prescribed by a physician.

In many ways, the divide between those who provide care and those who need it has not changed over the past 1,000 years. Ten centuries ago, academically-trained physicians were not interested in treating commoners. In the current era, underserved populations do not trust physicians to care for them, perhaps because they believe that physicians are driven by self-interest. The patterns of disconnect a millennium apart are eerily similar.

I was privileged to know and work with Ron Victor when we were both at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School (2004-2009). He was an exceptionally talented and heroic physician-scientist, whose brilliance, innovation, compassion, and humility were beyond words.

Ron Victor died in September 2018 in Los Angeles. His contributions to medicine are numerous, but perhaps most importantly, his work reminded us of the clinical and social consequences of medical elitism, for which he provided a path towards rectification. He is sorely missed.

Families list health care as a top financial problem: poll

Tal Axelrod noted that Health care costs are the top financial issue facing most American families, according to a new Gallup poll released Thursday.

About 17 percent of Americans said health care was their most significant financial issue, followed by 11 percent citing lack of money or low wages, 8 percent saying college expenses, 8 percent saying the cost of owning or renting a home and 8 percent saying taxes.

Health care costs were also the most significant financial issue for Americans in 2017 and nearly tied with lack of money or low wages for the top spot in 2018, according to the poll.

Health care costs are most likely to be the top concerns for older Americans, with 25 percent of adults between the ages of 50 and 64, and 23 percent of those aged 65 and older listing them as their top financial problems. Health care costs are tied with lack of money, college expenses and housing costs as the greatest financial worries among adults younger than 50.

Health care also ranked as the top financial concern for Americans among all income levels.

Health care costs, energy costs or oil and gas prices and lack of money or low wages are the only three issues to ever top the “most important family financial problem” question in the 48 times Gallup has asked it since 2005.

However, mentions of energy costs have declined as gas prices have gone down over the last decade.

Reflecting a time of high economic confidence, 20 percent of Americans say they do not have a “most important financial problem,” one of the highest responses to the question in the Gallup poll’s 14 years. That figure was only surpassed in February 2005, when 21 percent of Americans said they do not have a top financial issue.

Despite strong economic numbers, Democrats are likely to highlight health care issues in the 2020 race after focusing on the issue to win back the majority in the House in 2018.

“Even in generally good economic times, Americans still face significant personal financial challenges. Foremost among these are healthcare costs, which have been a consistent concern over time but currently stand above all other concerns. As such, healthcare will likely continue to be a major focus in national elections, including the 2020 presidential election,” Gallup concluded.

Medicare and healthcare reform

So, when did we really make inroads in healthcare reform? Things started to get more positive in 1952 when the President’s Commission on Health Needs of the Nation later that year echoed the Social Security Administration’s annual report recommended enactment of health insurance for social security beneficiaries and the recommendation. However, General Eisenhower, who was to take office made clear that he would not support government health insurance.

Despite the opposition by the Eisenhower administration things began to happen that eventually led to some major changes. In 1956 Congress enacted a permanent program of health care coverage for the dependents of servicemen (what has been described as a military “medicare” program) and at the same time began on the Social Security Act cash benefits to totally and permanently disabled persons over the age of fifty. The AMA opposed the amendment and the battle began between those supporting and opposing this extension of the social security program, which was viewed as a test of strength between physicians and health reformers.

Then when the disability insurance measure passed a Democratic member of the House Ways and Means Committee, Aime J. Forand, introduced a medicare bill just prior to adjournment of the House in late 1957.

Next was the number of public hearings on the bill, which were held in June of 1958 before the House Ways and Means Committee, which proved inconclusive. The number of national groups started lining up on either side of the issue. The AFL-CIO, the National Farmers Union, the Group Health Association of America, the American Nurses Association, the American Public Welfare Association, and the National Association of Social Workers all supported the bill. On the other side, the opponents were the National Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association, the American Farm Bureau Association, the Health Insurance Association of America, and of course the AMA.

The fear of government cutting into the sales of insurance contracts as had been the case with government life insurance for servicemen during the First and Second World Wars and also with the passage of social security and its extensions. At the Forand bill hearings, the spokesman estimated the cost of the measure would exceed $2 billion per year, which was a tremendous underestimate.

However, because of the President’s opposition and the controversial nature of the Forand bill, the measure died in committee.  More hearings were held in 1959 with the same result as well as in 1960 where the Forand bill was able to obtain a vote on the bill in Committee with the result of a defeat again.

Despite the defeat after defeat, momentum in support of the proposal seemed to be increasing.

The next and most important stage of this historic saga is the one that brings the most changes and I will continue the discussion starting with House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson who both spoke and lobbied in favor of the bill which increased more support. First to come will be medical assistance through the states proposed by Wilbur Mills but not until John F. Kennedy was real progress made.

More next week.