Children’s hearing aids are generally much more expensive than adult hearing aids for several reasons. Adults might be able to make do with lower cost hearing aids, but children who are still developing the ability to speak and process language cannot.
Access to hearing aids for children with hearing loss doesn’t just mean kids can hear — it means they can learn, grow and communicate.
Disabled children have a right to a free and appropriate public education.
I’m making an intentional choice to use the word “disabled” to talk about children who need care during the school day. Many families use words like “special needs” to talk about children with disabilities. But disability is a word that is defined by state and federals laws that comes with rights.
Two years ago, my son James was invited to speak at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of Olmstead v. L.C.
The 1999 Supreme Court case said people with disabilities have a right to receive care in their own homes and live in the community, rather than being forced to live in segregated institutional care facilities.
It strikes me that embarrassment is a huge barrier to participation in physical activity for aging people, and it’s not even the most substantial one. Other obstacles include lack of money or transportation to attend an age-appropriate exercise class. In some cases, older adults are hobbled by arthritis or are wheelchair-bound. And sometimes taking a walk isn’t a viable option when a neighborhood doesn’t feel safe or the sidewalk is cracked and pitted.
Every year, an estimated 1 or more million patients venture from California to Mexico to obtain medical treatments and medicines, and a large contingent of these are aging people.
Cost is the main reason to make the trip for 60 to 70 percent of patients, said Arturo Vargas Bustamante, a professor in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
The most popular treatments among older patients who cross the border are dental services.
I’m one of many people who are increasingly living longer with or past cancer. In the 1970s, only 49 percent of patients survived five years after their illness, but that rate has risen to 70 percent. Doctors now commonly talk about cancer as a chronic disease which can be managed.
But even as older cancer patients receive the gift of extra time, greater longevity brings its own challenges.
Imagine knowing exactly what you want to say, but the words don’t make it from your brain to your lips. You know how you want to move, but your body fails to comply.
This is the reality of living with something called full-body apraxia, a term I hadn’t heard until recently, despite my 30 years of being diagnosed with this and or that disorder. Many treatment providers fail to recognize how these motor and sensory differences might manifest.
Shari Horne spends much of her day caring for her husband Hal in their sunny apartment in Orange County’s Laguna Woods, where she was once mayor.
I’m sharing the Hornes’ story in my inaugural column for the California Health Report. Over the next year, I’ll write about health equity and aging, drawing on my personal experiences, as well as those of the people I interview.
I spent three summers providing emergency services as part of Yosemite National Park’s Search and Rescue team, working hard on more than 100 rescue missions.
Emergency medical services look different in every park, but one thing is now the same: The systems that NPS visitors, residents and employees have come to rely on are on shaky ground.
When President Trump first announced tariffs on most foreign imports, Jennifer McLelland checked the packaging on her son’s medical supplies.
As a parent of a child with complex medical needs, McLelland argues for tariff exemptions on medical supplies that cannot be purchased from U.S. manufacturers.