Hands to Help Seniors

This year’s flu hit a lot of people hard, even those who got the flu vaccine.  A new study found that it was only 23% effective due to the fact that it didn’t include a vaccine for the bug that made most people sick (H3NS).  That’s one of the worst performances in the last decade since U.S. Health Officials began tracking this data.  In the best years, however, the vaccine is only 50-60% effective.  Each year, the vaccine is reformulated based on what experts like those at the Centers for Disease Control and prevention believe will be most effective.  The problem is, those decisions are made in February, way before the flu season starts.   In the meantime, new strains developed which drug companies just don’t have time to incorporate into the mix.  The elderly and those with weak immune systems are the hardest hit.  Hospitalization rates for senior citizens were high this flu season than they were during the 2012-2013 flu season, according to the CDC.

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Many people have heard the old adage "take a deep breath and relax."  Doctors and psychologists say that there is a lot of truth to the fact that breathing and controlling your breath is one of the easiest ways to improve your mental and physical health.  Slow, deep and consistent breathing has been shown to have benefits in treating conditions ranging from migraines and irritable bowel syndrome to anxiety disorders and pain.  “If you train yourself to breathe a little bit slower, it can have long-term health benefits,” Dr. Murali Doraiswamy, ,a professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center, told The Wall Street Journal.  Deep breathing has a relaxing response which can decrease inflammation, improve heart health, boost your immune system and may even improve your life span, according to Dr. Doraiswamy.  It sounds like it is worth a try!

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It was great to see the title of the story on the front page of the Monterey Herald was “Helping Others : Mothers and Daughters work to make life better through philanthropy.” Our Platinum sponsors, Alliance Home Healsh and Family inHome Caregiving, do try to make the day-to-day lives of seniors better, for a profit, but we are also involved in a number of charities including raising over $100,000 for the local chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association.  I also serve as the president of Hands to Help Seniors, a local non-profit which is trying to fill the void for senior services not covered by other non-profits or government assistance programs such as dental work.  The story today was about mothers and daughters getting together this past weekend for the National Charity Initiative Day which was sponsored by the Monterey Bay chapter of the National Charity League.  The group asks for a six year commitment for mothers and daughters who got together to do great things including making 24 pans of lasagna and making 40 fleece blankets to donate to Dorothy’s Place in Salinas.  The latter is a great non-profit which houses many homeless senior women.

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In one of the biggest Medicare overhauls in history, the Obama administration this week announced a plan which would change the way hundreds of billions of dollars are disbursed.  The goal is two-fold.  First, the government wants to save money.  But the administration is hoping that this will also make older Americans healthier.  The Department of Health and Human Services is proposing to make half of the payments that doctors receive based on the quality of care that they provide rather than the quantity by the year 2018.  Currently, 20% of payments are linked to quality metrics.  This change is likely to face huge opposition from the health care industry, which has complained that the administrative burden imposed on them by quality surveys which are required under the Affordable Care Act are just not worth it.  

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I have been writing quite a bit on my blog about the potential for “personalized medicine” where we change from being a one-size-fits-all prescription based society to one which looks at a person’s own DNA to see what might work best for him or her.  There are a number of companies making significant inroads in this area and I was happy to read that a company started by Dr. Jack Kaganaugh called ZetaRX was purchased by Juno Therapeautics and had an extremely successful IP just before Christmas.  The IP debuted at $24/share (a $4 billion market cap.) and shares have since soared to over $60 (with a range of $34.71 to $61.70, closing today at $42.49.  The company does non-surgical, non-chemo and non-radiation treatment for cancer using T-Cell technology which gets a subset of T-cells isolated from a patient’s blood.  These are then chemically altered and a receptor gene is added which allows the lab to grow cells, inject them in the patient, and they essentially destroy the cancer cells.  This is a wonderful technological breakthrough and I hope it is rapidly improved to fight many other diseases.

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