JANESVILLE — The Aging and Disability Resource Center (ADRC) of Rock County/Dementia Care Specialist is presenting a free Alzheimer’s disease and dementia educational series at the Job Center, 1900 Center Ave.
Each program in the series, “Stepping Stones to Understanding Dementia: Diagnosis to End of Life,” is free of charge and begins at 6 p.m. Upcoming installments include:
JANESVILLE — Rock County Council on Aging will be offering a six-week LIVING WELL workshop series Tuesdays, Sept. 16 through Oct. 21 at the Rock County Council on Aging office, 3328 Hwy. 51 North, Janesville, from 5:30 to 8 p.m.
LIVING WELL is a program for people with chronic diseases and their caregivers. Chronic diseases are ongoing health conditions and include diabetes, arthritis, HIV/AIDS, high blood pressure, depression, heart disease, chronic pain, anxiety, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia.
In a 1999 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, patients with serious illness were asked to identify what was most important to them during the dying process.
Many indicated they wanted to achieve a “sense of control.” This is understandable. Most of us fear our powerlessness in the face of illness and death.
We would like to retain an element of control, even though we realize that dying often involves the very opposite: a total loss of control, over our muscles, our emotions, our minds, our bowels, and our very lives, as our human framework succumbs to powerful disintegrative forces.
Q I come from a family of five — three boys and two girls. Mom is still living, dad passed away several years ago. We have always been “worriers” — with my mom setting the standard.
One of my sisters has just been diagnosed with a serious disease and does not want mom to know because she will worry. I think she should know what is going on but I am the only one. Is it a good idea to hide this information from mom to “protect” her? (A son in Portage)
Last month, an advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta recommended that nine- to 12-year-old boys be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV), a virus transmitted through sexual contact. The goal of the recommendations was to prevent cancers caused by HPV, such as certain cancers of the digestive tract.
The same committee had already recommended, back in March of 2007, that girls and young women between the ages of nine and 26 be vaccinated against HPV, to help prevent various cancers of the reproductive tract, such as cervical cancer.
While the motivation to prevent cancer and diseases is clearly good, a universal recommendation of this type raises ethical concerns. Because the recommendations of the committee relate to important aspects of human behavior and sexuality at formative ages for children and adolescents, parents need to look at the psychological and social messages they might be conveying by choosing to vaccinate their children against HPV.
In implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) now requires almost all private health plans to cover contraception and sterilization as “preventive services” for women.
A key argument in the embryonic stem cell debate — widely invoked by scientists, patient advocacy groups, and politicians — involves the fate of frozen embryos.
Barack Obama put it this way in 2008: “If we are going to discard those embryos, and we know there is potential research that could lead to curing debilitating diseases — Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease — if that possibility presents itself, then I think that we should, in a careful way, go ahead and pursue that research.”
The head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, embraced this same line of reasoning by
