Subscribe Past Issues Translate RSS Hi, just a reminder that you're receiving this email because you have expressed an interest in Patrick Malone & Associates. Don't forget to add [email protected] to your address book so we'll be sure to land in your inbox! You may unsubscribe if you no longer wish to receive our emails. Call Us Today 202-742-1500 Better Healthcare Newsletter from Patrick Malone IN THIS ISSUE When the going gets tough, the resilient get going — and studies help explain how For seniors and kids, distinct challenges Boosting the capacity to bounce back Tidings of joy, in comforting and caring for others and finding a higher purpose It happened before: Good times can follow the bad With the needs great, contributions have been, too For too many Americans, 2020 will go down as a horrible year. You know the main outlines of the story: Millions were infected with a BY THE debilitating coronavirus. The infection killed hundreds of thousands of NUMBERS Americans, leaving loved ones and friends shrouded in grief. The unchecked virus slammed the economy, with tens of millions of 450,000 jobs lost and businesses shut, some forever. Estimated U.S. death toll by February, if the Too many of us had work-provided health insurance ripped away, while nation can't get bettter fear of infection led patients in droves to stay away from medical care, control of unchecked whether preventive or treatment for chronic conditions. coronavirus. That would be the rough equivalent of seeing the population Medical scientists have struggled to get ahead of the SARS-COV2 of either Atlanta or virus and to counsel Americans on how to protect themselves from it. A Kansas City wiped out. shambolic federal response to the disease may have worsened the infection’s consequences. 1 in 8 The nation, riven by political partisanship and an epidemic of public Number of adults falsehoods, has struggled for months. But it may be months more reporting that they did before a coronavirus vaccine and new occupants of the White House not get enough to eat in bend the curve of this disaster. the last week. The 26 million Americans How can all of us look ahead, be realistic — and bounce back from suffering food insecurity is far greater than adversity? How can we build the crucial quality of resilience, so when before the pandemic the darkest of recent times fade to memories, we can be in even better and may be at the worst shape than before? levels since 1998, when officials began keeping this data. When the going gets tough, the resilient get going — and studies help explain how 22% Percentage of respondents ages 18-23 deemed by researchers to be resilient — that is able to bounce back from adversity, such as is occuring in the pandemic. Young adults fared most poorly among the thousands in a nation survey and study of Americans' resilience. $3.4 billion Sums given by individual donor-advised funds in the first part of 2020. That was a 28% After the Great Depression, the two World Wars, and upheaval on a increase over the global scale, experts began to wonder how some youngsters not only previous year and, experts said, showed survived dire circumstances but thrived. Why did cruelty, poverty, how philanthropists and starvation, and other abject conditions break many children but not individuals have others? stepped up to address the dire needs caused As journalist Maria Konnikova described the studies of psychologist by the coronavirus Norman Garmezy and others, researchers flipped the question and pandemic. began to ask not why people fail in tough times but how they show resilience, so they succeed. Garmezy had his “aha!” moment while observing a smart and charming boy who came to school and smiled no matter what. He wondered why after learning the lad had a dad who QUICK LINKS had deserted him and an alcoholic mom. The best she could offer her lone kid was to send him to school every day with the same “sandwich” Our firm's website — two slices of plain bread, with nothing between. The boy refused pity, ate his lunch with cheer, and would not hear any doubts about his Read an excerpt from mother. Patrick Malone's book: Garmezy pioneered an approach to the study of resilience, no longer The life you save asking about troubled kids. when he visited schools. Instead, as Konnikova reported, he inquired of teachers and principals about Nine Steps to Finding the Best youngsters “who were adaptive and good citizens in the school and Medical Care — making it even though they had come out of very disturbed and Avoiding the Worst backgrounds — that was a new sort of inquiry. That’s the way we began.” He and others undertook what we know now to be a difficult study, as the New Yorker reported: “Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won’t know how resilient you are. It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb, or do you surmount?” Why do some surmount while others succumb? Researchers could quickly catalog the ways that people can be tested to the extreme, including growing up in poor, abusive, and neglectful homes. They might be directly subjected to harms or be harmed by watching the injury or death of others. The bad things could be LEARN MORE persistent or random. Their duration and intensity mattered. But other elements did, too, described in the New Yorker as, “protective factors: the elements of an individual’s background or personality that could enable success despite the challenges they faced.” These elements emerged, for example, in careful studies over decades of controlled groups, like hundreds of kids on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. This is what the magazine reported that Emily Read our Patient Safety Wenner, a psychologist, found in her longitudinal study: Blog, which has news and practical advice “She had followed a group of 698 children, in Kauai, Hawaii, from from the frontlines of before birth through their third decade of life. Along the way, she’d medicine for how to monitored them for any exposure to stress: maternal stress in utero, become a smarter, poverty, problems in the family, and so on. Two-thirds of the children healthier patient. came from backgrounds that were, essentially, stable, successful, and happy; the other third qualified as ‘at risk.’ Like Garmezy, she soon discovered that not all of the at-risk children reacted to stress in the same way. Two-thirds of them ‘developed serious learning or behavior problems by the age of 10, or had delinquency records, mental health problems, or teen-age pregnancies by the age of 18.’ But the remaining third developed into ‘competent, confident, and caring young adults.’ PAST ISSUES They had attained academic, domestic, and social success — and they When facts don't matter: were always ready to capitalize on new opportunities that arose.” Public is harmed when politicians bash U.S. It may sound strange in scientific work, but Wenner and other experts health agencies, on resilience agree that luck plays a role in all our lives. We bounce especially in a back from adversity sometimes because we are fortunate — we are pandemic. tied in some way to people with the power to pull us out of rotten World sees a sickly U.S. situations. Or we meet someone new who turns the course of our lives health system, wobbling around. We are at the right place at the right moment for fortune to hit in pandemic and a divisive election us like a lightning bolt. The Covid-19 vaccine: Will 'warp speed' Evidence has identified crucial ingredients to resilience — human produce safe, effective connections and adjustments in attitude. Humans are social animals protection for billions? and we got this far as a species by living and working together, notably Covid-19 and nursing in the toughest of times. As the New York Times reported of the homes: Should families importance of our ties to each other under duress and our standing up sue? to bad conditions: For African Americans, relentless health inequities require urgent “The most significant determinant of resilience — noted in nearly every redress review or study of resilience in the last 50 years — is the quality of our close personal relationships, especially with parents and primary care You Can Eat This... But givers. Early attachments to parents play a crucial, lifelong role in Why Would You? human adaptation. ‘How loved you felt as a child is a great predictor of Looking Ahead: how you manage all kinds of difficult situations later in life,’ said Bessel Preparing for Long- van der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Term Care Medicine who has been researching post-traumatic stress since the 1970s. He is the founder of the Trauma Research Foundation in Managing Chronic Pain: Boston. Dr. van der Kolk said long-term studies showed that the first 20 It’s Complicated years of life were especially critical. ‘Different traumas at different ages Secure Health Records: have their own impacts on our perceptions, interpretations and A Matter of Privacy and expectations; these early experiences sculpt the brain, because it is a Safety use-dependent organ,’ he said.” Standing Tall Against a Kids may find the care and nurture they need not just from parents Fall (who may be absent or worse) but from older siblings or encouraging More..