Advance Care Planning means just that; we make plans about our healthcare in advance. Obviously we cannot predict what will happen to our health, but we can make our wishes known as to what treatments and types of care we want carried out when the time comes.

If this virus was a visible enemy we would be at war with it, and we would be armed with vaccines to fight it. Instead we have the apathy of millions of adults, who refuse to be vaccinated, and they are crushing our healthcare system.

“The level of care that we have gotten used to in our hospitals no longer exists” (The Atlantic 12/16/21). As outsiders (of the hospitals), our lifestyle with the COVID pandemic has somewhat improved, but the crisis still exists inside our hospitals. We were not prepared when the pandemic started, and we are not prepared for the future.

We typically address the impact of mental and physical aspects of our health, but what about the spiritual? Our spiritual well-being is often left out and gets muddled with our emotional well-being, but they are not the same.

Although there has been an existing nursing shortage in the U.S, the shortage came into the spotlight in 2012. Now it is projected that within eight years, over 1 million new registered nurses (RNs) will be needed to meet healthcare demands in the U.S (https://www.healthline.com/health/nursing-shortage). That seems like an embellished number, but it is not.

As of 9/20/21, the U.S has the highest number of COVID-19 infections (42.3 million) and deaths (over 691,000) in the world–compared to any other nation  (https://www.statista.com/page/covid-19-coronavirus). The COVID-19 death toll has surpassed that of the 1918 flu pandemic. According to epidemiologist, Stephen Kissler, PhD, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: “A lot of the mistakes that we definitely fell into in 1918, we hoped we wouldn't fall into in 2020 … We did.”

How can you tell the difference between a bacterial and a viral infection? It is hard to judge, based on symptoms, since they can cause similar outcomes such as coughing, fever, fatigue, inflammation, sneezing, headaches and even vomiting or diarrhea (https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/bacterial-and-viral-infections). Although bacteria and viruses are both categorized as microbes and can spread infections in the same manner (coughing, sneezing, skin contact etc.) , they are significantly different structurally and the treatments are not the same.

People do not have a clear understanding of how HIPAA is put into practice. HIPAA, which stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, was established in 1996 as an act to provide consumers with a national standard for handling our medical information. The word “privacy” is not in the name of the act.

I started out writing about the highlights of COVID-19 and with each highlight, the outcome was “people need to get vaccinated.” We have the good fortune in this country of access to the vaccine, and yet we still have large numbers of the population not vaccinated. In the beginning it was understandable that people were concerned about the unknowns of the vaccine, but now there are over 2.5 billion people who are vaccinated world-wide.

Over the years I have written about the many benefits of physical activity. Along with good nutrition, it should be the first prescription that our doctors write out for us. But what does physical activity do for the brain?