Managing anxiety through COVID 19 Does the new coronavirus from China make you a little anxious? How concerned should we be? Is it a real threat or mostly hype? In today’s podcast, Dr. John Grohol, founder and editor-in-chief of PsychCentral.com, explains what the coronavirus is, how it compares to the flu and why it seems to have hit the panic button in a lot of people. He offers tips to avoid getting sick in general, and importantly, gives advice on how to keep our anxiety levels in check when it comes to new disease outbreaks, especially in how we seek information from the media.
Topics: Mental Health
Withholding surgery: How gaps in policy fail people who inject drugs
A recent New York Times article described a harrowing situation faced by some people who inject drugs and develop endocarditis, a life-threatening infection caused by bacteria that enter the bloodstream and settle in the heart. The article described doctors in Tennessee deciding whether to perform repeat costly heart surgeries on patients who were re-infected with endocarditis as a result of ongoing illicit drug use—and at times declining to operate. There are policy failures that are to blame, too, for how and why resources are allocated this way. This looks at those failures and how our bias influences both the policies and how they are applied.