After Rebecca Valentine, 47, found out she had high blood pressure, she started monitoring her pressure at home. She invested in a high-tech blood pressure cuff that automatically sends readings to her smartphone. Rebecca can easily share that data with her doctor, who determines whether her medication needs adjustment. “The monitor keeps a record for me and even lets me know how I’m doing,” Rebecca says. “A green light is good. Orange means keep an eye on it; red lets me know to take more medicine or call the doctor.” Read more at Aetna.com.
Category Health
Recognizing postpartum depression: Women tell their stories
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Teens Imagine “If Men Could Lactate” in Hilarious Essay
Can you picture what the world would look like if men could lactate and women could not? A co-ed group of California high school students did and the results were amazing.
School boys would brag about how far they could “fire” their breast milk, lactation would be weaponized in video games, and “Brad Titt” would star in such films as “Money Boob.” On a more serious note, “breastfeeding in public would be encouraged” and men “would bring their babies to their workplace and it wouldn’t be a distraction,” according to an essay by Madison Holland, Peter King, Zack Matar, and Jacob Rivera, 11th graders at Pioneer High School in San Jose, Calif.
Two N.J, pharma companies leading search for Ebola vaccine
Biopharmaceutical companies generate billions in economic activity for New Jersey, but don’t expect their latest, most high-profile venture — tackling the Ebola epidemic — to add much to their bottom line.
Industry leaders say they have a greater goal in mind.
“The real purpose is not to make money or not lose money. The real purpose is to respond to the public health need,” said Dr. Mark Feinberg, chief public health and science officer for vaccines at Merck & Co. in Kenilworth.
Home care staffing crunch in New Jersey
For Lubna Ismail, president of a Cliffside Park home health aide business, time is crucial. If she can’t set up potential recruits with a client right away, they might sign on with someone else.
“When you’re ready to hire, sometimes they’ve already taken a position with another agency,” said Ismail, a Leonia resident who has been running a Right at Home franchise for three years. “It’s like, who can get to them first?”
Home health aides work with the elderly and the disabled, assisting them with basic tasks like bathing and dressing and performing limited clinical duties, including checking vital signs. In New Jersey and across the country, an aging population means that home health aides are in greater demand than ever.
The Dark Side of the Modern ‘Super Parent’
Rachel Hillestad hasn’t perfected the art of French braiding her daughters’ hair. She doesn’t serve organic, free-range chicken for dinner. And for her four kids’ first day of school, she didn’t photograph them posing with cute chalkboards listing their ages and heights, as she saw some of her friends doing.
The Kansas City mom feels guilty about all of it — her perceived shortcomings as a parent. And because she has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, that guilt translates into torturing herself with the same self-critical thoughts over and over: “You’re not a good mom,” and “Your kids don’t know you love them.”
Inside the Ebola Swag Market
Infectious disease experts have assured the U.S. public that despite the Ebola outbreak raging abroad, Americans’ chances of contracting the illness at home are virtually nil. Anyone, however, can have Ebola adorning their walls, their necks or even their children’s playrooms, for a price.
A handful of North American-based businesses sell Ebola-themed products ranging from jewelry to home decor…Read more on NBCNews.com.
The Next Best Thing to a Mother’s Beating Heart?
It is one of the most iconic images of motherhood: A new mother, still recovering from labor but beaming as she holds a newborn in her arms. But the mothers of fragile preemies too often miss this amazing moment.
“All those dreams I had for bonding with my new baby are now nightmares because I couldn’t even hold my baby for the first few days,” wrote preemie mom Jennifer Sweetman on the site preemiebabies101.com.
The makers of a new device hope that parents like Sweetman will someday rest assured that even when pre-term infants are separated from their mothers for days or weeks at a time, they can still feel the sensation of being near their mothers and reap health benefits as a result.
Thank You, “Parentese,” for Growing Baby’s Vocab
Do you speak “parentese” with your baby? If not, you might want to start. A new study has found that infants and young toddlers exposed to more “parentese” through one-on-one interactions with their caregivers had much larger vocabularies by age 2 than their peers.
The findings “are consistent with the idea that infants’ early speech and later word production may be related to the social context and the style of speech directed toward the child,” researchers from the University of Connecticut and the University of Washington wrote in an article to be published in the journal Developmental Science.
So what exactly is “parentese”? Think baby talk, but less “googoo, gaga” and more “shooooes” and “diiiaper.”
High-Chair Injuries: Why Are Children Getting Hurt?
Lainie Gutterman is changing her ways. Sometimes, the New York mom of two admitted, she didn’t always fully strap her children into their high chairs.
Not anymore.
“I will no longer be lax,” said Gutterman, who blogs at Me, Myself and Baby I, noting that she was “glad we haven’t had a casualty yet in (the) past four years.”
Gutterman’s about-face comes in response to a new study reporting that more than 9,400 children are treated each year for high chair-related injuries.
Alice Gomstyn 