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Dr. Google You’re Fired! – 3 Effective Ways to Reduce Illness Anxiety!

Paging Dr. Google!

When you’re feeling unwell, it’s tempting to turn to Dr. Google. He’s accessible, there’s no copay or wait time, and he offers instant appointments! Having a lot of anxiety about being sick is natural, we even have a name for it – illness anxiety. Unfortunately, he usually arrives with bad news… That cough you’ve had for the last two days… Dr. Google says it must be lung cancer. The diarrhea that won’t seem to go away… oh that’s definitely colon cancer. And what does Dr. Google say about that sore toe? Oh, that’s probably lung cancer too. Of course, I’m being facetious here. 

But there are ways to properly use Google to take charge of your health and make the most out of your visits to the doctor. Let’s talk about some strategies and pitfalls of using Dr. Google and why it’s always important to get a second opinion from a real-life health care professional!

Steps to Combat Illness Anxiety

Don’t Do This: Google your symptoms! I know this is a tall order, but googling symptoms is just going to make that illness anxiety go through the roof! Type in cough, chest tightness, and weight loss and you’ll arrive on a search page full of lung cancer results.

Do This Instead: Make an appointment with your doctor and if you’re really worried, keep a journal about your symptoms. Each day keep track of changes, is your cough getting worse or better? How much weight are you losing each day? Are you feeling too sick to eat each day? Have you been in contact with any sick people lately? Does anything make you feel better or worse?

If You Want to Go Even Further: Get proactive with your health! Don’t wait for symptoms to start thinking about developing healthy habits. Make annual appointments with your family doctor, learn about your health insurance benefits, stay on top of essential labs like tracking your cholesterol and work with your primary doctor to setup important annual screenings. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

 

Don’t Do This: Obsess over illnesses that run-in families. Maybe you haven’t felt well for a while. Maybe a close relative had a serious illness when they were about your age. Maybe they even passed away tragically young. Turning to Dr. Google, you then learn that they may have had XYZ disease and it runs in families! Should you panic now?! No!

Do This Instead: Make an appointment with your primary care doctor to discuss your concerns. Don’t have a primary care doctor? Now’s a great time to get one. Try to stay away from your local Urgent Care, you should be trying to establish long-term care with a physician that’s going to get to know you. After you have your appointment, talk to them about what you’re concerned about and how those concerns are impacting your life. The doctor may order further testing to help rule in or out the chances of illness.

If You Want to Go Even Further: Learn about risk factors for illnesses. For example, diabetes has a strong genetic component. Talk to your doctor, and consult legitimate sources to learn all you can. Then once you’re equipped with that knowledge you can take steps to keep yourself in good health and stay proactive. This should help reduce illness anxiety. If you’re not sure about a source of information, talk to your doctor – they can help you tell apart trustworthy and untrustworthy sources of information, they might even have some good resources of their own! Thrifty Patient is one of those good sources of information. Like our very popular articles on Major Losartan Recalls hitting the country or information about supplements like CBD, we only deliver quality information about your health.  

Don’t Do This: Don’t trust miracle cures that pop up when asking Dr. Google a question. All search engines, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc use complex algorithms to direct traffic to popular and relevant content. However, what Dr. Google can’t do is tell evidence-based medicine apart from wacky theories. Abby Ohlheiser of the Washington Post recently wrote about the flood of bogus medical cures that can be found online. 

Do This Instead: Empower yourself in your next discussion with your doctor by asking them how they make their treatment decisions. Most doctors will tell you that they follow evidence-based practices and keep up to date on the latest research guidelines for their specialties.


If You Want to Go Even Further:
Take the evidence-based approach yourself when doing research into therapies. Then bring your evidence to your doctor. You might be surprised at how open and flexible many doctors are to try new things, especially if you can show them good research. Just remember, not all research is created equal. Click here to learn more about the Pyramid of Quality Research!

It’s important to stay on top of your health and we’re the biggest advocates of patients taking their health into their own hands. However, you need good tools if you plan on getting anywhere. Search engines like google are one of those tools that can do as much harm as good. We’d love to hear your stories about illness anxiety and if searching symptoms online helped or caused even greater illness anxiety. 

How to Prepare for an ACA Repeal – 6 Important Steps

Affordable Care Act Faces Uncertain Future

On Wednesday, May 1st 2019 the Trump administration signaled it’s legally challenging the constitutionality of the entire Affordable Care Act (ACA). This marks a shift from their earlier position that parts of the act were good and parts should be struck down. If the entire ACA repeal goes through, then up to 20 million people in the US are in a position to lose coverage.

The Thrifty Patient is an a-political, pro-patient organization. Our mission is to help all patients, no matter how they vote. So, instead, we’re looking at who has benefited from the ACA and how you can prepare for an ACA repeal if you are going to lose coverage.

Who Benefits the Most from the ACA?

There are 4 groups of people in particular that benefit from the ACA. If you’re one of the over 20 million in one of these groups, you would be rightly concerned about what an ACA repeal means for you.

1. People with Pre-Existing Conditions. The ACA ensured that insurance companies couldn’t deny coverage to people with costly pre-existing conditions. Here are some proposed examples of pre-existing conditions. Before the ACA, there were over 400 pre-existing conditions defined by insurance companies, the most common being Cancer, Diabetes, Pregnancy, Mental Illness, and Hepatitis.

2. Young Adults. Under the ACA coverage was extended to the age of 26. You may have noticed young people think they’re invincible. You combine this with the fact that many young people don’t have very well paying jobs until their late 20’s and you’ll find many not affording or thinking they can skip coverage.

3. Low-Income & Lower-Middle Class Families. The ACA allowed states to expand medicaid coverage to so that your household qualifies if the household’s income is below 138% the income level. Check this healthcare.gov tool to see if your state expanded coverage and your household qualifies!

4. People who Need / Use a lot of Care (Via Elimination of Lifetime Caps). One group of people who benefited tremendously was people who have required very costly cares. Before the ACA you had limits to the amount insurance would pay out to cover your bills. For people like newborn Timmy Morrison’s parents, who got a $2 million dollar medical bill – this could quickly bankrupt you. Medical bills are still the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the US, and the ACA was a step towards addressing this.

Is the ACA Repeal giving you a headache?

How to Prepare for an ACA Repeal

If the thought of and ACA repeal gets your heart pounding and your blood pressure skyrocketing…

First, take a deep breath. There are many steps and barriers until that’s a reality. Even if it does happen, we all hope that the politicians have learned how popular at least parts of it are, and won’t want the fallout of kicking everyone off.

Second, start doing research. As the demand grows, options like transparent, out-of-pocket care are becoming more widely available. Also look into what options will allow you to obtain care for free. We have an excellent write up on how to get free dental care. ACA repeal or no repeal, these options are worth knowing about!

Third, take stock of your finances. If you receive care for free now, what can you start saving towards medical expenses? Look into options like High Deductible Plans and Health Savings Accounts. These options are especially important to young adults, who may be aging off their parent’s plans earlier. Don’t let an ACA repeal catch your bank account flat-footed.

Fourth, begin asking about ways to save money now. There are many options out there for drug cards, generic medications, free wellness programs, and so on. Even if the repeal doesn’t go forward, you can only benefit from knowing more about your options.

Fifth, use your coverage now! Take care of those health problems NOW while your coverage is solid. If you’ve been putting off going to the dentist, do it now. If you’ve had shortness of breath, or a sore back or knees that you’ve been ignoring, now might be the best time to get them taken care of. Best case scenario, a year from now you feel better then ever and you still have your coverage.

Finally, if you feel strongly one way or the other about a repeal, take action and contact your representatives to tell them how you feel. At the Thrifty Patient we want to help empower every person to be the best advocate they can be for themselves.

Healthereum – A New Incentive for Healthy Behaviors

Healthereum – a New Incentive for Healthy Behaviors

When I was a kid, I used to get a lollipop for going to the doctors’ office. Nowadays, I get a copay. How would you like to return go the time of be rewarded for going to your appointments? And I’m not talking lollipops. The health care startup Healthereum is looking to utilize blockchain technology to do just that.

Healthereum digital coins

Healtherium Life Portfolio aka HELIOS is creating a rewards system for patients making appointments, finishing surveys, completing tasks, and so on. As a patient completes a task, they’re rewarded with digital tokens that can be traded back in to the provider. The provider is empowered to determine exactly what these tokens are worth. It reminds me a lot of the arcades where you win tickets that you can trade in for prizes. Except ideally these prizes are worth a lot more then the pencil eraser I’d usually wind up with.

You’d be totally forgiven if you were in a rush to dismiss Healthereum after hearing the words ‘blockchain’, ‘startup’, and ‘digital token’. However, the development team isn’t your run-of-the-mill garage hackers. Founded by experienced physicians and software engineers and advised by industry experts and executive business leaders, HELIOS brings a significant amount of expertise to the fore. This team behind Healtherium, has also developed a number of other extremely impressive products.


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HELIOS is one of the latest examples in a trend towards incentivizing patient compliance and behavioral interventions. Research done into the behavioral science aspects of incentivizing care shows that it can often result in improved compliance. HELIOS looks exciting and it’ll be great to watch the development of the product to see how practices implement it.

In regards to of the larger field of incentivizing compliance, this writer has some concerns regarding the ethics of such systems. No one likes feeling manipulated or strong-armed into doing things. Such systems also need to consider issues of accessibility. A 20-something software engineer might know how to fully take advantage of something like a digital reward, but a retiree who doesn’t own a PC might have some trouble fully utilizing it and thus may be left out of savings. We absolutely don’t want to leave our vulnerable populations behind as we modernize care.

As Healthereum matures, we’ll continue to bring you news about how you can use it to save more at the doctors. In the meantime, check out our articles about how to save now. Like 8 simple ways you can make the most out of your next doctor’s visit!