Living with chronic pain or a life-threatening disease can be a difficult and overwhelming experience. Fortunately, there are many resources available to help people in Ellisville, Mississippi manage their chronic illnesses. The American Chronic Pain Association (ACPA) and the HealthWell Foundation are two great organizations that provide support and guidance to those suffering from chronic or life-threatening diseases. The ACPA has published the Chronic Pain Management Resource Guide, which provides detailed information on medical, interventional, behavioral, pharmacological and rehabilitation therapies.
The HealthWell Foundation offers funds for drug coinsurance, copayments, deductibles, health insurance premiums, and other selected out-of-pocket health care expenses. They also have partnerships with many healthcare organizations and societies to support patients. New interventions have the opportunity to improve family participation in clinical care by helping patients and their families to explicitly define family roles in clinical management and by providing tools and skills that improve the ability of family members to perform these roles. While family members who participate in any support program may experience greater stress due to the intensification of their roles and function expectations, family members who support clinical care may be particularly prone to increased stress or burden if they lack the clinical knowledge or skills they need to perform their role or if they do not have effective access to the patient's healthcare provider when needed. The few interventions evaluated to date have shown improvements in intra-family communication, levels of family support, and patient self-efficacy, and some have improved patient outcomes.
Approaches to treating chronic diseases are moving from the traditional provider-patient relationship to a paradigm in which people with chronic diseases play a key role in guiding their care, in collaboration with healthcare providers. As with many disease control programs, the patient's clinical provider receives automated faxes summarizing the most pressing health issues and can access the patient's health evaluation answers through a website. Improvements in healthcare have resulted in greater numbers of people living with multiple chronic conditions for longer periods of time. Research on the best approaches to better mobilize family members to support the treatment of chronic diseases is vitally important, in light of the growing number of patients with chronic diseases, the difficulty of changing health behaviors and maintaining positive changes, limited resources for professional services, and the growing recognition of the positive effects of family support. After every visit to the healthcare provider (usually every three to four months), patients often have to deal with revised personal care instructions, changes in their medication regimens, referrals for medical tests, and new self-monitoring goals. Self-management has a particular value since it represents a fusion of the objectives of the patient, the family, the community and the doctor, in which everyone works collaboratively to better control the person's illness and at the same time facilitate comprehensive care. Primary prevention can be considered as efforts to prevent the onset of the disease among asymptomatic people while secondary prevention involves detecting the disease among asymptomatic people.
Tertiary prevention involves efforts to prevent deterioration of health in cases where the disease is already present. Self-management goes beyond traditional treatment of a disease by incorporating a broader concept of prevention and emphasizing that people with chronic diseases still need preventive interventions to promote well-being and mitigate further deterioration in health. Between clinic visits, family members can help refill medications, manage appointments and insurance issues, keep track of self-evaluations or symptoms and communicate those results to providers, and address worrying trends in patients' health in the early stages. While most goal-setting programs focus on goals that support patients' health behaviors, family members could set goals to improve their own health with the intention of creating a healthier home environment that would indirectly influence the patient. The American Chronic Pain Association was founded in 1980 in the United States by Penney Cowan to help people suffering from chronic pain. Because most chronic conditions are lifestyle-related, self-management represents an opportunity for direct intervention at an individual level with potential for having a favorable impact on health and health-related behaviors.
