Journal of general internal medicine
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Incarceration can result in adverse socioeconomic and health consequences for individuals who have been incarcerated; these consequences extend to their children and may have impacts into later adulthood. ⋯ FMI during childhood was associated with adverse health-related outcomes for adults of all ages. Developing programs to improve access to education and economic opportunities for adults with FMI may help mitigate the disparities.
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Healthcare provided without attending to patients' religious/spiritual needs contributes to inequities. ⋯ Muslim Americans have substantial unmet religious/spiritual resource needs in hospital settings. Patient-centered, equitable care may be enhanced by clinicians inquiring about, and mobilizing resources to attend to these.
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Biomarkers are becoming crucial in ever more medical tasks and are proposed to change medicine in profound ways. By biomarking ever more attributes of human life, they tend to blur the distinction between health and disease and come to characterize life as such. Not only do biomarkers strongly influence the professional conception of disease by pervading ever more diagnoses, but they also impact patients' experience of illness. To manage how biomarkers influence patients, professionals, and societies, we urgently need to move from identifying potentially relevant biomarkers to determine their meaning and value to individuals, professionals, and public health.
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Editorial Review
Blunt Talk on "Blunts": The Increasingly Popular Tobacco Product That Is Potentially Exacerbating Tobacco-Related Health Disparities.
A "blunt" is a hollowed-out cigar/cigarillo from which much of the loose tobacco has been removed, and the remaining tobacco wrapper filled with cannabis. Although blunts contain significant levels of tobacco/nicotine, they are often treated as if they were exclusive cannabis products and omitted from surveys of tobacco products. Whereas the prevalence of virtually all other tobacco products is on the decline in the USA, available data suggest that the prevalence of blunt smoking is not - and in fact, it may be increasing. ⋯ Co-use of tobacco and cannabis has been reported to have additive and even synergistic adverse health effects. Lack of investigations into the health effects of tobacco products most frequently used by Black people may contribute to tobacco-related health disparities. We argue that the scientific and public health communities must treat blunts as the potentially lethal tobacco product that they are, studying their prevalence and use patterns, and investigating their adverse health effects, both short and long term.
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Observational Study
Healthcare Utilization and Chronic Disease Management for Non-Medicaid-Eligible Patients in a City-Wide Safety-Net Healthcare Access Program.
In 2019, New York City (NYC) launched NYC Care (NYCC), a healthcare access program through NYC Health + Hospitals (H + H) for individuals who are ineligible for federally funded health insurance programs or cannot purchase insurance through the State Marketplace, predominantly undocumented individuals. ⋯ NYCC effectively enrolled a large number of uninsured participants and provided them with healthcare access similar to that of Medicaid patients. Future studies should evaluate the impact of NYCC enrollment on healthcare utilization and disease outcomes.