Health Archives — 100 Days in Appalachia

Tag: Health

Health

‘Life-changing Support’: In Rural North Carolina, a Program for Treatment of Substance Use Disorder Through Pregnancy and Beyond Offers Care and Counters Stigma

by Taylor Sisk on August 6, 2024 Comments are Disabled

Project CARA works to get people into care and support them — with a goal of better outcomes for both the babies and their parents.

Photo: Molly Humphries/Healthcare is Human

Healthcare Is Human

Meet a Doctor Inside a W.Va. Crisis Support Center Who Relies on Hope in Recovery

by Ryan McCarthy & Molly Humphreys on July 18, 2024 Comments are Disabled

At the West Virginia University Crisis Support and Recovery Center, the staff takes hope seriously. H-O-P-E is even spelled out in the steel railing inside their living quarters.

Healthcare Is Human

Healthcare is Human: A Nurse on the Frontlines of an Addiction Crisis

by Ryan McCarthy & Molly Humphreys on July 2, 2024 Comments are Disabled

Angie Gray has spent her entire career in public health nursing and says she knew long ago that West Virginia was vulnerable to many public health issues. Substance use disorder was becoming a problem in West Virginia as she advanced in her career, and its prevalence concerned her. “Our obituaries […]

Dr. Ryan McCarthy, left, started the podcast Healthcare is Human during the COVID-19 pandemic. The storytelling skills he learned during the podcast, he says, has changed the way he practices medicine and interacts with his patients in Appalachia. Photo: Molly Humphreys/Healthcare is Human

Health Care in Appalachia

Finding Solace in Stories: How Narrative Medicine Transformed an Appalachian Doctor’s Practice

by Ryan McCarthy on June 25, 2024 Comments are Disabled

In the 1990s when I started medical school, nobody warned me how my job was going to hurt me emotionally. Maybe it’s better they didn’t, as I might have been scared away. I must admit, there were a few omens I foolishly ignored early on. Still, I could not have […]

Every weekend, Ainsley Bryce, the executive director of Holler Harm Reduction, sets up a syringe exchange in the back parking lot of a Dollar General in western North Carolina, where people seek help across state lines. Photo: Stacy Kranitz/For 100 Days in Appalachia

Recovery

‘Harm Reduction Saves Lives’: Meet the Appalachians Doing the Work

by Taylor Sisk, Photography by Stacy Kranitz on March 30, 2023 Comments are Disabled

Recovery from addiction is possible. For help, please call the free and confidential treatment referral hotline (1-800-662-HELP) or visit findtreatment.gov. The numbers are now frighteningly familiar: More than a million Americans dead from a drug overdose in the past two decades. More than 100,000 of those deaths came in 2021, […]

During his about a year-and-a-half stay at Mildred Mitchell-Bateman Hospital in Huntington, Richard Rothermund gained 60 pounds and his health drastically declined. He died at age 40 on Dec. 17, 2021. Photos: Provided

Access To Care

For This W.Va. Family, Legislative Attention on ‘Warehousing’ People with Intellectual Disabilities at State Hospitals Is too Late

by Erin Beck on February 13, 2023 Comments are Disabled

Richard Rothermund was healthy and generally happy before he was confined to Mildred Mitchell-Bateman Hospital in Huntington in 2020, according to Sue Rouse, his mother. There, Sue says, a lack of independence, separation from loved ones and the decline of joyful moments in his life led to the drastic deterioration […]