Dementia is not a disease, but rather a collection of symptoms stemming from brain deterioration that occurs as people age. Alzheimer’s disease and small repetitive strokes known as vascular dementia are the most common illnesses leading to dementia.
A PEG tube—the acronym stands for percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy—is a silicone rubber feeding tube affixed to a patient’s belly through a simple surgical procedure. Intended for long-term feeding for patients who can’t or won’t eat, the tube carries liquid nutrition directly into the stomach.
While criticism of through-the-stomach feeding tubes has revolved around their use in frail elderly people, the device is widely accepted as crucial to medical care in a number of other circumstances.
Terminally ill adults can make advance directives from their doctors forbidding medical interventions outside the hospital, but a little-known Iowa law does not allow the same power to similarly situated minors and their parents.
Two years ago the Utah legislature authorized use of do-not-resuscitate orders for terminally ill children after discharge from the hospital. The new directives operate on the same model as those for adults, with the additional requirement that two doctors sign for them instead of one. Despite that
The state of Iowa is failing to warn people to cut back on eating locally caught fish contaminated with mercury and other pollutants at levels the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finds too risky, an IowaWatch study has found. More than 330,000 people a year buy licenses to fish Iowa’s waters, a
