6 . Health Care Workers Getting Panic Buttons

Hundreds of health care workers at Cox Medical Center in Missouri will soon be equipped with personal panic buttons, following over a year of increased violence against staff members. The pandemic (流行病), the medical center said, has greatly ________the rise of the number of attacks and the very device comes at the right time to the rescue.

A medical worker, once experiencing an attack, can press the button attached to his working ID card to activate a personal ________system and warn the security department—an instant pop-up ________will appear on hospital computers, showing the worker’s exact location.

The panic buttons are being ________among scores of staff members working in “high-risk areas” of Cox Medical Center. The hospital promises, if there are positive results, to ________the program to hundreds of employees. And the system is expected to be ________at the end of the year.

Those buttons are ________backed by the Skaggs Foundation, a charity in Missouri, which has offered the hospital a big grant. “This project helps maintain our No.1 resource—our health care workers, the number of whom has ________so much,” Nita Jane Ayres, Chairman of the foundation, said.

Alan Butler, Cox Health’s system director, agreed the buttons were a(n) ________tool in the battle to keep the staff safe. The entire number of attacks on staff by patients has risen from 40 in 2019 to 123 in 2020, and total injuries rocketed from 17 to 78.

________ , even those numbers scarcely paint the full picture. Angie Smith, the medical center’s patient safety facilitator, said that many workplace violence events went ________because “staff don’t feel like they will be supported or don’t feel like they will be able to do anything about it.” “The ________parts of being in health care now are not only being able to give excellent care to your patients”, she said, “but also feeling ________yourself as their caregiver.”

________, workplace violence in medical centers deserved our attention even before the pandemic. A survey of thousands of emergency physicians found that nearly half of the participants had undergone attacks while working, and roughly ninety-seven percent of those were ________by patients.

7 . Elizabeth wouldn’t walk or talk as an infant. Angela’s left leg was so enlarged that it hurt to stand. Emma needed a breathing machine just to sleep. Their suffering may take different forms, but their stories share a common thread: Neither they nor their families knew what was actually causing these issues.

Undiagnosed diseases are more common than you might think. Tens of millions of Americans likely suffer from disorders they cannot name. For many, the symptoms are minor. But in some cases, patients come to their doctors with serious problems caused by diseases that challenge medical knowledge.

Those cases are precisely where the Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) steps in. Established in 2008, the UDN’s mission is to provide answers for patients with diseases that doctors are unable to diagnose. Anyone can apply to the program and the UDN works hard to screen every application it receives.

Today, the UDN covers 12 clinical sites around the country, and has evaluated over 1,400 patients. More than 400 of those patients have received a diagnosis thanks to the UDN. In some of these cases, the network is able to match a patient with an already known condition. In others, UDN researchers must work to describe an entirely new disease and enter it into the medical dictionary. The program has added at least 25 entirely new diseases in this way. Additionally, the UDN covers the cost of the tests, meaning patients aren’t burdened with crushing medical debt.

This kind of groundbreaking work helps more than just the patients themselves. Insights from studying rare diseases offer new knowledge about the human body that can benefit all of us. For example, the discovery of statins, a class of drugs commonly recommended today to help regulate high blood pressure, arose from the study of a rare genetic disorder.

“I think they’ve really advanced and changed the whole model for how we approach many of these illnesses,” says Anne Pariser, director of the Office of Rare Diseases Research. She says the UDN’s multidisciplinary approach — bringing different specialists together to talk about challenging cases — has helped advance the field of rare disease research, especially when it comes to genetic diseases.

Living with a disease without a name can be its own kind of suffering. “You grow up feeling like, I’m in this, crazy, all by myself, and no one really understands me,” says Angela Moon, a UDN participant. For patients like her, the UDN offers hope for treatment, but also for finally being seen.

9 . A three-year study comparing three different treatment options for tooth decay (腐烂) in children’s teeth has found no evidence to suggest that conventional fillings are more telling than sealing (封闭) decay in teeth, or using prevention techniques alone, in stopping pain and infection from tooth decay.

The FiCTION trial, the largest of its kind to date, also found that 450 children who took part in the study experienced tooth decay and pain, regardless of which kind of dental treatment they received.

Professor Nicola Innes, Chair of Paediatric Dentistry at the University of Dundee, said, “Our study shows that each way of treating decay worked to a similar level but that children with tooth decay at a young age have a high chance of experiencing toothache however the dentist manages the decay. From our trial, the best way to manage tooth decay is not by drilling it out or sealing it in, but it’s by preventing it in the first place.”

During the study, one of three treatment approaches was then chosen randomly for each child’s dental care for the duration of the trial for three years. The first approach aimed to prevent new decay by reducing sugar intake, ensuring twice-daily brushing with fluoride toothpaste (含氟牙膏). The second option involved drilling out tooth decay. For the third treatment strategy, tooth decay was sealed in to stop it progressing.

Of all three different ways of treating decay, sealing-in with preventive treatment was the most likely to be considered the best way of managing children’s decay if society is willing to pay a minimum of £130 to avoid an episode of pain or infection.

Professor Anne Maguire, Chair of Preventive Dentistry said, “The FiCTION findings have focused again on the need to prevent dental decay. The good news is that tooth decay can be prevented. Brushing your teeth with fluoride toothpaste, especially before bedtime, avoiding sugary drinks and snacks between meals and seeing a dentist regularly are all small habits that can help boost the overall health of your teeth.”