Tag: intellectual disabilities
Special Ed Shouldn’t Be Separate
In the fall of 2020, as my son and his neighborhood friends started to trickle back out into the world, my daughter, Izzy, stayed home. At the time, Izzy was 3 years old, ripe for the natural learning that comes from being with other kids. I knew by the way she hummed and flapped her hands around children at the playground—and by her frustration with me at home—that she yearned to be among them.
The question of where Izzy would
Doctors Are Failing Patients With Disabilities
This piece was originally published by Undark Magazine.
Ben Salentine, the associate director of health-sciences managed care at the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System, hasn’t been weighed in more than a decade. His doctors “just kind of guess” his weight, he says, because they don’t have a wheelchair-accessible scale.
He’s far from alone. Many people with disabilities describe challenges in finding physicians prepared to care for them. “You would assume that medical spaces would be the most
Vaccine Hesitancy Has Seeped Into Home Health Care
There was the home health attendant who sucked her thumb before touching household items. And the one who brought her unvaccinated 4-year-old into the apartment where Mary and her immunocompromised husband live, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And the one who came by after her day shift at a nursing home.
Many of the aides who circulated through Mary’s household were vaccine-hesitant or outright anti-vax; many wore their mask improperly while in the apartment, she told me. A few came in with