Take a moment to think about how a patient feels when they are diagnosed with a lifelong illness. Think of a family member or a friend who has diabetes, or multiple sclerosis, maybe Alzheimer’s, or COPD. There are many different questions that your loved one had when they were told they were sick. “Is this going to be painful for me?” “How are others going to treat me?” “How am I going to pay for this?” But mostly they want to know, “How is this going to impact my life?”
We should also be aware of the grieving process they are experiencing, the loss of their former life without the disease, and always help to comfort them.
Medical care and pharmaceuticals are important commodities that individuals can utilize to enhance their health. For many people, doctor’s visits may only be necessary for brief sicknesses or a yearly checkup. However many people are dependent on long term medical attention for chronic diseases and associated symptoms. These patients require daily prescribed medications to treat their illness or prevent complications. As future nurses, along with other healthcare professionals, it is crucial to be well versed on chronic illnesses such as diabetes, HIV/AIDS, respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, and others that will be frequently encountered in the field. Having, as well as, treating a chronic disease is a complicated issue with many considerations.
Assessing the patient is vital to diagnosis and treatment of any illness or injury. As nurses, we must be able to interpret our patient’s signs and symptoms; we must know what each symptom is caused by or possibly indicates. A general example, if a patient presents with abdominal pain we must assess whether the patient is having appendicitis, a tubal pregnancy, GI bleeding, pelvic inflammation from an STD, a drug interaction, or just gas. Therefore, knowing the most common chronic diseases and their associated drug therapies we can conduct a more thorough assessment to diagnose any problems that arise.
A large portion of the nurse’s role is to console and teach our patient’s about what they do not know about their sickness. Therefore we should be knowledgeable of:
• the pathophysiology of the disease process
- the cause of the disease
- how the disease runs its course
- what symptoms to expect: on a daily basis or a special case
• treatments: drugs and procedures
- what does the drug do?
- how does the patient take the drug?
- with or without food
- time of day
• how to prevent complications and symptoms (Acute care/ Long term care)
- daily actions to take
- diet modifications
- quitting smoking
- drug interaction warnings
Aside from the strictly treatment-based focus, we must always anticipate our patients emotional, spiritual, and financial lives which can also have an affect on the course of action a patient will take with their health.
How do finances affect a patient’s treatment?
I briefly mentioned the patient’s concern for the cost of drugs and treatments. This is a huge issue for many people across the world. Often, economic struggle seems to take precedent over our health. If a person cannot afford their medication they may stop taking the drug. This could be hugely detrimental to their health. It is important for us as nurses to be aware of the costs of drugs (and possibly ask if our patient has health insurance?) to anticipate such a situation. We should also urge our patients to always talk to their doctor about any medical issue, even if it is financially based, as there are in some cases generic brands that could lower the financial burden.
This is especially true when the patient does not approve of the effect of the drug they are taking. In some cases a patient will not experience a therapeutic effect from the medication that they are taking. Patients sometimes stop taking their medications because they do not think that they are working. They figure if the drug doesn’t make a difference then why pay for it?
In other cases a patient cannot tolerate the side effects of a medication can therefore stops taking the drug. This should be strongly discouraged! As we will see, this can be deadly! Patients should again be encouraged to talk to their doctor before stopping treatment.
This blog will be a broad discussion of the various chronic diseases. We decided that in order to best display these problems and any possible solutions, we will focus on specific chronic illnesses, the drugs involved with them, and any of the issues related to these drugs. So just check out the different pages we’ve created for an assortment of chronic illnesses. We hope that this proves useful for you! Enjoy, and let us know what you think.
