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Author Pain and Injury Categories News 0 comment

Workers’ comp prescription drug reform takes first step in Senate

A reform of workers’ compensation prescription drug benefits being aggressively lobbied by just about every business group in the state passed the Senate Banking and Insurance Committee on Thursday morning. But not before some heated rhetoric and testy back-and-forths that call into question the bill’s future.

Lambasting doctors that upcharge insurers as much as 600 percent for drugs after they unbundle and repackage them, Sen. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, introduced SB 668 to cap drug dispensers’ markup at $4.18.

“When I learned about the facts of this situation, I said ‘There ought to be a law against that,’” said Hays. “This bill will stop [doctors] from ripping off the system by charging extremely inflated fees for medication.”

The bill seeks to close the so-called drug repackaging loophole, which allows physicians to charge increased reimbursement rates for medication bought wholesale, repackaged for patients and then given a heftier price tag. Those markups costs employers as much as $62 million annually, and are a major contributor to this year’s 8.9 percent increase in workers’ compensation premiums, according to industry estimates.

The bill passed the Senate Banking and Insurance committee with a 7-4 vote, with dissenting lawmakers arguing that the bill injects government into an issue that should be handled by the free market. Senators Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, Gwen Margolis, D-Coconut Grove, Joe Negron, R-Stuart  and Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood, voted against the bill.”Is the carrier forced to send the patient, the workers comp patient, to any particular doctor?” Fasano asked in a testy exchange with Hays. “If we know that there are doctors, as you say, ripping off the system, why would the carriers be allowing the patients to go see them?”

Hays was blunt and terse in his response: “I really have no idea the origin or the purpose of the question.”

Dr. Gary Kellman, one of two doctors to speak out against the bill at the hearing, said his office in Plantation could not continue to dispense drugs to patients if the price was capped, due to the costs involved.

“This very idea that doctors are gouging the system is unbelievably offensive to me,” he said, adding that insurers let their workers’ compensation patients get drugs directly from doctors (rather than from a pharmacy) because those workers get better faster.

More than a dozen business groups have expressed support for closing the loophole.

Back in 2010, the bill passed both houses, but was vetoed by Gov. Charlie Crist. The bill moves next to the Health Regulation Committee in the Senate. Its companion in the House, HB 511 (which has some 22 co-sponsors), cleared its first committee last month, and is on its way to a vote in the Health and Human Service Committee.

Read more here: http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2012/01/workers-comp-prescription-drug-reform-takes-first-step-in-senate.html#storylink=cpy

Author Pain and Injury Categories News 0 comment

Children in Low-Income Manhattan Neighborhoods More Likely To Be Hit By Cars

By Kate Hinds | 01/19/2012 – 5:15 pm

Children under 18 account for 43% of car crash victims in Manhattan’s East Harlem neighborhood. But just a few blocks south, in the moneyed Upper East Side, the same age group accounts for less than 15% of neighborhood car crash victims.

That’s the conclusion of the new report “Child Crashes: An Unequal Burden”(pdf), released Thursday by Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group. According to the group’s research,  of the East Side’s top ten intersections for motor vehicle crashes that kill or injure child pedestrians and bicyclists, “nine are located in close proximity to public housing developments in East Harlem and the Lower East Side.”

The report  draws upon data from 1995-2009 that the group received after filing Freedom of Information Law requests to the New York State  DMV.

The city DOT is disputing the way Transportation Alternatives (TA) is presenting the data.

“There were a record-low three child pedestrian fatalities citywide last year, none of them in any of the neighborhoods cited in the report,” said Seth Solomonow, a department spokesperson.

He cited agency statistics that show serious crashes went down 64% in the Lower East Side’s Community Board 3 and 38% in Harlem’s Community Board 11 over the course of the study period. In 2011, the number of traffic deaths in New York City fell to the lowest levels in a century– a 40% drop from 2001.

A deeper dive into the data shows rates did indeed drop everywhere — but that injury rates remain consistently higher in poorer neighborhoods.  In East Harlem in 1995, for example, 107 children were injured by cars. By 2009, that number had fallen to 47.  But that’s still higher than the Upper East Side, which had 32 injuries of children at the highest point, and 17 in 2009. Children under 18 make up about 30% of the population of both neighborhoods.

TA concludes children on Manhattan’s East Side are three times more likely to be hit by a car in a neighborhood where public housing is nearby.  Just last week, a 12-year-old girl was killed crossing a street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She was a resident of the Jacob Riis Houses.

The report singles out East 125th Street and Lexington Avenue as the worst intersection in Manhattan for children.

Melissa Mark-Viverito, the New York City Council member who represents East Harlem, called the report “alarming.”

“This really just kind of exacerbates the urgency and really demonstrates that particularly in my community, where I represent the most public housing in the city of New York, where I have the most number of developments, that this is a real immediate danger,” she said.

She said she will bring together community groups and the NYC DOT to work collaboratively on the problem. Mark-Viverito has also been working with the local community board to bring protected bike lanes to East Harlem — a project which was recently derailed but she said is expected to go before the board again in March.

In an email, Paul Steely White, Transportation Alternatives’ executive director, said “the NYPD must protect these children and hold dangerous drivers accountable.” The report calls for more targeted enforcement of traffic laws by the NYPD, as well as speed cameras. The group also says other city agencies, like the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, as well as the New York City Housing Authority, need to further study “what neighborhood built environment factors…may drive these neighborhood-based differences in child crash rates.”

Transportation Alternatives acknowledges that the DOT has worked hard to make the streets safer. “We’re pushing the NYPD to step up,” said Jennifer So Godzeno, pedestrian advocacy manager.  But, she says, “the NYPD is completely failing to use these penalties. When you look across time, 60% of these crashes are attributable to drivers breaking laws. But we don’t see the NYPD making enforcement of these laws a priority at all.”

No response yet from the NYPD.

Author Pain and Injury Categories News 0 comment

KAPL workers push for union

SCHENECTADY, N.Y., Jan. 19 (UPI) — Citing pay freezes and employee benefit losses, technicians and specialists at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in New York are seeking to join a union.

“Under the Bechtel Marine Propulsion Corporation, Knolls Atomic Power Lab has experienced many changes that have resulted in less efficient operations, poor morale, pay freezes and loss of benefits,” said Butch Greski, a technician at KAPL.

“As a technician/specialist, a union will give us the voice we need to hold KAPL accountable to fair compensation, reasonable treatment and continued success into the future.”

Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory is a research and development entity dealing with nuclear reactors and provides relevant support and training to U.S. Navy personnel.

Designers and draftsmen at KAPL belong to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which the technicians and specialists seek to join.

A news release said KAPL’s technicians and specialists are filing with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board’s office in Albany, N.Y., to join unionized colleagues in the IFPTE local 147.

“As more of our colleagues join IFPTE, the more effective our ability in working with Bechtel to ensure its treatment and compensation of employees is fair, and their service to the Navy is outstanding and efficient,” said IFPTE Local 147 President Charlie Trembley, who is a design coordinator at KAPL.

“We also look forward to our administrative staff, engineers, scientists and other professionals at KAPL, as well as our counterparts at our sister locations, joining IFPTE so their voices are also heard.”

Author Pain and Injury Categories News 0 comment

Man Denied Workers Compensation; Marijuana Led to Accident

Submitted by NORML on Jan 13, 2012

An Arkansas Court of Appeals decided to deny a workers compensation award to an employee because they say his marijuana use contributed to the explosion that burned him.

Greg Prock was working for Bull Shoals Landing Marina when he and a coworker were asked to remove the tops of two empty oil barrels. He had been told on a previous occasion to use an air chisel to open oil barrels to avoid creating sparks that could ignite the oil, according to the Marina’s co-owner. In this case, Mr. Prock used an acetylene torch to take the barrel top off, something that he routinely did according to co-workers, without instance. But this time, a spark ignited the oil in the barrel, creating a fireball that set both men on fire.

The men were drug tested after the accident, something that is routine in most workplace accidents all over the nation. Both men tested positive for marijuana. One of the Marina’s owners testified in court that Mr. Prock exhibited what he called “suspicious behavior the morning of the accident, and Mr. Prock testified in court that he did smoke marijuana three to four times a week after work, but never before. He also testified in court that he had not had any marijuana two full weeks before the accident because he was trying to pass a drug test for a potential new employer.

An administrative law judge ruled that the accident was caused by Mr. Prock attempting to finish a task quickly, and ruled he was credible when he said he did not smoke marijuana that morning. The Arkansas Workers’ Compensation Commission reversed that ruling, saying that Mr. Prock’s credibility was in question because there were other inconsistencies in his testimony, as well as testimony about his behavior that morning from his boss and his co-worker that was also burned in the accident.

Yesterday, an appellate court upheld that workers compensation commission decision, adding that Arkansas law presumes that illegal substances caused a workplace accident when evidence of drug use is found. They said the burden of proof was not upon the employer in this situation to prove that Prock was impaired prior to the explosion that resulted in his injuries, but rather the burden was on the employee to prove that it wasn’t caused by the drug use, when drug use is found evident.

Out of the nine judges on the appellate court three of them disagreed with the opinion. One of those judges said that since he had used the torch in the past to open barrels, that proved that his use of marijuana may not have directly caused the accident. Judge Raymond Abramson noted that Mr. Prock method of opening barrels that way was dangerous, but said there was no direct causal link between the drug use and the explosion, and that Mr. Prock should be awarded full benefits.

External Links:

http://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20120111/NEWS08/120119962?tags=|68|75|305|340|304|92

Author Pain and Injury Categories News, sciatica, sports injuries, sports injury, Yoga

Practicing Safe Yoga — 5 Tips to Avoid Injuries

Can yoga wreck your body? A recent article in the New York Times 1 argues that it can, quoting the increase of yoga-related injuries in recent years as the number of yoga practitioners has soared.

Indeed, the number of yoga injuries treated in emergency rooms or doctors’ offices rose to 5,500 in 2007, according to the Consumer Products Safety Commission. The same year, the number of yoga practitioners reached an estimated 15.8 million. That pegs the number of injuries at 0.035 percent, or about 3.5 out of every 10,000 practitioners.

Can weight training wreck your body? Between 1990 to 2007, an estimated 970,000 weight training-related sports injuries were treated in U.S. hospital emergency rooms, according to the American Journal of Sports Medicine. That’s an average of 57,000 injuries per year among an estimated 37 to 45 million practitioners, or roughly 0.12 to 0.15 percent, about 1.2 to 1.5 out of every 1,000 practitioners.

Can golfing wreck your body? In 2007, an estimated 103,000 of the nation’s estimated 26.2 million golf players visited the emergency room for golfing-related injuries, according to data from the Consumer Products Safety Commission. That’s 0.39 percent, or 3.9 out of every 1,000 golf players incurring an injury.

Any type of physical activity aiming to increase fitness carries with it a certain degree of risk. Pegged next to the injury rate of common physical activities like weight training and golf, however, yoga comes across as far safer than even a relatively innocuous activity like golf (ignoring for the moment that yoga is not just about fitness).

Exercise improves health by challenging the body, triggering changes that make the body stronger: increased muscle mass, stronger bones, greater flexibility, coordination and range of motion — depending on what is targeted. That is the core of what makes exercise work, but that is also what makes any type of exercise program carry some degree of risk.

As the above statistics indicate, however, making claims about the injury risks of yoga without backing them up by the relative percentage risk is at best poor reporting, at worst could discourage someone from trying yoga who might otherwise benefit from the practice.

Yoga has more than 50 well-documented health benefits according to Dr. Tim McCall, author of Yoga as Medicine. Numerous studies on yoga as therapy demonstrate that yoga offers not just effective stress management, but also is a useful complement in the treatment of diabetes, cancer, MS, heart disease, back pain and many more conditions. Physicians, for example Dr. Loren Fishman, have effectively used yoga in the treatment of numerous debilitating musculoskeletal issues, including rotator cuff tears, back pain, sciatica and much more.

*Safe Yoga Strengthens Bones

Weight-bearing activities have long been known to strengthen bones, which is why many of those who are at risk for osteoporosis are encouraged to begin a strength-training workout regimen. Yoga training, with its many positions that  put pressure on different body parts, can be considered weight-bearing and has shown the ability to build bone mass in scientific studies.

Science has proven that yoga can have a transformative effect on the body, resulting in everything from lowered blood pressure to disease prevention. Here are some of the many health benefits of yoga, as proven by science. 2 Read More

That being said, any type of physical activity that challenges the body should be practiced with awareness and caution. To help you develop the safest possible yoga practice, follow these five tips:

1. Adopt a beginner’s mind. You wouldn’t go into an advanced ballet or kickboxing class without working your way up through the basics first. Yoga may look comparatively more simple, but it’s not. Start with a series of yoga classes targeting beginners, which introduces you to the basics in a systematic way. Not all studios offer intro courses for beginners, so look around. Make sure you build a solid foundation of knowledge of alignment before you try your hand at more challenging classes like a rigorous Vinyasa flow class or a hot yoga class.

2. Learn to listen to your body. In any yoga class, your body, not the teacher, is the real guide to what is best for you. Listening to your body and honoring its signals is key to a safe practice. If something doesn’t feel right, ease out of the pose. If something feels like a strain, you’re pushing too hard. If your body feels like it needs a break, relax back in child’s pose.

3. Do your own pose, not your neighbor’s. For most of us, the mind tends to overrule the body. So if the person next to you gets her face all the way down to her shins in Paschimottasana (seated forward bend), by golly, you’re gonna get there too, no matter how much your hamstrings howl. However, yoga at its essence is about getting in tune with your body. The only right way to practice a pose is to practice it in the way that honors where your body is at, and not trying to force yourself into your neighbor’s pose.

4. Look for your intelligent edge. Look for the sweet spot in every pose. That is where you are challenging the body and yourself, but still staying completely within your comfort zone. Your intelligent edge is that place in the posture where you are feeling a soothing stretch and your muscles are working, but there is no pain, strain or fatigue.

5. Pick the right teacher and approach. When it comes to practicing and teaching safe yoga, it’s not a one size fits all. Yoga teachers vary in approach, style, experience and training. If you’re young and fit, you will be able to handle a wide range of yoga styles and classes. On the other hand, if you’re a 50+ year old male with super tight hamstrings just starting out, it may be better to start with individual yoga sessions with an experienced teacher. The same thing applies if you have any injuries or physical limitations you’re working with. Let your teacher know before the class, and don’t be shy to ask if the class will still be suitable for you. If the teacher isn’t able to offer specific feedback related to your condition, that’s a good indication the teacher might not a good fit for you.

For more by Eva Norlyk Smith, Ph.D., click here.

For more on yoga, click here.

“A safe return to an active lifestyle after a sports injury, depends on early diagnoses and treatment. Knowing when to see an injury & pain doctor is an important step in this process. Many yoga injuries (pulls or strains in the neck, spine, low back or hamstrings.) including overuse injuries, can happen over time and often have subtle symptoms.” Say’s Dr. Michael Monfett with Skyline PMR in The financial district of New York City (FiDi).

Resources:

1. www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/06/yoga-wreck-you-body_n_1190661.html
2. www.jenreviews.com/yoga/

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