Most illnesses are unexpected and can lead to life changes. A chronic illness can lead to a life altering illness. While some chronic illnesses can be cured in a few weeks or months many last a lifetime. Chronic illnesses typically have a significant impact on clients, like treatments, coping, and dealing with possible side effects. When the chronic illness progresses to death then the illness would be life altering. According to webmd.com Multiple Sclerosis or MS is a disease that affects the brain and spinal cord resulting in loss of muscle control, vision, balance, and sensation. I chose Multiple Sclerosis because it can affect daily activities and can have a negative impact on the person’s well-being (Tamper & Lindh 197-199) Learning …show more content…
What causes MS is unknown; Scientists believe there are several factors that cause MS including immunologic, environmental, infectious, and genetic. MS is 2 to 3 times more common in women than men. MS is not inherited but genetics plays an important role in who gets the disease. While most people are diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 50, young children and teenagers may develop this life altering illness. MS is more common in northern latitudes that are further from the equator and less common in areas closer to the equator however, known in all parts of the world. MS occurs in most ethnic groups, including African Americans, Asians, and Hispanics/Latinos, but are more common in Caucasians of the northern European ancestry (“What is Multiple Sclerosis”). According to Margret Vickers the Sociologists have been concerned about the inequality of patients that have a chronic to life altering disease especially at work. A person with a disability is categorized as being other, different, and outside the norm, faces obstacles of trying to fit in to the working environment. Furthermore, employees who don’t possess the physical, emotional or cognitive attributes that others present maybe stigmatized or discredited. The workplace remains difficult for people with a life altering illness to negotiate and be secure furthermore employment has actually decreased worldwide.
Gina is a 21-year old nursing student who saw her primary health care provider after experiencing episodic blurred vision, fatigue, poor motor coordination and urinary incontinence. Her neurological exam revealed mild ataxia and mild weakness in her left leg without severe spasticity. MRI scan of the brain reveals multiple plagues indicative of multiple sclerosis.
Multiple sclerosis, also known as MS, is one of humankind’s most mysterious diseases. No one knows the exact cause and there is no exact treatment. Still multiple sclerosis has the ability to affect nearly 3 million people worldwide and at least 500,000 people in the United States (Boroch). This disease tends to be more common in individuals of northern European descent and women are more than twice as likely to develop multiple sclerosis as men. Of those 3 million people, most of them are between the ages of 20 and 50 years old (Dangond). Even though multiple sclerosis is a mystery disease, scientists are working to determine the exact cause and treatment.
1. Main point 2: So now that I have talked about what MS is, let us continue on to what the symptoms are and how it can be diagnosed. In most cases, the symptoms generally appear between the ages of 20 and 40 and affect more than twice as many women as men. Common indicators of MS are fatigue, dizziness, numbness and tingling, weakness, blurred vision, heat sensitivity, slurred speech, problems with memory and concentration, loss of balance and more. Sometimes the symptoms disappear completely and the person regains lost functions or sometimes a change in their life causes the symptoms to resurface and return stronger than ever. In my observations, my Dads’ MS is strongest in hot weather and during times of high stress. The symptoms normally vary from person to person, which makes it hard to diagnose. There are currently no lab tests that can be done to rule out or confirm MS, but MRI’s can help reach a strong diagnosis. MS is not considered a fatal disease, but many people struggle to live as productively as they desire, often facing many limitations.
MS is usually occurs at age of 15 to 55 with the average onset at about 30 years of age. Women are twice more likely than men to develop this debilitating autoimmune disease (Love, 2006). Due to the heterogeneity of the disease, where it can affects many sites of the CNS such as the brain cortex, brainstem, spinal cord as well as the optic nerve, thus the clinical symptoms of MS are widely ranged.
Anyone can develop MS, but many patients share the following characteristics. The majority experiences their first symptoms between ages 20 and 40. Caucasians are more than twice as likely as other races to develop MS. MS is two to three times more common in women as in men. MS is five times more common in temperate climates like those of the northern US, Canada, and Europe. And people whose close relatives have MS are more susceptible to developing the disease, but there is no evidence the disease is directly inherited.
As a senior this year, I am looking forward to several endeavors, such as leading my team in my last year of cheerleading, participating in a Senior Engineering Design Project, and continuing to volunteer with VSVS, a program that allows Vanderbilt student to teach science lessons in local elementary schools. Moreover, I spent this past summer working on my research at the Vanderbilt Institute of Imaging Science and will continue my projects throughout the school year. I am excitingly close to finishing the project I have been working on that involves a magnetic resonance imaging study of patients with multiple sclerosis. We have employed quantitative magnetization transfer techniques at 7-Tesla field strength to obtain indices reflective
Anyone can develop MS, but many patients share the following characteristics. The majority experiences their first symptoms between ages 20 and 40. Caucasians are more than twice as likely as other races to develop MS. MS is two to three times more common in women as in men.
In the world of neurology, there are a vast amount of neurological disorders, conditions, and diseases. One severe disease is known as Multiple Sclerosis. In this research essay, I will be discussing what multiple sclerosis is, symptoms, causes, personal experience, and treatments.
The topic in regards to the disabled worker is of interest to the author. The commentary is titled “Accommodation for Disabled Workers: Knowledge of Rights a Good Start” at the Rand Corporation blog by author Kathleen Mullen. The article describes how employees quitting their jobs because of healthcare decline and applying for social security benefits. As a number of social security benefits increase it puts US funding at risk. The author knows several disabled workers that are faced with working with a health-related disability. Additionally, they are challenged to take care of their families in spite of their disability. The disabled subgroup often expresses that they feel misunderstood by the world. The disabled person is betwixt and in between.; society expects the
Multiple Sclerosis, commonly known as MS is an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system. Scientists have been studying MS since the 19th century. In MS, the body’s immune system produces cells and antibodies that attack myelin in your brain which is essential for the nerves in your brain and spinal cord to conduct electricity to perform its function. The attack on myelin results in vison loss, paralysis, numbness, muscle weakness, difficulty walking, stiffness, spasms, and bladder and bowel problems. MS has varying degrees of severity and affects people between the ages of 20-50, mostly women. Although there are treatments, there is no cause and cure yet.
Multiple Sclerosis is an autoimmune disorder where the myelin sheath within the Central Nervous System is attacked (National Multiple Sclerosis Society, 2017). The myelin sheath protects the axon of the nerve cell. When the myelin sheath is intact, the axon is able to carry impulses away from the neuron’s cell body, and the message carried is clear. With Multiple Sclerosis, the myelin sheath becomes scarred, hence the word “sclerosis”, and distorts the nerve impulses traveling over the CNS (National Multiple Sclerosis Society, 2017). This may cause the message to be changed or stopped altogether.
Multiple Sclerosis has been found out to be most common in populations living at latitudes farther from the equator ; prevalent among Caucasians,specifically those of Northern European ancestry. Whites people are likely to get multiple sclerosis showed by a number of studies that had been conducted. Multiple sclerosis is not commonly found in popultions of Asian,Indian,South American and Native American descent, and particularly from African sub-continents.
It was a raw, blustery March day and I was leading four classmates to my house to hash out the remaining details of our current English presentation. When I opened the door, however, I received a surprise. I had not anticipated my mother still being home and neither had my group members. Their faces turned slightly blank, as if they were trying to hide their confusion and surprise. The previously relaxed atmosphere had become very formal and quiet. I had seen this before.
As a child, I thought my parents were invincible. I grew up believing they were superheroes who had the ability to whisk away all my problems. Unfortunately, when I was 15-years-old, my father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The hardest part about his diagnosis was that his sister had been diagnosed with MS a couple years before and we had seen her health deteriorate so quickly that she was already wheelchair bound. During this time my family was scared. The little information we knew about MS did not seem hopefully and we were worried about what the future would hold for our family. Lucky, we were blessed with a great neurologist who eased the insecurity we felt and gave my father the strength to be optimistic about his diagnosis.
The dominant model of disability for the majority of the 20th century was the medical model. The medical model’s emphasis is on impairment; this is the cause of the disadvantage disabled individuals face and therefore the site of interventions (Crow, 1996). It is based in the biomedical and clinical. It views disability as a personal tragedy, an idea which is often implicit in work around disability based on the medical model. (Oliver, 1990).