New Leaf
(309) 689-3078
www.fayettecompanies.org
3500 New Leaf Lane
Peoria IL 61615

Celebrity Services

Substance abuse treatment services
Services Provided: Substance abuse treatment, Buprenorphine Services
Type of Care: Residential short-term treatment (30 days or less), Residential long-term treatment (more than 30 days), Outpatient
Special Programs/Groups: Women

Overloaded Physicians

All of the professionals in our healthcare system struggle under the crushing weight of cost control measures imposed by insurers and medical institutions, which force doctors to minimize the time they spend assessing, treating, and discussing options with patients and their families. Protecting a family in an overtaxed healthcare system requires expertise. The statistics on medical errors, while often quoted, are still disturbing. In the United States, over 70,000 people die every year because of preventable medical errors that occur in hospitals. That means these avoidable mistakes kill more people than breast cancer or traffic accidents, making medical errors the eighth leading cause of death in the country. The report found that these errors were not the result of individual recklessness on the part of caregivers, but basic flaws in the organization of the American healthcare system. The treatment of over 50% of patients with diabetes, hypertension, tobacco addiction, hyperlipidemia, congestive heart failure, asthma, depression, and other chronic illness is inadequate. Due to cost constraints and resource limitations, doctors are not able to spend adequate time with their patients and do not necessarily have access to information on all available forms of treatment. In addition, when patients see more than one doctor, their care, medical records, and medications are rarely effectively coordinated. The burden of managing treatment most often falls on the shoulders of the patient and family who are already overwhelmed by having to deal with a serious illness. The average office visit is 10 minutes and physicians may be seeing as many as 40 patients a day. In addition, there are long waits for rushed appointments, the confusion about what types of care are available and best suit the needs, and the stress of navigating the U.S. healthcare system. When dealing with a serious medical situation, it is only natural to be overwhelmed. People tend to be confused about their options and too distracted or upset to ask the important questions. IPA Health provides private health management services.

What Makes People Sleep?

Although people may put off going to sleep in order to squeeze more activities into the day, eventually the need for sleep becomes overwhelming and people must get some sleep. This daily drive for sleep appears to be due, in part, to a compound known as adenosine. This natural chemical builds up in the blood as time awake increases. While people sleep, the body breaks down the adenosine. Thus, this molecule may be what the body uses to keep track of lost sleep and to trigger sleep when needed. An accumulation of adenosine and other factors might explain why, after several nights of less than optimal amounts of sleep, people build up a sleep debt that people must make up for by sleeping longer than normal. Because of such built-in molecular feedback, people cannot adapt to getting less sleep than the body needs. Eventually, a lack of sleep catches up with everyone.
The internal "biological clock" and environmental cues govern time of day when people feel sleepy and go to sleep. The most important cues are light and darkness. The biological clock is actually a tiny bundle of cells in the brain that responds to light signals received through the eyes. When darkness falls, the biological clock triggers the production of the hormone melatonin. This hormone makes people feel drowsy as it continues to increase during the night. Because of the biological clock, people naturally feel the sleepiest between midnight and 7 AM. People may also feel a second and milder daily "low" in the mid-afternoon between 1 PM and 4 PM. At that time, melatonin production rises again and might make people feel sleepy.
The biological clock makes people the most alert during daylight hours and the drowsiest in the early morning hours. Consequently, most people do very good work during the day. In a 24/7 society, however, some people must work at night. Nearly one-quarter of all workers work shifts that are not during the daytime and more than two-thirds of these workers have problems with sleepiness and/or difficulty sleeping. Because some work schedules are at odds with powerful sleep-regulating cues like sunlight, night shift workers are often drowsy at work and have difficulty falling or staying asleep during the daylight hours.
The fatigue experienced by night shift workers can be dangerous. Major industrial accidents--such as the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear power plant accidents and the Exxon Valdez oil spill--are results of mistakes made by overly tired workers on the night shift or an extended shift.
Night shift workers also are at greater risk of being in car crashes when driving home from work. One study found that one-fifth of night shift workers had a car crash or a near miss in the preced­ing year because of sleepiness on the drive home from work. Night shift workers are also more likely to have physical problems, such as heart disease, digestive disturbances and infertility, as well as emo­tional problems. All of these problems can relate to the workers' chronic sleepiness. See "Working the Night Shift" for some helpful tips.
Other factors can also influence the need for sleep, including the production of cellular hormones called cytokines by the immune system. These compounds occur in large quantities in response to certain infectious diseases or chronic inflammation and may prompt a person to sleep more than usual. The extra sleep may help the person conserve the resources needed to fight the infection. Recent studies confirm that people who rest enough are improving the ability of the body to respond to infection.
People are creatures of habit and one of the hardest habits to break is the natural wake and sleep cycle. A number of physiological factors conspire to help people sleep and wake up at the same times each day. Consequently, people may have a hard time adjusting when traveling across time zones. The light cues outside and the clocks in a new location may suggest it is 8 AM and to should be active, but the body believes it is more like 4 AM and to should sleep. The result is jet lag--sleepiness during the day, difficulty falling or staying asleep at night, poor concentration, confusion, nausea and general malaise and irritability.