Two Minds Blog

With Christina Baker Despite concerns about a new Omicron variant, the current state of COVID-19 prevention in the U.S. is moderately optimistic :  About 78% of all people living in the United States had received one dose of vaccine by 4/18/22, 66% were fully vaccinated, and 33% had received at least one booster dose. Even one dose provides some level of protection against severe illness, and as more people are fully vaccinated and boosted the average person’s chance of encountering someone who could infect them with SARS-CoV-2 is correspondingly reduced.  Whether this is enough to prevent a resurgence of hospitalizations or deaths remains to be seen, but it’s certainly better than where we were even last summer -- only 67% of adults had even one dose by July 4 th  2021 . Unfortunately, children (who make up 22% of the total population) are much less likely than adults to have been vaccinated: As of 4/13/22, the CDC reported that only 34% of children ages 5-11 (who at...

Our research team has a new study out this week, written by one of my nursing honors students, Linda Driscoll Powers. The study looked at questionnaires filled out by 476 people participating in a treatment program for adults with opioid use disorders (OUD) in rural parts of Colorado, which was funded by the Colorado legislature as part of its statewide opioid response plan. Linda is especially interested in understanding people's history of trauma and abuse, and how that might affect their current experiences of illness or treatment. Many health care professionals are starting to pay attention to these things, adding scales like the ACE  (Adverse Childhood Experiences scale) or principles of trauma-informed care to their practice. Linda's hypothesis was that people with a history of trauma would have more trouble with symptoms that predispose them to opioid use, resulting in a higher percentage of patients with trauma histories among people with OUD than in the general pop...