By Shelby Harris for The Daily Yonder.Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for North Carolina News Service Service for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration Two summers ago, Lee Berger sat in her Macon County, N.C., home hunched over a laptop - pulling the small computer closer to her face. It was Berger s first telehealth appointment, a routine check-up with her primary care physician, and she couldn t hear what the doctor was saying. Berger thought about telling the doctor to speak up, but then she remembered her house, fastened at the end of a 17-house subdivision in the small town of Franklin, doesn t often invite steady internet connection. .
Each year some 68,000 people in Colorado and across the U.S. die from opiate overdoses, largely due to lack of treatment, and federally qualified health clinics in southwestern Colorado are pioneering an effort to give people access to care at the same place they get their annual medical, dental and vision checkups. Jeanne Marotta, a family nurse practitioner with Axis Health System in Pagosa Springs, said getting people onto alternative medications can save lives. .
November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month, bringing the spotlight to the country s deadliest form of cancer. There will be an estimated 130,000 lung cancer deaths in 2022, including more than 8,400 in Oregon, according to the American Cancer Society. Michael Skokan, pulmonary critical-care physician at The Oregon Clinic, said many of these deaths are preventable and the first action people can take is to stop smoking. .
Perhaps no organization in La Plata County gained more awareness of its work during the coronavirus pandemic than San Juan Basin Public Health.
From protective health orders to vaccines, the agency gu.