Skip to main content

New Year, New Look

Just a quick hello and Happy New Year to you!


We've updated our blog layout to be a bit more interactive and hopefully easier to navigate.  If it's lousy or a PITA, please let us know.  Please also let us know if there are any topics you'd like for us to cover in the coming months and we'll do our bestest to make sure we write about them.  Here's a preview of some things we've been chewing on for 2014:
  • The doctor-patient relationship, including knowing when and how to fire your physician.
  • Medical marijuana, what it can help with, what it may harm, and what people think about it.
  • Complimentary & Alternative Medicine (aka CAM), including acupuncture, biofeedback, and herbal supplements.
  • Each month we'll highlight a rare chronic disease, give an overview and review research (if any) on social and emotional issues.
  • The impact chronic medical illness has on siblings.
  • Transitioning from pediatric to adult medical care.
  • An overview of different types of psychiatric medications and some of their "off-label" use to manage chronic medical conditions.
And much more....

We're also looking for guest bloggers to contribute to our little corner of the internet.  If you have an idea for a post that relates to chronic illness that we haven't covered before, please contact us at info@opbmed.com.

Finally, here are our top 10 posts from 2013 by pageviews as of today:

  1. 20 Things to Try in 2014 
  2. Chronic Illness Catch 22
  3. A Day in the Life
  4. Navigating the World of IBD Diets
  5. The Role of Stress in IBD (Part 1)
  6. The Physical Weight of IBD
  7. Chronic Illness & Suicide
  8. Dating & Chronic Illness
  9. Emotion Focused Coping
  10. Workplace What The?

Popular posts from this blog

So You Have IBD During a Pandemic

Hey! What's going on? Been pretty boring over here in Chicago. Ok I don't need to elaborate on what the hell is going on in the world. We are being bombarded with information - some accurate, a lot inaccurate - about this pandemic. It's very easy to become completely overwhelmed by it all. We've been forced, pretty damn quickly, to completely overhaul our way of life for the greater good. To reduce the strain on our healthcare system of the sick and dying. And us humans are generally bad with rapid, monumental change that we really don't have a lot of say in. Our little reptilian brains do what they're supposed to do (prime us for fight or flight or freeze) but our advanced "thinking" parts of our brain have to interject with all sorts of unhelpful thoughts, thereby sending some of us off the rails. Before we start, turn off the news. Seriously. In the days following 9-11 we found people who consumed more 24-hour news channel information were mor

Psychosocial aspects of having an ostomy

This past Saturday, Tiffany and I had the honor of speaking at the United Ostomy Associations of America's Regional Midwest conference. I was assigned the task of speaking to the patients, and Tiffany addressed the partners or caregivers. I wanted to share with you some of the highlights from my talk. I only had an hour for my session, and with about 100 people in the room, it was not nearly enough time. I love bullet points, so here you go: We are all different! Every ostomate is different and not one size fits all for the emotional/mental aspect either. Who had months to talk about an ostomy and weigh pros/cons? Who was this a more sudden decision for? Who had cancer? Who had IBD? Something else? Who had an ileostomy? colostomy? urostomy? Who has a temporary? Permanent? Multiple temporaries? What age where you when you got your ostomy? Under 20, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60+ Who was single when they got their ostomy? With a serious partner when they had it? Some find a stom

IBD & Medical Trauma

Medical trauma is such an under-recognized issue for the chronnically ill. It's a hard topic to talk about because it can seem like we are pointing fingers at healthcare workers. Maybe that's why there are only, now, 4 studies on the topic in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). If you are someone who treats people with IBD please know I am not here to demonize or criticize. I am both a patient and a GI psychologist. I know the medical system from both sides. I know how messed up and broken it is. But ignoring this or rationalizing it away as only affecting a few folks is wrong. So let's talk about it. Post-traumatic stress (PTS) is the term we use for medical trauma due to technicalities in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5) for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTS can be less severe that full on PTSD, or it can be full on PTSD. Regardless, the symptoms are identical: Feeling hypervigilant/on-edge (increased