A Changing Scenery

I have been disabled since 1971 and have been involved in disability ministry since 1983. My experience with support groups for people with disabilities started with a para-church ministry I helped to co-found. But in more recent years I have been involved in my home church (in Philadelphia, PA) in ministering to people with disabilities, chronic illness and their caregivers.
I was never a fan of statistics (probably because they are numbers and I'm mathematically challenged), until I started researching the statistics on disability and I realized that those numbers represent people. I would like to share with you some of what I found.
In the USA one out of five people live with disability - 20%. In Pennsylvania that goes up to one out of four people - 25%. In Philadelphia 27% live with disability.
Surprisingly, about 40% of those who live with disability are working.

Unfortunately, they make less than their fellow co-workers doing the same kind of work, at the same level and quality - one of the reasons for the American with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). The majority of those who live on subsistence of any sort live at and below the poverty level. Those without health insurance must settle for managed healthcare which makes it impossible to adequately care for their medical needs.
The next group of people is even more surprising. There are 133 million Americans who live with chronic illness - that's almost 50% of the American population. And 60% of them live with invisible chronic illness - just looking at them you cannot tell that their lives are different from their healthy neighbors.
The health care system is changing in several ways:
1. In more recent years, chronic pain has been redefined. Pain used to be just a symptom and if they could not find the source of the pain, the tendency would be to under-treat or not it. Today chronic pain is now being seen as a disease entity on its own. In addition the American Medical Association has defined "pain level" as another critical sign/symptom requiring documentation, just like blood pressure, pulse and respiration.
2. Medical training placed an emphasis on the treatment and healing of various conditions. The object was a return to normal, or the patient died. But what about those who linger on with chronic conditions that are either always there or spring up on a regular basis? More often than not they would be treated from one crisis to the next, with poor management to prevent exacerbations. The medical community is now seeing more people with chronic conditions than they used to. As Baby Boomers age, they will also develop those chronic conditions that go along with aging, but if they are not adequately treated then quality of life suffers.
3. Recently a study found that adults who survived childhood cancer consequently lived with chronic illnesses as a direct result of the treatment they received. Surviving has it's price and the medical community needs to make parents aware of they potential problems after treatment. Unfortunately many women survivors found themselves unable to become pregnant because of cancer treatment that left them sterile.
4. Illnesses that used to result in death are now becoming managed and are now considered to be chronic illnesses. The most public of these is HIV/AIDS. AIDS used to be a death-sentence, but today is managed through medications.
5. In recent years psychiatric care has changed as we find one mental illness after another being due to a neural transmitter deficiency or other chemical imbalance.
In some respects, medicine is as much an art as it is a science. Some things we may never be able to fathom, and we continue to gain a greater appreciation for the fact that we are "fearfully and wonderfully made."


~ Lois A. Denier