Dr. Ali Jamehdor, Medical Director of Emergency Services for Dignity Health St. Mary, center along with some of the first responders who bring the patients to the hospital, in Long Beach on Tuesday, February 15, 2022. Doctors from Northridge, Long Beach and San Bernardino weigh in on the health crisis because of the pandemic.
Sheryl Rosenberg Thouin, dietician and clinical instructor with Dignity Health Northridge Hospital Family Medicine discusses healthy eating February 16, 2022. Physicians are sounding alarms as people with serious non-COVID-19 conditions continue ignoring symptoms and waiting until the last minute to go to emergency rooms, fearful of contracting the virus.
“Now we are seeing the longer-term effects with diabetes and wound care,” he said. “Patients with a small wound on their legs, their fingers who would usually come in earlier. Now they are showing up about a year and a half later with very advanced stages … and are having amputations. This happens in healthcare. It’s not an unknown thing or a completely rare thing, but it didn’t happen as much as we are seeing now.
Today, doctors and hospital staffs say they know how to keep everyone safe from contracting the deadly virus.“We saw some catastrophic conditions after the first surge, where patients were concerned about coming to the hospital,” said Dr. Jahandar Saleh, a cardiologist and director of Cardiology Telemetry Services at Dignity Health Northridge Hospital.
“As a cardiologist at the hospital, when patients came in, I would ask what happened and they would tell me they couldn’t see their doctor, it had been six months or a year since they saw one, appointments had to be rescheduled because offices were closed,” said Dr. Prabhdeep Sethi, an interventional cardiologist with St. Bernardine Medical Center in San Bernardino. “We were only doing telehealth .
Mammograms, colonoscopies, pap smears and low-dose CT scan screenings for lung cancer all decreased during the pandemic by 80% during its height. Because of a drop in screenings, patients subjected themselves to higher-risk surgeries and suffered from side effects from nausea, vomiting, hair loss, fatigue and appetite loss due to the toxicities of chemotherapy.