The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, & Move More
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Today we’re talking about Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. He’s a medical doctor with decades of experience, and he wants us all to proactively stay in good health, rather than waiting for things to go wrong.
Great! What’s his deal?
Dr. Chatterjee advises that we take care of the following four pillars of good health:
- Relaxation
- Food
- Movement
- Sleep
And, they’re not in this order at random. Usually advice starts with diet and exercise, doesn’t it?
But for Dr. Chatterjee, it’s useless to try to tackle diet first if one is stressed-to-death by other things. As for food next, he knows that a good diet will fuel the next steps nicely. Speaking of next steps, a day full of movement is the ideal setup to a good night’s sleep—ready for a relaxing next day.
Relaxation
Here, Dr. Chatterjee advises that we go with what works for us. It could be meditation or yoga… Or it could be having a nice cup of tea while looking out of the window.
What’s most important, he says, is that we should take at least 15 minutes per day as “me time”, not as a reward for when we’ve done our work/chores/etc, but as something integrated into our routine, preferably early in the day.
Food
There are no grand surprises here: Dr. Chatterjee advocates for a majority plant-based diet, whole foods, and importantly, avoiding sugar.
He’s also an advocate of intermittent fasting, but only so far as is comfortable and practicable. Intermittent fasting can give great benefits, but it’s no good if that comes at a cost of making us stressed and suffering!
Movement
This one’s important. Well, they all are, but this one’s particularly characteristic to Dr. Chatterjee’s approach. He wants us to exercise less, and move more.
The reason for this is that strenuous exercise will tend to speed up our metabolism to the point that we will be prompted to eat high calorie quick-energy foods to compensate, and when we do, our body will rush to store that as fat, understanding (incorrectly) that we are in a time of great stress, because why else would we be exerting ourselves that much?
Instead, he advocates for building as much natural movement into our daily routine as possible. Walking more, taking the stairs, doing the gardening/housework.
That said, he does also advise some strength-training on a daily basis—bodyweight exercises like squats and lunges are top of his list.
Sleep
Here, aside from the usual “sleep hygiene” advices (dark cool room, fresh bedding, etc), he also advises we do as he does, and take an hour before bedtime as a purely wind-down time. In gentle lighting, perhaps reading (not on a bright screen!), for example.
Ready to start the next day, relaxed and ready to go.
If you’d like to know more about Dr. Chatterjee’s approach…
You can check out his:
If you don’t know where to start, we recommend the blog! It has a lot of guests there too, including Wim Hof, Gabor Maté, Mindy Pelz, and come to think of it, a lot of other people we’ve also featured ideas from previously!
Enjoy!
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Falling: Is It Due To Age Or Health Issues?
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small 😎
❝What are the signs that a senior is falling due to health issues rather than just aging?❞
Superficial answer: having an ear infection can result in a loss of balance, and is not particularly tied to age as a risk factor
More useful answer: first, let’s consider these two true statements:
- The risks of falling (both the probability and the severity of consequences) increase with age
- Health issues (in general) tend to increase with age
With this in mind, it’s difficult to disconnect the two, as neither exist in a vacuum, and each is strongly associated with the other.
So the question is easier to answer by first flipping it, to ask:
❝What are the health issues that typically increase with age, that increase the chances of falling?❞
A non-exhaustive list includes:
- Loss of strength due to sarcopenia (reduced muscle mass)
- Loss of mobility due to increased stiffness (many causes, most of which worsen with age)
- Loss of risk-awareness due to diminished senses (for example, not seeing an obstacle until too late)
- Loss of risk-awareness due to reduced mental focus (cognitive decline producing absent-mindedness)
Note that in the last example there, and to a lesser extent the third one, reminds us that falls also often do not happen in a vacuum. There is (despite how it may sometimes feel!) no actual change in our physical relationship with gravity as we get older; most falls are about falling over things, even if it’s just one’s own feet:
The 4 Bad Habits That Cause The Most Falls While Walking
Disclaimer: sometimes a person may just fall down for no external reason. An example of why this may happen is if a person’s joint (for example an ankle or a knee) has a particular weakness that means it’ll occasionally just buckle and collapse under one’s own weight. This doesn’t even have to be a lot of weight! The weakness could be due to an old injury, or Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (with its characteristic joint hypermobility symptoms), or something else entirely.
Now, notice how:
- all of these things can happen at any age
- all of these things are more likely to happen the older we get
- none of these things have to happen at any age
That last one’s important to remember! Aging is often viewed as an implacable Behemoth, but the truth is that it is many-faceted and every single one of those facets can be countered, to a greater or lesser degree.
Think of a room full of 80-year-olds, and now imagine that…
- One has the hearing of a 20-year-old
- One has the eyesight of a 20-year-old
- One has the sharp quick mind of a 20-year-old
- One has the cardiovascular fitness of a 20-year-old
…etc. Now, none of those things in isolation is unthinkable, so remember, there is no magic law of the universe saying we can’t have each of them:
Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?
Which means: that goes for the things that increase the risk of falling, too. In other words, we can combat sarcopenia with protein and resistance training, maintain our mobility, look after our sensory organs as best we can, nourish our brain and keep it sharp, etc etc etc:
Train For The Event Of Your Life! (Mobility As A Long-Term “Athletic” Goal For Personal Safety)
Which doesn’t mean: that we will necessarily succeed in all areas. Your writer here, broadly in excellent health, and whose lower body is still a veritable powerhouse in athletic terms, has a right ankle and left knee that will sometimes just buckle (yay, the aforementioned hypermobility).
So, it becomes a priority to pre-empt the consequences of that, for example:
- being able to fall with minimal impact (this is a matter of knowing how, and can be learned from “soft” martial arts such as aikido), and
- ensuring the skeleton can take a knock if necessary (keeping a good balance of vitamins, minerals, protein, etc; keeping an eye on bone density).
See also:
Fall Special ← appropriate for the coming season, but it’s about avoiding falling, and reducing the damage of falling if one does fall, including some exercises to try at home.
Take care!
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You can train your nose – and 4 other surprising facts about your sense of smell
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Would you give up your sense of smell to keep your hair? What about your phone?
A 2022 US study compared smell to other senses (sight and hearing) and personally prized commodities (including money, a pet or hair) to see what people valued more.
The researchers found smell was viewed as much less important than sight and hearing, and valued less than many commodities. For example, half the women surveyed said they’d choose to keep their hair over sense of smell.
Smell often goes under the radar as one of the least valued senses. But it is one of the first sensory systems vertebrates developed and is linked to your mental health, memory and more.
Here are five fascinating facts about your olfactory system.
DimaBerlin/Shutterstock 1. Smell is linked to memory and emotion
Why can the waft of fresh baking trigger joyful childhood memories? And why might a certain perfume jolt you back to a painful breakup?
Smell is directly linked to both your memory and emotions. This connection was first established by American psychologist Donald Laird in 1935 (although French novelist Marcel Proust had already made it famous in his reverie about the scent of madeleines baking.)
Odours are first captured by special olfactory nerve cells inside your nose. These cells extend upwards from the roof of your nose towards the smell-processing centre of your brain, called the olfactory bulb.
Smells are first detected by nerve cells in the nose. Axel_Kock/Shutterstock From the olfactory bulb they form direct connection with the brain’s limbic system. This includes the amygdala, where emotions are generated, and the hippocampus, where memories are created.
Other senses – such as sight and hearing – aren’t directly connected to the lymbic system.
One 2004 study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to demonstrate odours trigger a much stronger emotional and memory response in the brain than a visual cue.
2. Your sense of smell constantly regenerates
You can lose your ability to smell due to injury or infection – for example during and after a COVID infection. This is known as olfactory dysfunction. In most cases it’s temporary, returning to normal within a few weeks.
This is because every few months your olfactory nerve cells die and are replaced by new cells.
We’re not entirely sure how this occurs, but it likely involves your nose’s stem cells, the olfactory bulb and other cells in the olfactory nerves.
Other areas of your nervous system – including your brain and spinal cord – cannot regenerate and repair after an injury.
Constant regeneration may be a protective mechanism, as the olfactory nerves are vulnerable to damage caused by the external environment, including toxins (such as cigarette smoke), chemicals and pathogens (such as the flu virus).
But following a COVID infection some people might continue to experience a loss of smell. Studies suggest the virus and a long-term immune response damages the cells that allow the olfactory system to regenerate.
3. Smell is linked to mental health
Around 5% of the global population suffer from anosmia – total loss of smell. An estimated 15-20% suffer partial loss, known as hyposmia.
Given smell loss is often a primary and long-term symptom of COVID, these numbers are likely to be higher since the pandemic.
Yet in Australia, the prevalence of olfactory dysfunction remains surprisingly understudied.
Losing your sense of smell is shown to impact your personal and social relationships. For example, it can mean you miss out on shared eating experiences, or cause changes in sexual desire and behaviour.
In older people, declining ability to smell is associated with a higher risk of depression and even death, although we still don’t know why.
Losing your sense of smell can have a major impact on mental health. Halfpoint/Shutterstock 4. Loss of smell can help identify neurodegenerative diseases
Partial or full loss of smell is often an early indicator for a range of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
Patients frequently report losing their sense of smell years before any symptoms show in body or brain function. However many people are not aware they are losing their sense of smell.
There are ways you can determine if you have smell loss and to what extent. You may be able to visit a formal smell testing centre or do a self-test at home, which assesses your ability to identify household items like coffee, wine or soap.
5. You can train your nose back into smelling
“Smell training” is emerging as a promising experimental treatment option for olfactory dysfunction. For people experiencing smell loss after COVID, it’s been show to improve the ability to detect and differentiate odours.
Smell training (or “olfactory training”) was first tested in 2009 in a German psychology study. It involves sniffing robust odours — such as floral, citrus, aromatic or fruity scents — at least twice a day for 10—20 seconds at a time, usually over a 3—6 month period.
Participants are asked to focus on the memory of the smell while sniffing and recall information about the odour and its intensity. This is believed to help reorganise the nerve connections in the brain, although the exact mechanism behind it is unclear.
Some studies recommend using a single set of scents, while others recommend switching to a new set of odours after a certain amount of time. However both methods show significant improvement in smelling.
This training has also been shown to alleviate depressive symptoms and improve cognitive decline both in older adults and those suffering from dementia.
Just like physiotherapy after a physical injury, olfactory training is thought to act like rehabilitation for your sense of smell. It retrains the nerves in your nose and the connections it forms within the brain, allowing you to correctly detect, process and interpret odours.
Lynn Nazareth, Research Scientist in Olfactory Biology, CSIRO
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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154 million lives saved in 50 years: 5 charts on the global success of vaccines
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We know vaccines have been a miracle for public health. Now, new research led by the World Health Organization has found vaccines have saved an estimated 154 million lives in the past 50 years from 14 different diseases. Most of these have been children under five, and around two-thirds children under one year old.
In 1974 the World Health Assembly launched the Expanded Programme on Immunization with the goal to vaccinate all children against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), measles, polio, tuberculosis and smallpox by 1990. The program was subsequently expanded to include several other diseases.
The modelling, marking 50 years since this program was established, shows a child aged under ten has about a 40% greater chance of living until their next birthday, compared to if we didn’t have vaccines. And these positive effects can be seen well into adult life. A 50-year-old has a 16% greater chance of celebrating their next birthday thanks to vaccines.
What the study did
The researchers developed mathematical and statistical models which took in vaccine coverage data and population numbers from 194 countries for the years 1974–2024. Not all diseases were included (for example smallpox, which was eradicated in 1980, was left out).
The analysis includes vaccines for 14 diseases, with 11 of these included in the Expanded Programme on Immunization. For some countries, additional vaccines such as Japanese encephalitis, meningitis A and yellow fever were included, as these diseases contribute to major disease burden in certain settings.
The models were used to simulate how diseases would have spread from 1974 to now, as vaccines were introduced, for each country and age group, incorporating data on increasing vaccine coverage over time.
Children are the greatest beneficiaries of vaccines
Since 1974, the rates of deaths in children before their first birthday has more than halved. The researchers calculated almost 40% of this reduction is due to vaccines.
The effects have been greatest for children born in the 1980s because of the intensive efforts made globally to reduce the burden of diseases like measles, polio and whooping cough.
Some 60% of the 154 million lives saved would have been lives lost to measles. This is likely due to its ability to spread rapidly. One person with measles can spread the infection to 12–18 people.
The study also found some variation across different parts of the world. For example, vaccination programs have had a much greater impact on the probability of children living longer across low- and middle-income countries and settings with weaker health systems such as the eastern Mediterranean and African regions. These results highlight the important role vaccines play in promoting health equity.
Vaccine success is not assured
Low or declining vaccine coverage can lead to epidemics which can devastate communities and overwhelm health systems.
Notably, the COVID pandemic saw an overall decline in measles vaccine coverage, with 86% of children having received their first dose in 2019 to 83% in 2022. This is concerning because very high levels of vaccination coverage (more than 95%) are required to achieve herd immunity against measles.
In Australia, the coverage for childhood vaccines, including measles, mumps and rubella, has declined compared to before the pandemic.
This study is a reminder of why we need to continue to vaccinate – not just against measles, but against all diseases we have safe and effective vaccines for.
The results of this research don’t tell us the full story about the impact of vaccines. For example, the authors didn’t include data for some vaccines such as COVID and HPV (human papillomavirus). Also, like with all modelling studies, there are some uncertainties, as data was not available for all time periods and countries.
Nonetheless, the results show the success of global vaccination programs over time. If we want to continue to see lives saved, we need to keep investing in vaccination locally, regionally and globally.
Meru Sheel, Associate Professor and Epidemiologist, Infectious Diseases, Immunisation and Emergencies Group, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney and Alexandra Hogan, Mathematical epidemiologist, UNSW Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Eye Drops: Safety & Alternatives
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝Before important business meetings my father used to use eye drops to add a “sparkle” to his eyes. I think that is a step too far, but what, short of eye drops, can we do to keep our eyes bright throughout the day?❞
Firstly, we’d indeed not recommend eye drops unless advised to do so by your doctor to treat a specific health condition:
- Infections from over-the-counter artificial tears
- Are my eye drops safe to use?
- More eye drops recalled due to infection danger
Those eye drops that “add sparkle” are often based on astringents such as witch hazel. This means that the capillaries in the eye undergo vasoconstriction, becoming much less visible and the eye thus appears much whiter and thus brighter.
There isn’t a way to do the same thing from the inside, as taking a vasoconstrictor will simply increase your general blood pressure, making the capillaries of your eyes more, rather than less, visible.
However, what you can do is…
- look after your general vasculature (cardiovascular health)
- in particular, reduce hypertension
- that includes limiting salt
- stay away from vasoconstrictors (including caffeine)
- reduce your resting cortisol levels
- that certainly also means reducing alcohol consumption
- maintain good hydration
Take care!
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Dry Needling for Meralgia Paresthetica?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝Could you address dry needling, who should administer it, and could it be a remedy for meralgia paresthetica? If not, could you speak to home-based remedies for meralgia paresthetica? Thank you?❞
We’ll need to take a main feature some time to answer this one fully, but we will say some quick things here:
- Dry needling, much like acupuncture, has been found to help with pain relief.
- Meralgia paresthetica, being a neuropathy, may benefit from some things that benefit people with peripheral neuropathy, such as lion’s mane mushroom. There is definitely not research to support this hypothesis yet though (so far as we could find anyway; there is plenty to support lion’s mane helping with nerve regeneration in general, but nothing specific for meralgia paresthetica).
Some previous articles you might enjoy meanwhile:
- Pinpointing The Usefulness Of Acupuncture
- Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief
- Peripheral Neuropathy: How To Avoid It, Manage It, Treat It
- What Does Lion’s Mane Actually Do, Anyway?
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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They Were Injured at the Super Bowl Parade. A Month Later, They Feel Forgotten.
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KFF Health News and KCUR are following the stories of people injured during the Feb. 14 mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. Listen to how one Kansas family is coping with the trauma.
Jason Barton didn’t want to attend the Super Bowl parade this year. He told a co-worker the night before that he worried about a mass shooting. But it was Valentine’s Day, his wife is a Kansas City Chiefs superfan, and he couldn’t afford to take her to games since ticket prices soared after the team won the championship in 2020.
So Barton drove 50 miles from Osawatomie, Kansas, to downtown Kansas City, Missouri, with his wife, Bridget, her 13-year-old daughter, Gabriella, and Gabriella’s school friend. When they finally arrived home that night, they cleaned blood from Gabriella’s sneakers and found a bullet in Bridget’s backpack.
Gabriella’s legs were burned by sparks from a ricocheted bullet, Bridget was trampled while shielding Gabriella in the chaos, and Jason gave chest compressions to a man injured by gunfire. He believes it was Lyndell Mays, one of two men charged with second-degree felony murder.
“There’s never going to be a Valentine’s Day where I look back and I don’t think about it,” Gabriella said, “because that’s a day where we’re supposed to have fun and appreciate the people that we have.”
One month after the parade in which the U.S. public health crisis that is gun violence played out on live television, the Bartons are reeling from their role at its epicenter. They were just feet from 43-year-old Lisa Lopez-Galvan, who was killed. Twenty-four other people were injured. Although the Bartons aren’t included in that official victim number, they were traumatized, physically and emotionally, and pain permeates their lives: Bridget and Jason keep canceling plans to go out, opting instead to stay home together; Gabriella plans to join a boxing club instead of the dance team.
During this first month, Kansas City community leaders have weighed how to care for people caught in the bloody crossfire and how to divide more than $2 million donated to public funds for victims in the initial outpouring of grief.
The questions are far-reaching: How does a city compensate people for medical bills, recovery treatments, counseling, and lost wages? And what about those who have PTSD-like symptoms that could last years? How does a community identify and care for victims often overlooked in the first flush of reporting on a mass shooting: the injured?
The injured list could grow. Prosecutors and Kansas City police are mounting a legal case against four of the shooting suspects, and are encouraging additional victims to come forward.
“Specifically, we’re looking for individuals who suffered wounds from their trying to escape. A stampede occurred while people were trying to flee,” said Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker. Anyone who “in the fleeing of this event that maybe fell down, you were trampled, you sprained an ankle, you broke a bone.”
Meanwhile, people who took charge of raising money and providing services to care for the injured are wrestling with who gets the money — and who doesn’t. Due to large donations from celebrities like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, some victims or their families will have access to hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical expenses. Other victims may simply have their counseling covered.
The overall economic cost of U.S. firearm injuries is estimated by a recent Harvard Medical School study at $557 billion annually. Most of that — 88% — represented quality-of-life losses among those injured by firearms and their families. The JAMA-published study found that each nonfatal firearm injury leads to roughly $30,000 in direct health care spending per survivor in the first year alone.
In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, as well-intentioned GoFundMe pages popped up to help victims, executives at United Way of Greater Kansas City gathered to devise a collective donation response. They came up with “three concentric circles of victims,” said Jessica Blubaugh, the United Way’s chief philanthropy officer, and launched the #KCStrong campaign.
“There were folks that were obviously directly impacted by gunfire. Then the next circle out is folks that were impacted, not necessarily by gunshots, but by physical impact. So maybe they were trampled and maybe they tore a ligament or something because they were running away,” Blubaugh said. “Then third is folks that were just adjacent and/or bystanders that have a lot of trauma from all of this.”
PTSD, Panic, and the Echo of Gunfire
Bridget Barton returned to Kansas City the day after the shooting to turn in the bullet she found in her backpack and to give a statement at police headquarters. Unbeknownst to her, Mayor Quinton Lucas and the police and fire chiefs had just finished a press conference outside the building. She was mobbed by the media assembled there — interviews that are now a blur.
“I don’t know how you guys do this every day,” she remembered telling a detective once she finally got inside.
The Bartons have been overwhelmed by well wishes from close friends and family as they navigate the trauma, almost to the point of exhaustion. Bridget took to social media to explain she wasn’t ignoring the messages, she’s just responding as she feels able — some days she can hardly look at her phone, she said.
A family friend bought new Barbie blankets for Gabriella and her friend after the ones they brought to the parade were lost or ruined. Bridget tried replacing the blankets herself at her local Walmart, but when she was bumped accidentally, it triggered a panic attack. She abandoned her cart and drove home.
“I’m trying to get my anxiety under control,” Bridget said.
That means therapy. Before the parade, she was already seeing a therapist and planning to begin eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a form of therapy associated with treating post-traumatic stress disorder. Now the shooting is the first thing she wants to talk about in therapy.
Since Gabriella, an eighth grader, has returned to middle school, she has dealt with the compounding immaturity of adolescence: peers telling her to get over it, pointing finger guns at her, or even saying it should have been her who was shot. But her friends are checking on her and asking how she’s doing. She wishes more people would do the same for her friend, who took off running when the shooting started and avoided injury. Gabriella feels guilty about bringing her to what turned into a horrifying experience.
“We can tell her all day long, ‘It wasn’t your fault. She’s not your responsibility.’ Just like I can tell myself, ‘It wasn’t my fault or my responsibility,’” Bridget said. “But I still bawled on her mom’s shoulder telling her how sorry I was that I grabbed my kid first.”
The two girls have spent a lot of time talking since the shooting, which Gabriella said helps with her own stress. So does spending time with her dog and her lizard, putting on makeup, and listening to music — Tech N9ne’s performance was a highlight of the Super Bowl celebration for her.
In addition to the spark burns on Gabriella’s legs, when she fell to the concrete in the pandemonium she split open a burn wound on her stomach previously caused by a styling iron.
“When I see that, I just picture my mom trying to protect me and seeing everyone run,” Gabriella said of the wound.
It’s hard not to feel forgotten by the public, Bridget said. The shooting, especially its survivors, have largely faded from the headlines aside from court dates. Two additional high-profile shootings have occurred in the area since the parade. Doesn’t the community care, she wonders, that her family is still living with the fallout every day?
“I’m going to put this as plainly as possible. I’m f—ing pissed because my family went through something traumatic,” Bridget vented in a recent social media post. “I don’t really want anything other [than], ‘Your story matters, too, and we want to know how you’re doing.’ Have we gotten that? Abso-f—lutely not.”
‘What Is the Landscape of Need?’
Helped in part by celebrities like Swift and Kelce, donations for the family of Lopez-Galvan, the lone fatality, and other victims poured in immediately after the shootings. Swift and Kelce donated $100,000 each. With the help of an initial $200,000 donation from the Kansas City Chiefs, the United Way’s #KCStrong campaign took off, reaching $1 million in the first two weeks and sitting at $1.2 million now.
Six verified GoFundMe funds were established. One solely for the Lopez-Galvan family has collected over $406,000. Smaller ones were started by a local college student and Swift fans. Churches have also stepped up, and one local coalition had raised $183,000, money set aside for Lopez-Galvan’s funeral, counseling services for five victims, and other medical bills from Children’s Mercy Kansas City hospital, said Ray Jarrett, executive director of Unite KC.
Money for Victims Rolls In
Donations poured in for those injured at the Super Bowl Parade in Kansas City after the Feb. 14 shootings. The largest, starting with a $200,000 donation from the Kansas City Chiefs, is at the United Way of Greater Kansas City. Six GoFundMe sites also popped up, due in part to $100,000 donations each from Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Here’s a look at the totals as of March 12.United Way#KCStrong: $1.2 million.Six Verified GoFundMe AccountsLisa Lopez-Galvan GoFundMe (Taylor Swift donated): $406,142Reyes Family GoFundMe (Travis Kelce donated): $207,035Samuel Arellano GoFundMe: $11,896Emily Tavis GoFundMe: $9,518Cristian Martinez’s GoFundMe for United Way: $2,967Swifties’ GoFundMe for Children’s Mercy hospital: $1,060ChurchesResurrection (Methodist) “Victims of Violence Fund”: $53,358‘The Church Loves Kansas City’: $183,000
Meanwhile, those leading the efforts found models in other cities. The United Way’s Blubaugh called counterparts who’d responded to their own mass shootings in Orlando, Florida; Buffalo, New York; and Newtown, Connecticut.
“The unfortunate reality is we have a cadre of communities across the country who have already faced tragedies like this,” Blubaugh said. “So there is an unfortunate protocol that is, sort of, already in place.”
#KCStrong monies could start being paid out by the end of March, Blubaugh said. Hundreds of people called the nonprofit’s 211 line, and the United Way is consulting with hospitals and law enforcement to verify victims and then offer services they may need, she said.
The range of needs is staggering — several people are still recovering at home, some are seeking counseling, and many weren’t even counted in the beginning. For instance, a plainclothes police officer was injured in the melee but is doing fine now, said Police Chief Stacey Graves.
Determining who is eligible for assistance was one of the first conversations United Way officials had when creating the fund. They prioritized three areas of focus: first were the wounded victims and their families, second was collaborating with organizations already helping victims in violence intervention and prevention and mental health services, and third were the first responders.
Specifically, the funds will be steered to cover medical bills, or lost wages for those who haven’t been able to work since the shootings, Blubaugh said. The goal is to work quickly to help people, she said, but also to spend the money in a judicious, strategic way.
“We don’t have a clear sightline of the entire landscape that we’re dealing with,” Blubaugh said. “Not only of how much money do we have to work with, but also, what is the landscape of need? And we need both of those things to be able to make those decisions.”
Firsthand Experience of Daily Kansas City Violence
Jason used his lone remaining sick day to stay home with Bridget and Gabriella. An overnight automation technician, he is the family’s primary breadwinner.
“I can’t take off work, you know?” he said. “It happened. It sucked. But it’s time to move on.”
“He’s a guy’s guy,” Bridget interjected.
On Jason’s first night back at work, the sudden sound of falling dishes startled Bridget and Gabriella, sending them into each other’s arms crying.
“It’s just those moments of flashbacks that are kicking our butts,” Bridget said.
Tell Us About Your Experience
We are continuing to report on the effects of the parade shooting on the people who were injured and the community as a whole. Do you have an experience you want to tell us about, or a question you think we should look into? Message KCUR’s text line at (816) 601-4777. Your information will not be used in an article without your permission.
In a way, the shooting has brought the family closer. They’ve been through a lot recently. Jason survived a heart attack and cancer last year. Raising a teenager is never easy.
Bridget can appreciate that the bullet lodged in her backpack, narrowly missing her, and that Gabriella’s legs were burned by sparks but she wasn’t shot.
Jason is grateful for another reason: It wasn’t a terrorist attack, as he initially feared. Instead, it fits into the type of gun violence he’d become accustomed to growing up in Kansas City, which recorded its deadliest year last year, although he’d never been this close to it before.
“This crap happens every single day,” he said. “The only difference is we were here for it.”
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