We often associate healthcare with visiting a doctor at a clinic or going to a hospital, which would be fine under normal circumstances, but with the resurgence of the coronavirus, it can often be difficult for us to get healthcare from these traditional sources because the number of patients infected with COVID-19 that require emergency care is overwhelming the healthcare system. Now may also not be a good time to visit a clinic or a hospital for a routine appointment.
But there are still many ways that you can continue to take excellent care of your health at home. You can, for example, get home healthcare tests for COVID-19 testing, use circadian lighting to improve the quality of your sleep, and consult a physician, dietitian, psychologist, or other healthcare practitioners via telemedicine.
Home Healthcare Testing
Earlywell, underwritten by The Chernin Group (TCG), provides an at-home COVID-19 test kit if you’re feeling anxious that you or someone in your household is showing flu-like symptoms and wonder if you, a family member, or a roommate has caught the virus. Earlywell also provides many other digital-based healthcare options for your health, including tests for vitamin D deficiency, women’s fertility, food allergies, and thyroid hormone levels.
Circadian Lighting
You can optimize your health through circadian lighting, which is special lighting available in your home to support the circadian rhythms that balance out your wake-sleep cycle. Incidentally, although circadian rhythms regulate our sleep-wake cycle, they also influence the cycle of body temperature, the cycle of hormonal secretion, and the cycle of menstruation in women.
When using a circadian optics lamp, timing and intensity make all the difference to how effectively this special lighting works for you because it’s important to synchronize your body’s internal clock with the earth’s external clock.
By turning on your circadian optics lamp in the evening, it will help you feel sleepy before bedtime and sleep well all night long. It’s also important to switch on your circadian optics lamp in the morning to become more fully awake and avoid feeling sleepy during the day. Exposure to circadian light early in the morning will stimulate the receptors in your eyes, and this will prime your body’s clock to stay awake the rest of the day.
Telemedicine
Telemedicine is a technological way to provide remote health care, a new method of practicing medicine that’s also commonly referred to as telehealth. Although often considered just as a way for a patient to make a video conferencing appointment with a physician via a smartphone or computer, telemedicine is far more sophisticated and offers more than an opportunity for a patient to have a face-to-face conversation with a physician. For instance, besides video consultations, we can also use telemedicine for remote diagnosis and evaluation, and we can use it for digital transmission of almost any type of medical imaging.
Telemedicine can also help us consult with many other healthcare professionals. If you need nutritional guidance, you can arrange a consultation with a dietitian, or if you need psychotherapy, you can make an appointment with a psychotherapist.
The healthcare professional that you need can be found through a professional online directory. If, say, you need to talk to a psychotherapist, you’ll find many directories that make it easy to choose a psychotherapist and make an appointment for a telehealth therapy session. If, perhaps, you live in Colorado and suffer from panic attacks, you can make an appointment with a psychotherapist through a directory like the Network Therapy website.
All things considered, plenty of healthcare options, including communicating with a healthcare professional about any health issues, are still available despite our currently overwhelmed healthcare system.
