Outfitting Your New Office (Part I)

Exam Table

Congratulations! You’ve made the career-altering decision to open your own practice. With this significant change comes countless new responsibilities; one of the most pressing concerns is the purchase or lease of an office and the furnishing and setup of said office for optimal workflow, patient comfort, and staff efficiency. With a dizzying array of options in every area of office arrangement and organization – furniture! equipment! supplies! filing! – the process may seem insurmountable. Our guide to setting up your office is designed to help you find exactly what you need to suit your individual needs, preferences, tastes, and budget.

Mobility with Style

For thousands of years, people with disabilities were viewed as inferior, damaged, even evil. The ancient Greeks believed that those with physical imperfections were substandard, corroborated by Plato’s philosophy that the “deformed” ought to have been put away in “mysterious unknown places.” Later, theologians Martin Luther and John Calvin asserted that people with mental and physical limitations were possessed by evil spirits that necessitated painful and cruel exorcisms. As time went on, tolerance for disabilities did not increase; rather, Darwinists and similar evolutionists lobbied against aid for people with impairments, rationalizing that the continuity of an “inferior species” would interfere with survival of the fittest and a superior race. In a similar vein, Hitler and his Nazi party sought to eliminate all people with disabilities, claiming that their very existence tainted their pure-blooded nation. Historically, people with physical, emotional, and/or mental challenges have not been treated well and remained stigmatized until fairly recently.

Today, people with impairments are more fortunate than they ever have been. They are protected by laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, which ensure that they are awarded equal rights in the workforce and educational systems and are granted accessibility to public places. They are not only tolerated, however; people with disabilities are fully accepted and embraced as being just like everyone else. This is evidenced in countless respects: in the sports world, with the Paralympics, International Wheelchair Basketball Federation, and organized wheelchair-bound participants in dance competitions; in popular culture, demonstrated by actors such as Christopher Reeve and Michael J. Fox and stage and film presence of people with dwarfism and other conditions – in typical roles, not as “freaks” in carnival sideshows as they were in years past – and musicians like Itzhak Perlman and Stevie Wonder; and in the academic world, where students of all abilities are admitted to schools and people like Stephen Hawking are celebrated rather than shunned. Humankind has made great strides in our attitude toward those with differing abilities.

The Silent Killer

It may sound like the title of a horror movie, but the condition dubbed “the silent killer” is all too real. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, accounts for an astonishing 40.6% of all cardiovascular disease-related deaths, more than smoking, poor diet, insufficient activity, and abnormal glucose levels, according to the American Heart Association. Being that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention asserts that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States – killing approximately 600,000 men and women of all ethnicities annually – hypertension is indeed a cause for tremendous concern and action. It affects roughly 76.4 million Americans over age twenty; put simply, one in every three United States residents has high blood pressure.

Hypertension is known as the silent killer due to the fact that it often goes undetected until it manifests itself in other serious health conditions. Left untreated, hypertension can and frequently does lead to stroke, heart attack, angina, heart and/or kidney failure, and peripheral artery disease, among other life-threatening illnesses. While it is regularly – and often correctly – blamed on and linked to a range of factors such as stress, anxiety, obesity, smoking, drinking, and family history, essential (or primary) hypertension most often occurs without a clear cause. Secondary hypertension, which is far less common than its primary counterpart, is directly linked to various medications and ailments such as kidney disease, diabetes, pregnancy (when it is known as preeclampsia), endocrine disease, and cancer.