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Planning for the holidays can be rather hectic. Decorating, baking, shopping, and spending time with family and friends is a blast, but there’s so much to do! There are so many ways to celebrate this time of year, which is why we’ve taken the time to create the ultimate holiday guide, so you know exactly what Columbia, Missouri has to offer.

In Columbia, there are a number of holiday events to attend, in addition to many shops, restaurants, bars, and Christmas tree farms. Celebrate your holiday season by checking out the places in our guide.

Hiring an attorney can be a daunting task. How do you choose one? How do you know what type of lawyer to hire? What’s it like to work with an attorney and how do you know what’s expected of you? These are all questions you’re likely to have while browsing the website of an attorney, but don’t worry—we’re here to help.

Every firm’s site is filled with the same, boastful claims and pages and pages of legal speak that aren’t immediately useful. What’s useful? Answers. Real answers. Every two weeks roughly, we’ll be posting a common question a client new to the legal world might have, and we’ll provide real, honest answers to that question.  

The attorneys and staff at Thomas Law Offices spend a great deal of time working to protect Kentucky seniors who have suffered personal injuries as the result of nursing home fraud, neglect and abuse.  Which is why I applaud Attorney General Candidate Andy Beshear for recently publishing his six point plan to realign the priorities of the office of the Attorney General to make this worthy goal an even greater priority.  The Office of the Attorney General under the leadership of Attorney General Conway has done a great job of protecting seniors for the last eight years.  A Beshear administration will go even further by forming an office dedicated to seniors.  He would open an new office of investigators with a specific focus on senior related fraud and abuse, open a senior protection hotline and work  to coordinate non-profits with the same mission.

Read more about Beshear’s plan here:  http://www.andybeshear.com/my-plan/protecting-kentucky-seniors

For more information on what Attorney General Conway and his team already do to protect seniors visit: http://ag.ky.gov/Pages/protectingseniors.aspx

In July 2013, the Food and Drug Administration issued a drug safety alert for Benicar(olmesartan medoxomil), the medicine developed to help with high blood pressure and reduce the risk of serious medical problems. The alert came as a result of findings by the Mayo Clinic that Benicar and similar drugs like HCT, Azor, and Tribenzor were found to cause severe problems like sprue-like eneropathy and villous atrophy.

Symptoms of enteropathy severe, chronic diarrhea with substantial weight loss whereas villous atrophy damages the ability of the intestines to absorb nutrients. The enteropathy in particular may not develop for months or years after taking these drugs. In the study done by the Mayo Clinic involving 22 patients, 14 of them had to be hospitalized for these symptoms. One of the patients even lost 125 pounds.

The FDA ordered these new side effects be added to drug labels but the product had been on the market for a long period of time by then. “The FDA’s evaluation found clear evidence of an association between olmesartan and sprue-like enteropathy. If patients taking olmesartan develop these symptoms and no other cause is found, the drug should be discontinued and therapy with another antihypersensitive started,” the agency stated. The FDA considered these side effects life threatening in its report.

Of the 20 nursing homes in the country with the most government fines, five of them are in Kentucky. Kentucky also has three nursing homes listed among the top 20 in the nation that were cited for the most serious deficiencies.

The list is compiled by ProPublica, which is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism. The data is drawn from government databases, and includes deficiencies cited by regulators and the penalties imposed over the past three years.

Nursing Homes with the Most Fines

The Kentucky nursing homes found to have received the most fines over the past three years are:

• #5 – Somerwoods Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Somerset, KY: $564,000
• #7 – Princeton Health & Rehab Center, Inc. in Princeton, KY: $560,000
• #9 – Brownsboro Hills Health Care and Rehabilitation in Louisville, KY: $541,000
• #13 – Tradewater Pointe, in Dawson Springs, KY: $484,000
• #18 – NHC Healthcare, in Glasgow, KY: $436,000

The two homes nationwide with the most fines overall were Bradley Health Care & Rehab, in Cleveland, Tennessee, with $693,000 in fines, and the Siler City Center, in Siler City, North Carolina, with a total of $680,000 in fines.

Nursing Homes with the Most Serious Deficiencies

The Kentucky nursing homes among the worst in the country for most serious deficiencies over the last three years are:

• #10 – Fountain Circle Care & Rehabilitation Center, Winchester, KY: 14 serious deficiencies
• #11 – Signature Healthcare of Pikeville, Pikeville, KY: 13 serious deficiencies
• #15 – Hearthstone Place, Elkton, KY: 13 serious deficiencies

The worst levels of deficiencies in the U.S. were found at Graceland Nursing Center in Memphis, Tennessee, which had 28 serious deficiencies, the Care Inn of Abilene, Texas, which had 23, and the Courtyards at Fort Worth, Texas, which had 21.

An example of the types of problems leading to such serious levels of citations can be seen at the Princeton Health & Rehab Center. Many of its violations were found in 2012. In one case that lead to a resident’s death, records show that a nurse gave the resident pain medication at 2:00 a.m. Then two hours later at 4:00 a.m., staff helped the resident sit up at the side of the bed, and left the resident sitting alone in the room. The resident fell off the bed, suffered a head injury, and later died from internal bleeding.