Deadly Massachusetts fire highlights the minimal regulations that govern assisted-living facilities
As an assisted-living center, Gabriel House in Fall River , about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Boston, offered a type of housing for older residents that has expanded nationally in recent decades. But advocates argue that the absence of any federal regulations and spotty state rules mean the sector is largely left to police itself.
'The real issue is that assisted livings operate in an environment like the Wild West,' said Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for improved care in nursing and assisted-living facilities. 'They can pretty much do what they want with impunity, and that results in a lot of, I would say, mini-catastrophes every day, frankly.'
The fire that tore through the three-story structure late Sunday raised a host of questions about conditions at the dilapidated facility and put the spotlight on the growing number of assisted-living centers in the state and nationwide.
Created in the 1980s, assisted living has been marketed as an option for older adults who need some assistance but not as much help as a nursing home. Advocates argue that regulations for the facilities have not kept up as more locations have opened.
Nursing homes, for example, are governed by federal regulations because they receive Medicare and Medicaid while there are no federal regulations for assisted-living facilities. Nursing homes must have a minimum number of staffers and trained medical professionals such as doctors and nurses, but assisted-living facilities have no such requirements.
'The regulations are minimal,' said Liane Zeitz, an attorney who is also a member of the state Assisted Living Residences Commission, a body created to make recommendations about the sector. She has advocated for more regulations for assisted-living facilities.
The facilities were lightly regulated because initially they were regarded as residential, with lower levels of care and less oversight, she said. But now those facilities are caring for a population 'that is much frailer, and the population is growing.'
Not only are the regulations weaker for assisted-living facilities, but advocates argue that the enforcement of the existing rules is often lax.
Paul Lanzikos, a former Massachusetts secretary of elder affairs and co-founder of the advocacy group Dignity Alliance, described a 'patchwork' of regulations across the country, with different agencies involved depending on the state.
'Some of the states are much more regulated. Some are regulated as a health care entity. Others, as we do here in Massachusetts, are considered a residential housing model,' he said.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, has been advocating for increased oversight for years, particularly after the release of reports about health and safety problems in 2018.
'These are serious problems that have been going on for years,' she said at a hearing last year. 'But we hear so much less about what's going in assisted-living facilities than we do in other facilities, like nursing homes.'
At that hearing, Mollot noted that scandals in the nursing home industry pushed Congress to act in the 1970s and 1980s, and that such a reckoning could be coming soon for assisted living. He described two major risks: increasingly sick and vulnerable assisted living residents and financial exploitation by owner investors.
Speaking Wednesday after learning about the Gabriel House fire, Mollot said the problems that plagued that facility are not unique to Massachusetts.
'Unlike nursing homes, assisted living has no federal state requirements, no requirement for staffing, no requirements for staff training, no requirements for safety protocols, no requirements for inspections,' he said. 'That falls to the states, and the states have overall very weak rules.'
___
Associated Press writers Holly Ramer and Matt O'Brien contributed to this report.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Pitching injuries continue to be an issue in MLB. How it's impacting pitchers at all levels
Keith Meister is worried. The 63-year-old orthopedic surgeon feels as if he's screaming into a void, his expert opinion falling on deaf ears. Meister, whose slight Southern twang sweeps into conversation through his 20-plus-year career in the Lone Star State as the Texas Rangers' team physician, is a leading voice in baseball's pitching-injury epidemic. Meister wants the sport to err on the side of caution and create change to save pitchers' arms. The trend, Meister says, stems from the industry-wide push to increase speed, spin and break at all costs. While MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. bicker about what's causing the problem and how to solve it, the doctor provides his perspective. He just wants the 17-year-old high schooler, the 23-year-old college pitcher, and the 32-year-old MLB veteran to stop showing up at his office. 'It's not going to change at the lower levels until it changes at the highest level,' Meister said in a phone interview. 'I don't see a motivation within Major League Baseball to change anything that would enhance the level of safety.' Read more: Four major questions the Dodgers face in the second half of the season MLB asked Meister to sit on a committee examining the growth in pitcher injuries about 18 months ago, he said. Meister says the committee never met. (MLB did not respond to a request for comment about the committee.) Injury is among the biggest risks for youth pitchers looking for the all-too-sought-after faster fastball. Their quest to emulate their heroes, such as hard-throwing veteran starters and stars Justin Verlander and Jacob deGrom, has caused them to need the same surgeries as the pros. Trickling down, it's the teenager, the budding pitching prospect desperate to land his Division I scholarship, who is hurt the most. MLB teams wave around multimillion-dollar signing bonuses for the MLB Draft. Those same pitchers hurt their elbows after pushing their abilities to the extreme, calling into action surgeons such as Meister. 'It's an even bigger problem than it appears,' said David Vaught, a baseball historian, author and history professor at Texas A&M. 'This goes back into high school or before that, this notion that you throw as hard as possible. … It's so embedded, embedded in the baseball society.' Tommy John surgery saves careers. But as pitchers across baseball push for higher velocity, more hurlers are going under the knife — for a first time, a second time and in some instances, a third or fourth procedure. MLB pitching velocity steadily rose from 2008 to 2023, with average fastball velocity going from 91.9 mph to 94.2. According to Meister, the total number of elbow ligament surgeries in professional baseball in 2023 was greater than in the 1990s altogether. A 2015 study revealed 56.8% of Tommy John surgeries are for athletes in the 15- to 19-year-old age range. 'It's like the soldiers on the front lines — they come into the tent with bullet wounds,' Meister said. 'You take the bullets out, you patch them back up and you send them back out there to get shot up again.' MLB released a report on pitcher injuries in December 2024. The much-anticipated study concluded that increased pitching velocity, 'optimizing stuff' — which MLB defines as movement characteristics of pitches (spin, vertical movement and horizontal movement) — and pitchers using maximum effort were the 'most significant' causes of the increase in arm injuries. Meister was interviewed for the report. He knew all that years ago. He was yelling from the proverbial rooftop as MLB took more than a year (the league commissioned the study in 2023) to conclude what the doctor considered basic knowledge. 'Nothing there that hadn't been talked about before, and no suggestion for what needs to be changed,' Meister said to The Times Wednesday. Read more: Hernández: Secret to Yoshinobu Yamamoto's 2025 success? His hero-like effort in NLDS Game 5 Although pitching development labs such as Driveline Baseball and Tread Athletics provide fresh ideas, Meister said he does not entirely blame them for the epidemic. It's basic economics. There's a demand for throwing harder and the industry is filling the void. However, Meister sees the dramatic increase in velocity for youth pitchers, such as a 10-mph boost in velocity within six months, as dangerous. 'That's called child abuse,' Meister said. 'The body can't accommodate. It just can't. It's like taking a Corolla and dropping a Ferrari engine in it and saying, 'Go ahead and drive that car, take it on the track, put the gas pedal to the metal and ask for that car to hold itself together.' It's impossible.' On the other end of the arm-injury epidemic is the player lying on his back, humming along to Kendrick Lamar's 'Not Like Us' as an air-cast-like device engulfs his arm, pressurizing the forearm and elbow. The noise of the giant arm sleeve fills the room of Beimel Elite Athletics, a baseball training lab based in Torrance — owned by former MLB pitcher Joe Beimel. It generates Darth Vader-like noises, compressing up and down with a Krissshhhh Hhhwoooo… Krissshhhh Hhhwoooo. Greg Dukeman, a Beimel Elite Athletics pitching coach whose 6-foot-8 frame towers over everyone in the facility, quipped that the elbow of the pitcher undergoing treatment was 'barking.' For professional and youth players alike, this technology, along with red-light therapy — a non-intrusive light treatment that increases cellular processes to heal tissue — and periodic ice baths, is just one example of how Beimel attempts to treat athletes as they tax their bodies, hoping to heal micro-tears in the arm without surgical intervention. With little to no research publicly available on how high-velocity-and-movement training methods are hurting or — albeit highly unlikely — helping pitchers' elbows and shoulders, Meister said, it's often free rein with little — if any — guardrails. Josh Mitchell, director of player development at Beimel's Torrance lab, said that's not exactly the case in their baseball performance program. Beimel will only work with youth athletes who are ready to take the next step, he said. 'You got the 9- and 10-year-olds, they're not ready yet,' Mitchell said. 'The 13- and 14-year-olds, before they graduate out of the youth and into our elite program, we'll introduce the [velocity] training because they're going to get it way more in that next phase.' Beimel uses motion capture to provide pitching feedback, and uses health technology that coincides with its athletes having to self-report daily to track overexertion and determine how best to use their bodies. Their goal is to provide as much support to their athletes as possible, using their facilities as a gym, baseball lab and pseudo health clinic. Mitchell knows the pleasure and pain of modern-day pitching development. The Ridgway, Pa., native's professional career was waning at the Single-A level before the Minnesota Twins acquired him in the minor league portion of the Rule 5 Draft. The Twins, Mitchell said, embraced the cutting-edge technique of pitching velocity, seeing improvements across the board as he reached the Double-A level for the first time in his career in 2021. But Mitchell, whose bushy beard and joking personality complement a perpetually smiling visage, turned serious when explaining the end of his career. 'I'm gonna do what I know is gonna help me get bigger, stronger, faster,' said Mitchell, who jumped from throwing around 90 miles per hour to reaching as high as 98 mph on the radar gun. 'And I did — to my arm's expense, though.' Mitchell underwent two Tommy John surgeries in less than a year and a half. Mitchell became the wounded soldier that Meister so passionately recounted. Now, partially because of advanced training methods, youth athletes are more likely to visit that proverbial medic's tent. 'There's a saying around [young] baseball players that if you're not throwing like, over 80 miles per hour and you're not risking Tommy John, you're not throwing hard enough,' said Daniel Acevedo, an orthopedic surgeon based in Thousand Oaks, Calif., who mostly sees youth-level athletes. In MLB's report, an independent pitching development coach, who was unnamed, blamed 'baseball society' for creating a velocity obsession. That velocity obsession has become a career route, an industry, a success story for baseball development companies across the country. Driveline focuses on the never-ending 'how' of baseball development. How can the pitcher throw harder, with more break, or spin? And it's not just the pitchers. How can the hitter change his swing pattern to hit the ball farther and faster? Since then, baseball players from across levels have flocked to Driveline's facilities and those like it to learn how to improve and level up. 'Maybe five or six years ago, if you throw 90-plus, you have a shot to play beyond college,' said Dylan Gargas, Arizona pitching coordinator for Driveline Baseball. 'Now that barrier to entry just keeps getting higher and higher because guys throw harder.' MLB players have even ditched their clubs midseason in hopes to unlock something to improve their pitching repertoire. Boston Red Sox right-handed pitcher Walker Buehler left the Dodgers last season to test himself at the Cressey Sports Performance training center near Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., before returning to eventually pitch the final out of the 2024 World Series. Driveline is not alone. Ben Brewster, co-founder of Tread Athletics, another baseball development company based in North Carolina, said high-school-aged players have been attracted to his performance facility because they see the results that MLB players and teammates achieve after continued training sessions. Tread Athletics claims to have a role in more than 250 combined MLB draft picks or free agent signings, and says it has helped more than 1,000 high school players earn college opportunities. Kansas City Royals left-hander Cole Ragans achieved a 4.4-mph increase from 2022 to 2023, the largest in MLB that year. With the velocity increase after his work at Tread Athletics, Ragans went from a league-average relief pitcher to a postseason ace in less than a year. So what makes Ragans' development different from that of a teenage prospect reaching out to Tread Athletics? 'Ragans still could go from 92-94 miles per hour to 96 to 101,' Brewster said. 'He still has room, but relatively speaking, he was a lot closer to his potential than, like, a random 15-year-old kid throwing 73 miles per hour.' Meister knows Ragans well. When the southpaw was a member of the Rangers' organization, the orthopedic surgeon performed Tommy John surgery on Ragans twice. (Ragans has also battled a rotator cuff strain this season and has been out since early June.) 'These velocities and these spin rates are very worrisome,' Meister said. 'And we see that in, in and of itself, just in looking at how long these Tommy John procedures last.' Throwing hard is not an overnight experience. Brewster shared a stern warning for the pitching development process, using weightlifting as an example. He said weightlifters can try to squat 500 pounds daily without days off, or attempt to squat 500 pounds with their knees caving in and buckling because of terrible form. There's no 100% safe way to lift 500 pounds, just like there is no fail-safe way of throwing 100 mph. There's always risk. It's all in the form. Lifting is a science, and so is pitching — finding the safest way to train to increase velocity without injury. 'The responsible way to squat 500 pounds would be going up in weight over time, having great form and monitoring to make sure you're not going too heavy, too soon,' Brewster said. 'When it comes to pitching, you can manage workload. You can make sure that mechanically, they don't have any glaring red flags.' Brewster added that Tread, as of July, is actively creating its own data sets to explore how UCLs are affected by training methods, and how to use load management to skirt potential injuries. Read more: Freddie Freeman MLB Network documentary showcases storied career, and his vulnerability MLB admitted to a 'lack [of] comprehensive data to examine injury trends for amateur players' in its December report. It points to a lack of college data as well, where most Division I programs use such technology. The Andrews Sports Medicine & Orthopedic Center based in Birmingham, Ala. — founded by James Andrews, the former orthopedic surgeon to the stars — provided in-house data within MLB's report, showing that the amount of UCL surgeries conducted for high school pitchers in their clinic has risen to as high as 60% of the total since 2015, while remaining above 40% overall through 2023. Meister said baseball development companies may look great on the periphery — sending youth players to top colleges and the professional ranks — but it's worth noting what they aren't sharing publicly. 'What they don't show you is that [youth athletes] are walking into our offices, three or six months or nine months later.' Get the best, most interesting and strangest stories of the day from the L.A. sports scene and beyond from our newsletter The Sports Report. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Wall Street Journal
2 hours ago
- Wall Street Journal
Chronic Lyme Disease Was Once Dismissed. More Doctors Are Coming Around.
When Gretchen Dunoyer heard that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was recruiting people with lingering Lyme disease symptoms for a study, she burst into tears. Dunoyer, 63, had near-constant fatigue and vertigo for years, after an odd, flulike illness in the summer of 2002. She bounced around from doctor to doctor looking for answers. Many of them told her that she was depressed, but she had a gut feeling that something else was wrong. Around 2015, she was told the root of her distress was likely Lyme disease, courtesy of a tick bite that she didn't remember.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Eating these common foods could reduce Alzheimer's risk, experts say
Reducing the risk of Alzheimer's could be as simple as eating the right food. A new study by researchers in Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C., found that eating foods high in choline could lower the risk of developing the common dementia. Choline is an essential micronutrient found in various foods, including poultry, dairy products (such as milk, yogurt and eggs), cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and Brussels sprouts, beans and some fish, according to the USDA. The Key To Living Longer Could Be Tied To A Surprising Substance, Study Suggests Dietary choline intake has been associated with a lower risk of cognitive function and reduced risk of dementia, the researchers concluded. In the study, participants averaging 81 years of age who did not have Alzheimer's completed dietary questionnaires and underwent annual neurological exams. Read On The Fox News App After an eight-year follow-up, researchers determined that consuming about 350 milligrams of choline per day was associated with the lowest risk of clinical Alzheimer's diagnoses in older adults. Los Angeles-based registered dietitian nutritionist Ilana Muhlstein has also backed the impact of choline on brain health, citing a 2024 China-based study that found intake improves cognitive function, especially among women. "This is the study that inspired me to start supplementing choline," she said. "My memory has gotten worse over the years. I first wrote it off as 'pregnancy brain,' then 'mommy brain,' but eventually realized I should do my best to help it." "I already sleep well, exercise regularly, play mahjong and limit my alcohol, so choline was the next obvious tool worth trying." Warding Off Alzheimer's Might Mean Making These 11 Lifestyle Changes, Expert Says Muhlstein shared that more than 90% of the choline in eggs comes from the yolk. For those who choose to eat egg whites for dietary reasons, taking a choline supplement may be a better option. Choline intake should be tailored to each person's individual needs, the nutritionist noted, referencing guidance from the Harvard School of Public Health. "Premenopausal women may have lower requirements for dietary choline, because higher estrogen levels stimulate the creation of choline in the body," the university wrote. In a separate interview with Fox News Digital, Dr. Daniel Amen, a psychiatrist, brain imaging doctor and founder of Amen Clinics in California, emphasized the importance of eating the right foods for brain health. "Your brain uses 20% to 30% of the calories you consume," he said. "So, nutrition is critical to help your brain or hurt your brain." Walnuts are one of Amen's favorite brain-healthy food options, as they contain choline as well as omega-3 fatty acids. He also recommends including wild salmon as a dietary staple, as it's high in omega-3s and healthy protein, as well as organic blueberries and green, leafy vegetables. Click Here To Sign Up For Our Health Newsletter "If you had a salad every day, and you put blueberries and salmon and walnuts on it with a little lemon and olive oil, that would be a perfect brain-boosting lunch," he said. The doctor also suggested considering certain supplements to foster better brain health, including vitamin D, omega-3 or fish oil, or a daily multi-vitamin. For more Health articles, visit "Nearly two-thirds of the American population is low in vitamin D," he said. "And if it's low, it's a universal risk factor for every bad thing related to your brain, but also to your body, including obesity and cancer … Know and optimize your vitamin D level." Fox News Digital reached out to the study researchers for article source: Eating these common foods could reduce Alzheimer's risk, experts say Solve the daily Crossword
