(AP) ? After 17 years working in hospital emergency rooms, physician Jill Griffin tuned up her bicycle and launched a new venture she's calling PedalMed. Griffin, 53, started cycling around the area earlier this month offering "health coaching" house calls to people with chronic diseases and other health issues. Other businesses relying on bicycles for transportation include Pedal People, a Northampton business that transports everything from trash to furniture, and Halo Bike Couriers in Hadley, which delivers packages and paperwork and offers postering services. After visiting five clients in her first two days of health coaching house calls, Griffin said she knew she made the right decision in starting the business. Griffin said working in emergency rooms gave her a unique perspective into the health care system. If you come into the ER with congestive heart failure and your lungs are full of fluid, I'm going to get the fluid out and then send you home to be sick. What she would rather be doing is visiting that patient at home, teaching him or her about lifestyle changes that could prevent another episode. Most of her clients are older and suffer from chronic conditions such as heart disease, Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, high blood pressure or, like Adams and Mandeville, diabetes. [...] she started them on house and yard work, including cleaning the garage, and later added riding a stationary bicycle, just three minutes a day at first, and then slowly lengthening the workout intervals. Since starting PedalMed, Griffin has reduced her hours at the Mercy Medical Center emergency room to one day a week.
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