This Friday the 26th, HMB will be hosting Dr. Steven Albelda ’75, a respiratory oncologist from UPenn Medical School, who will speaking about Academic Medicine in TCL 202 from 4:30-5:30.
What IS Academic Medicine? Come find out.
“The Effect of Safety Net Programs on Food Insecurity”
Economics Department Seminar – given by Lucie Schmidt, Lara
Shore-Sheppard, and Tara Watson; Wednesday, October 24, 4:00PM,
Griffin 7.
Friday, November 2, 4:00PM, Griffin 6 — John Briscoe, Harvard School of Public Health, CDE Seminar Room. The Challenge of Water Security in a Changing World. (Click here to read an interview with John Briscoe addressing the topic of his talk).
“Street Medicine is the provision of medical care directly to those living and sleeping on the streets through mobile services such as walking teams, medical vans and outdoor clinics.”
“Street Medicine Institute facilitates and enhances the direct provision of health care to the street homeless where they live.”
You can watch this short documentary to learn more about the effort to provide basic medical care to homeless people.
Check out Andrew Read’s take on research on the evolution of infectious diseases and how this is becoming a more pressing issue through this link.
If you would like to listen to a discussion on this issue check out this link on Science Friday
The Bullying Culture of Medical School
When does this bullying culture start? does it begin in medical school or earlier on in undergraduate school? If so, how do schools unintentionally encourage such a culture to become so commonplace? What kind of measures should be taken, and when, to address and mitigate this issue?
Attention Disorder or Not, Children Prescribed Pills to Help in School
The medicalization of our culture is both pragmatic and problematic. By medicalizing what may seem as social ineptitude and mental deficiency into “Asbergers Syndrome” or “autism” we in some ways remove the social opprobrium attached to behavior that is not ordinary. The child who has Asbergers or autism can seek treatment and perform better in school and get along with other children his age. However, what about diseases that are not so unambiguously “diseases” and resist being medicalized? In the the documentary, “Sound and the Fury,” a deaf community in Maryland argues that they do not feel the need to give their deaf children cochlear implants because deafness is a part of their culture, and not an impediment. In fact, they cannot imagine how awful it would be to hear noise all the time and to not use their expressive sign language. Is it unethical that they do not give their child the cochlear implant? There is a similar case to be made with ADD; some gifted children process so much information that they may exhibit some of the symptoms of ADD. How would pills affect them mentally and emotionally?
In addition to the difficulty of knowing when and when not to medicalize something as a malady, there is another problem associated with the increasing medicalization of our culture, namely, that it allows us to ignore the social determinants of health. The geography, the culture, and the socioeconomic status of a person affects his health. Why should we prescribe Prozac instead of therapy to a depressed adolescent? Perhaps, the pharmaceutical companies are profiting too much or perhaps it is not solely a cynical monetary scheme, but a deeply-ingrained idea in our culture that pills can solve everything.
We will be meeting in TCL 202 at 4 pm on Friday, October 12. We will be discussing a recently published Nature article: “HIV-infected T cells are migratory vehicles for viral dissemination.”