Ionizing radiation, higher plants, and radioprotection: From acute high doses to chronic low doses

© 2018 Caplin and Willey. Understanding the effects of ionizing radiation (IR) on plants is important for environmental protection, for agriculture and horticulture, and for space science but plants have significant biological differences to the animals from which much relevant knowledge is derived. The effects of IR on plants are understood best at acute high doses because there have been; (a) controlled experiments in the field using point sources, (b) field studies in the immediate aftermath of nuclear accidents, and (c) controlled laboratory experiments. A compilation of studies of the effects of IR on plants reveals that although there are numerous field studies of the effects of chronic low doses on plants, there are few controlled experiments that used chronic low doses. Using the Bradford-Hill criteria widely used in epidemiological studies we suggest that a new phase of chronic low-level radiation research on plants is desirable if its effects are to be properly elucidated. We emphasize the plant biological contexts that should direct such research. We review previously reported effects from the molecular to community level and, using a plant stress biology context, discuss a variety of acute high-and chronic low-dose data against Derived Consideration Reference Levels (DCRLs) used for environmental protection. We suggest that chronic low-level IR can sometimes have effects at the molecular and cytogenetic level at DCRL dose rates (and perhaps below) but that there are unlikely to be environmentally significant effects at higher levels of biological organization. We conclude that, although current data meets only some of the Bradford-Hill criteria, current DCRLs for plants are very likely to be appropriate at biological scales relevant to environmental protection (and for which they were intended) but that research designed with an appropriate biological context and with more of the Bradford-Hill criteria in mind would strengthen this assertion. We note that the effects of IR have been investigated on only a small proportion of plant species and that research with a wider range of species might improve not only the understanding of the biological effects of radiation but also that of the response of plants to environmental stress

A Tale of Two Cities: The Exploration of the Trieste Public Psychiatry Model in San Francisco

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the “Trieste model” of public psychiatry is one of the most progressive in the world. It was in Trieste, Italy, in the 1970s that the radical psychiatrist, Franco Basaglia, implemented his vision of anti-institutional, democratic psychiatry. The Trieste model put the suffering person—not his or her disorders—at the center of the health care system. The model, revolutionary in its time, began with the “negation” and “destruction” of the traditional mental asylum (‘manicomio’). A novel community mental health system replaced the mental institution. To achieve this, the Trieste model promoted the social inclusion and full citizenship of users of mental health services. Trieste has been a collaborating center of the WHO for four decades with a goal of disseminating its practices across the world. This paper illustrates a recent attempt to determine whether the Trieste model could be translated to the city of San Francisco, California. This process revealed a number of obstacles to such a translation. Our hope is that a review of Basaglia’s ideas, along with a discussion of the obstacles to their implementation, will facilitate efforts to foster the social integration of persons with mental disorders across the world

Contradictions in the social production of clinical knowledge: The case of schizophrenia

This paper is divided into two parts. In Part I, I contend that the current thrust to synthesize clinical and critical medical anthropology is misdirected and may serve to further fragment, rather than unify their concerns. I then suggest that instead of focusing on their differences, either in levels of analysis ('micro-' versus 'macro-') or in objects for analysis, we should emphasize instead the perspective that they share--one drawn from the common task their work assumes as a critical, emancipatory science of mankind. In Part II, keeping in mind this short prolegomenon, I utilize data regarding the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) to illustrate that medical knowledge is reducible to neither natural nor social forces; it is instead produced by living actors who are constrained by their social and historical conditions and the exigencies of the mode of production in which these actors produce. I show how NAMI members have succeeded in changing 'blame-the-family' ideologies about schizophrenia etiology and treatment, but I also explain how the medicalized alternative they produced in redefining schizophrenia as a disease of the brain is itself limited and fraught with contradictions (e.g. reinforcing a depersonalizing mind/body separation that inhibits healing). These contradictions highlight the difficulty of transcending the assumptions implicit in medical categories since they are tied to the dominant epistemology of the mode of production in which they are produced--one that binds our world views and limits the options we can generate. Anthropologists must draw attention to these constraints as an initial step to transcending them.ideology schizophrenia clinical knowledge social production

Family therapy workshops in the United States: Potential abuses in the production of therapy in an advanced capitalist society

A market for family therapy workshops has mushroomed in recent years. Treatment of families by therapists conducting such workshops, however, can be dispassionate and dehumanizing. Using the distinction between curing and healing, I do not question the curative potential of family therapy, but I question whether this kind of doctor/patient interaction promotes healing. Also, by demonstrating how the systems model tends to objectify patients and alienate therapists from those they treat, this paper challenge claims that family therapy recognizes the social nature of illness. The dehumanizing treatment cannot be attributed solely to the therapists, but requires further interpretation by analyzing the biases of the therapy model, the commodified context of the workshops,and epistemological issues arising from the application of general systems theory to a social model of treatment. Family systems therapy shares epistemological features with biomedicine, and like the biomedical model, alienates therapists from patients. This alienation, ironically, can be even greater when the family systems model is used than in biomedical treatment. Finally, I suggest that family therapy workshops have grown in popularity because the mechanistic features of the treatment model, drawn largely from cybernetics, promote the production and reproduction of a form of therapy compatible with the emphasis on 'functional health' favored in an advanced capitalist society.