3,652 research outputs found
The Applicability of Nonlinear Systems Dynamics Chaos Measures to Cardiovascular Physiology Variables
Three measures of nonlinear chaos (fractal dimension, Approximate Entropy (ApEn), and Lyapunov exponents) were studied as potential measures of cardiovascular condition. It is suggested that these measures have potential in the assessment of cardiovascular condition in environments of normal cardiovascular stress (normal gravity on the Earth surface), cardiovascular deconditioning (microgravity of space), and increased cardiovascular stress (lower body negative pressure (LBNP) treatments)
Hygiene
Hygiene is defined in current English dictionaries as âthe science of health.â This definition, though formally correct, hides a long history of change in the wordâs use, from its holistic classical meaning of âindividual regimens to preserve healthâ to its nineteenth-century connotations of âsocial medicineâ (including lethal eugenics programs), to its current limited construal as âpersonal cleanlinessâ or âgerm removal.â For more than 2,500 years of use in many different lands, concepts of hygiene have been integral to personal identity, shaping sense of self through boundary maintenance and spirituality
Drawing the Lines: Health scares in the age of SARS
Epidemics of fear, perhaps also of disease: here are some important foci for our present anxieties. By âusâ I mean the various academics, experts and professionals, who in the âwesternâ nations of North America, Europe and Australia have ongoing conversations on these subjects. Some health professionals are worried about a vast outbreak of a new or re-emerging infectious disease; others are worried about being deliberately attacked with disease or with deadly gas. But also, many health professionals worry about the enormous impacts that these public fears may have on economies and societies: âthe problem with SARS,â I have heard several in Canada say, âwas not SARS itself, but fearâ. They meant that the disruptions of SARS were vastly disproportionate to its body count, a mere 44 deaths, and I know they recall, and would like to prevent, other situations where public worries unjustified by scientific evidence (say, of radiation from powerlines) caused trouble and expense. Yet they seem to make little professional effort to trace the tensions between their fears and their fears of fear. And so we who observe public health from the humanities worry and wonder about their (our) worrying: is ours a ârisk societyâ, a âculture of fearâ? In this chapter I will join these conversations to reflect on current concerns about, and responses to, the threats of infectious disease. First, I will situate these concerns and reactions in a more general context of concerns about âhealth scaresâ â social, as opposed to individual, phenomena, wherein we see a strong reaction to a specific event that appears to threaten the health of some significant social group. This is not the problem of disease but of âfear itselfâ, in the terms used above. I then briefly discuss concerns with epidemics of new and re-emerging infectious diseases as a particular category of health scare. Here I remind the reader of the central role that real borders, and conceived boundaries, play in these concerns: nation states remain the basic units for preventing and managing disease events, and they produce instrumental categories (like âsusceptibleâ or âinfectiousâ) whose crossings are cause for concern. I argue that this may be understood in terms of the logic of dangerousness outlined by Foucault, and, after him, Castel, and that this logic has been reasserted amid contemporary ideas of information flow and of risk. With all this in mind, I then retell the story of SARS in Canada, to show how containment strategies such as quarantine, policing air travel and hospital boundaries, and hygiene messaging, which had vast, largely negative social and economic impacts, were determined by the tensions between these logics of dangerousness and risk. Whether one quarantined newly adopted Chinese children or the nurse in a hospital with SARS patients, whether one spent money on thermal scanners in airports or on hospital emergency wards, such decisions depended, given these logics, on where one chose to âdraw the lineâ
Irresistible forces: reflections on the history of women in Australian science
The women scientists from the pre-World War II era, whose implements, publications and images were displayed as part of the League of Remarkable Women in Science exhibition, arouse in me an honouring of their quiet, dedicated sort of nationalism, in which deep connections with land and environment were intermingled with an ethic of humility and service. I went looking in Australiaâs history for women scientists whose lives and careers would refute claims that womenâs capacity for spatial and abstract reasoning is less than menâs, due to differences in the development and structure of the brain. If youâre interested in these questions, you may enjoy debates such as this from Harvard University
History and Social Change in Health and Medicine
In general, qualitative research â in health or otherwise â has not paid much attention to history. And why should it? While most qualitative scholars, particularly the more constructivist among us, would naturally acknowledge that the people and societies they study are different to those that preceded them, this mostly has little or no influence in practice on research design or conduct. History is interesting, yes, but in most cases must seem either too arcane, or too removed, to inform health research. There are, however, occasions where history may seem to have some instrumental value for health research: to learn about the efficacy and impacts of interventions in the past; to avoid past mistakes or reinventing the wheel; to be more influential advocates. For example, health researchers may be interested in social histories of Prohibition-era USA in order to think about the feasibility of drug bans. Similarly, studies using oral history interviews with politicians and other stakeholders involved in tobacco control legislation were conducted to delineate the set of social conditions and processes that resulted in legislative change, in order to identify any generalisable features that might allow advocates to achieve further tobacco control more quickly and efficiently in the future, or at least to predict and produce conditions conducive to accomplishing further control (Bryan-Jones & Chapman, 2006; Claire Hooker & Chapman, 2006). These studies have empirically verified the utility of Kingdonâs model of policy change (Claire Hooker & Chapman, 2006; Jacobson, Wasserman, & Anderson, 1997; Studlar, 2002) and underscored the key role of âpolicy entrepreneursâ and âwindows of opportunityâ in getting tobacco control onto the policy (and eventually, legislative) agenda. These sorts of studies are certainly compelling and often useful. What they do not do, however, is capture the unique qualities of peopleâs action and experience in a specific time and place, nor situate or understand these things in relation to wider social influences. There are different, good, reasons for qualitative researchers to be interested in history: for its capacity to enhance sensitivity to social context and its unique critical perspectives on health and medicine. The approaches and perspectives of history â the development of what I refer to as an âhistorianâs noseâ â can lead scholars to ask important new analytic questions, challenging their assumptions and goals, and leading to much deeper or more novel analyses
Middlemarch
At the time George Eliot wrote Middlemarch, the boundaries between History and Fiction (like those between Science and Romance, or Medicine and various Arts ) were still blurred. We who are the heirs of that era have liked to insist on distinguishing the soberly factual nature of history from the unhampered fantasies of fiction. Yet there are occasions when we must admit that the multi-faceted emotional and sensuous grasp of an era or a character that a good novelist can evoke may be at least as insightful as scholarly history. Eliot offers us this Gestalt-like experience, for she is unsurpassed in the ability to set her characters, with all their uniqueness of traits and doubts and actions and dreams, within the relentless current of the society that shaped them. And our compassion for them is increased by this broader and many-layered conception of them. When Middlemarch was published to instant acclaim in 1871-2, the William Osler was in the midst of his medical education. Middlemarch was and is famous for its finely-tuned portrayal of Dr Lydgate, one of its two leading protagonists, and thus this âhistoryâ of a fictional physician, may tell us something of what was passing in the young Oslerâs heart and mind. And Osler was hardly unique in identifying with Lydgate, as his own note on the novel suggests: âif [he] was to ask the opinion of a dozen medical men upon the novel in which the doctor is best described ⊠the majority will say, âMiddlemarchâ. How could Osler have helped identifying with Lydgate? Lydgate embodies the loftiest ideals and the happiest balances associated with medicine âworking for social good rather than personal profit, combining intellectual activity with emotional and social engagement. Few student physicians then or now would like to admit to lesser ambitions. Additionally, the young Osler and the young Lydgate had many things in common: like Lydgate, Osler was driven by intellectual passion (and one fortuitously stumbled upon, since the education of neither could have evoked it, and both were indifferent students as boys); like Lydgate, Osler similarly harboured hopes of building a âreputationâ as a scientific discoverer; like Lydgate, he could not earn a living in research, and had to integrate his intellectual ambitions with his professional life. And, although leaving the bench for the bedside initially depressed him, like Lydgate Osler is known for his care for his patients as unique individuals
How to cut through when talking to anti-vaxxers and anti-fluoriders
Dismissing peopleâs worries as baseless, whether thatâs about the safety of mobile phones or fluoridated drinking water, is one of the least effective ways of communicating public health risks. Yet it is common for people to âreassureâ like this, both at home and in professional roles as experts, officials or corporate managers. Another poor but common strategy is to try to debunk âalt-factsâ (lies or misleading statements claimed as fact) like those circulating among anti-vaccination or anti-fluoridation groups. If your role is to communicate public health risks, it is particularly hard to resist trying harder to help people understand the evidence. This is especially the case when a risk is low, and hence public fears are not only out of proportion but also costly to redress. If an officialâs or doctorâs response to a parent worried about fluoridated drinking water is to show them even more data about how safe and effective it is, they often wonât sound convincing. Instead, theyâll look incapable of unbiased discussion. Indeed, the more information they show, the more it can look like propaganda. This approach can even make the opponentâs argument more memorable. Not only are reassuring people and countering misinformation ineffective, they can end up doing a lot of damage
Understanding empathy: why phenomenology and hermeneutics can help medical education and practice
This article offers a critique and reformulation of the concept of empathy as it is currently used in the context of medicine and medical care. My argument is three pronged. First, that the instrumentalised notion of empathy that has been common within medicine erases the termâs rich epistemological history as a special form of understanding, - even a vehicle of social inquiry, - and has instead substituted an account unsustainably structured according to the polarisations of modernity (subject/object, active/passive, knower/known, mind/body, doctor/patient). I suggest that understanding empathy by examining its origins within the phenomenological tradition, as a mode of intersubjective understanding, offers a different and profitable approach. Secondly, I argue that the appropriation of empathy in medicine means that, ironically, empathy can function as a technique of pastoral power, in which virtue, knowledge and authority remain with the doctor (Mayes, 2009). And thirdly, empathy is in danger of being resourced as a substitute for equity and funding within health systems. I conclude however with hope for the productive possibilities for empathy.
Keywords: Empathy, sympathy, phenomenology, understanding, medical humanities, patient experienc
Health scares: professional priorities
Currently, many health scholars are concerned about health scares. But what do they mean by the term âhealth scareâ â are health scares an identifiable phenomenon, and how do we currently understand their causation and consequences? By collecting and analyzing published articles about events considered to be health scares, this paper maps the current views of scholars on their characteristics and causes. Results show that health scares are generally understood as events characterized by fears of catastrophic consequences but little actual mortality. However, the social and economic impacts of these events have often been severe. This survey shows that health scares can be usefully sorted into 6 categories, each with identifiable internal dynamics, suggesting different communications strategies to achieve resolution in each category. Using the social amplification of risk framework, the conditions under which risk signals were amplified were traced in general terms among major stakeholders. Simple causes for health scare events could not be identified, though some triggers did emerge. Importantly, public ignorance of real risk, media scaremongering, and political inaction could be dismissed as primary explanations, though they were sometimes factors in scare events. Implications for risk communication and for future research on risk and public health are discussed. Keywords: Health scare, Social amplification of risk, Expert, Media, Risk controversyfunded by the Sidney Sax Travelling Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Public Health, National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia
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