An Interesting Documentary

My sister and I recently watched the documentary Food Matters. The documentary discussed America's reliance on the pharmaceutical industry, in conjunction with our terrible eating habits. It presents "vitamin therapy" as a proven highly affective way to combat most illnesses, and attributes a great deal of sickness (namely instances of chronic pain, which is one of the leading ailments experienced by American citizens), to vitamin deficiencies. High dosages of vitamins can directly prevent, or even cure, these illnesses. However, largely due to corporate interests, this approach to medicine is not taken seriously by the medical community. Certainly a fascinating, if not shocking, take on public health within America!

Merry Christmas!

From all of us at GlobeMed at Brown, Merry Christmas to all, Happy Holidays, and best wishes for the new year! 2013, we are ready...

In the meantime, don't forget about our Personal Giving Campaign! Bring out that holiday giving cheer and consider helping out our friends at U-Tena with the Kuza Project, which aims to expand a youth center built just this year for teens in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya.

<<Download an informational flyer (PDF) on GlobeMed at Brown and the Kuza Project here.>>
<<Read a bit deeper into our partnership and mission, and donate here.>>

Not so much a hungry Thanksgiving...

I sat down this afternoon with a couple of friends earlier for a hearty (and free!) Thanksgiving lunch. Way too much turkey. Stuffing. Mashed potatoes, gravy, corn bread, green beans, and mac n' cheese that was seriously out of this world. I took too much for my appetite as usual, and having to put that extra slice of turkey in the trash bin put, too, a bit of guilty weight on my conscience.

I think it was because it reminded me of our GlobeMed Hunger Banquet we had last Friday. As part of Community Building, a bunch of us gathered in Arnold Lounge and chose our fates (excuse the blunt insensitivities). My slip of paper? Margaret, living in a broken home in Louisiana flooded countless times by Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, among others. The task was to figure out what income bracket we belonged to, according to a global scale.

We may or may not have eaten before the actual scripts...

I guessed middle class and was right--but there were quite a few of us who got pretty difficult scripts. What amazed me most was one that reminded me so much of my own mother, who immigrated here over a dozen years ago and started her first job as a bank teller. She earned a low-income salary by America's standards, but on the global scale, she would have been considered high! Although we could have taken into account costs of living in different nations and other socioeconomic concerns, this activity just goes to show how great global income disparities are.

What does it mean when we say, "25,000 people die each day due to hunger"? How does that number sit right with us? How does that number sit, at all? During the first few meetings of the year, our chapter members came to a consensus that health, including the nourishment of the body, is a human right. But after that, the question of who is necessarily responsible for providing food and other provisions lingers rather vaguely in the air. We must be careful how we address the concept of human rights. A GlobeMed critic brought up the interesting point of misinterpreting "rights" as a term for entitlement. However enlightening, the article fails to recognize the difference between GlobeMed's mission of combating hunger and that of combating desire unnecessary for survival. More turkey? No, thank you.

That's enough for me to think on at the moment. At the very least, I can say I am thankful for the company and the comfort I am surrounded by. It's really grown past a once-a-year appreciation since I discovered GlobeMed.

Happy Thanksgiving!

--Elaine Hsiang

Human Rights

Malawi Suspends Anti-Gay Laws

Here's an interesting article regarding the position of human rights in Africa with regards to equality.

Culture and Health

                What does it mean to be “healthy”? The standards of health are heavily influenced by culture. Influenced by views of race, gender, and cultural values, various cultures interpret the same biological phenomenon differently.  For example, researchers Estroff and Henderson describe that Japanese women and American women perceive menopause differently: Japanese women do not describe experiencing hot flashes and emotional liability, as American women do. Such difference in experiencing the same process exemplifies how people’s beliefs on gender and in general culture shape our definition of health.

                

               With culture playing a big role on our perception of health, social diagnosis has emerged with increasing rapidly in our society. As a more notable example, people commonly seek Viagra in order to “treat” their erectile dysfunction. However, who can distinguish the healthy from the unhealthy in these instances? In another case, people label common feelings, such as feeling blue or shy, as diseases. Then, they attempt to label these “defected” feelings as depression and treat them with medicine. These attempts  demonstrate people’s obsessive nature to optimize themselves, an emerging process called medicalization. 

             The desire to eliminate natural imperfections in the human body fuels medicalization in our lives; medicalization is not so much driven by an actual illness, however. Researcher Conrad observes that medicalization is “driven more by commercial and market interests than by professional claims-makers.” Indeed, medicalization has been driven by consumers, biotechnological companies, the media, and our own perception of health. His observation demonstrates just how deeply social factors have been integrated in the process of determining health. Since health is influenced by factors other than biology, sociologists have some responsibility in analyzing the various impacts of medicalization. Their findings will allow entire communities, not only individuals, to be studied in terms of definitions of health. Estroff and Henderson value the “ability to view medicine in society, and society in medicine” because improving our quality of health is impossible without having a concrete social perspective on medicine. 

State of the US?

Hey y'all! While Globemed focuses on international health, I thought it would be interesting if we stopped for a second and thought of the state of our health care system. Last week when we were discussing the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, many of us were able to point out distinct "basic human rights" which were not afforded to everyone in our own country. That made me think of this video I stumbled upon before. Just some food for thought!

Have a great Halloween everyone!

Recommended books!

Hey Globemedders!  Interested in learning more about Global Health, outside of our awesome weekly Global Health U sessions?  Check out these two incredible books.  

Cutting for Stone is a novel written by Abraham Verghese, an Ethiopian born medical doctor and author.  It is a saga of twin brothers, who became orphans due to their mother's death in childbirth and their father's disappearance.   An unforgettable journey into one man's remarkable life, it is an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.
This book might be a special interest to premeds!

Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic, written by Jonny Steinberg, explores the AIDS epidemic in Africa, especially on stigma against the disease and how it can hinder access to treatment.  If you are interested in HIV/AIDS, look into this book during your spare time!

--Hwajin Lee