As we are nearing the end of the semester, I want students to make connections between the more modern events and their precedents, and this week’s topic of health and healthcare disparities offers plenty of opportunities to do just that.
So, after this week , I want you to choose two intersecting factors that could contribute to health and healthcare disparities, connect those factors to previous write-ups, and explain your choices.
Category: Health Medicine and Science in America – Present
This week, we are discussion a selection of medical developments in the context of the 1960s and 1970s. I chose the title for this week’s write-up, “Achilles in Vietnam” based on the 1994 book by Dr. Jonathan Shay, which compares the experiences of the mythical Greek hero Achilles to his Vietnam veteran patients–demonstrating that the personal, subjective experience of war-related trauma stretches across the millennia.
Of course, one of the main themes of this course has been how modern, scientific medicine has sought ways to obviate–to render unnecessary or as superficial–the subjective experience of patients. This makes sense from a scientific perspective, where one wants to objectively observe and measure things to determine the influence of various factors. But it can have negative implications, too. Especially when medical expertise is cited for official policies–like whether or not veterans get access to care, or whether or not a person in pain gets access to medicine. It can be a dilemma.
For this week’s discussion, I want to know what stood out to you from the write-up and why. I also want to know your thoughts regarding the dilemma I mentioned above. In areas where modern medicine has no means of objectively measuring something and has to rely on subjective patient experiences, should medical experts be the authority in these areas? Why or why not?