Most news outlets have been focused with the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa. As defined by WebMD: “it damages the immune system and organs. Ultimately, it causes levels of blood-clotting cells to drop. This leads to severe, uncontrollable bleeding.”…
As you can probably discern from the title of this post, I am interested in global health. I am interested in public health, epidemiology, and community health as well, but that all fits into my primary interest. After I get…
By “culture of biomedicine,” I am referring how biomedicine has cultivated a space for itself and become the dominant and most accepted form of medicine – at least in the Western world. It’s also about how biomedicine operates in terms…
The role that medications have in the United States is large. We use medicine to fix our problems, even if those problems don’t necessarily need to be medicated to solve. Medicalization and biomedicalization have assisted in creating a culture where…
Post-partum depression is a form of sustained depression that occurs after the birth of a child. Because women (or those who are giving birth) are the ones more directly involved in the child-birth process, it affects them at a higher…
The True Life episode I watched dealt with two individuals who suffered from social anxiety albeit in different ways. Nonie cannot leave her house without fearing social interactions. She tends to leave in the evening so that it is harder…
The culture-bound syndrome (CBS) I chose was pibloktoq, an illness that is found in the circumpolar region – an area that encompasses the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Those who have pibloktoq will initially become more introverted and sullen but subsequently…
“A Doctor for Disease, a Shaman for the Soul” by Patricia Leigh Brown looked at Mercy Medical Center in Merced, CA where they have created a shaman program to strengthen their relationship with the Hmong community. The Hmong are refugees…
Race is a social construct but the impact and influence race still holds is all too real. It is often assumed that perceived genetic similarities is equivalent to race categories – however, much of these perceived genetic similarities tend to…
I got an 8 out of 10 on the Health Equity quiz. The statistic I was most surprised by was that Latino immigrants have better health than your average Americans. It almost seemed counter-intuitive to me as one of the…