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Reply to courtab,
Hi! I definitely agree with you and I think that you wrote a very thoughtful forum post. I really like how you referenced structural competency and how applicable this concept is to Dr. Tweedy’s book. I think that structural competency is indirectly referenced time and time again throughout these first couple chapters. For instance, Dr. Tweedy references the structural and social restrictions that stem from the history of slavery in the South. Dr. Tweedy states on page 4, “While the civil rights movement ultimately stirred remarkable racial progress in various areas of American life, many of King’s concerns about health and healthcare remain valid to this day”. As seen in this quote, social stigmas and structural restrictions from before the civil rights still linger today, affecting both the health and education of African Americans. I definitely agree with your closing point, that in order to combat this structural inequality our medical system’s demographics and values need to reflect the diverse nature of the people it serves.
I hope you are doing well and staying safe! Thank you for your post!
I thought that the movie 5B was beautifully produced. I really enjoyed how the directors conveyed a temporal shift through the use of both recent film of the empty ward and older film from when the ward was in use. Although there are many parallels between the AIDS epidemic as depicted in the film and our current COVID-19 pandemic, I kept thinking about how similar the 5B ward approach to care seems to hospice care. Hospice care emphasizes the importance of human touch in care and building relationships that nurture trust and care. Just as one of the 5B nurses said about their type of treatment, hospice focuses on the care not the cure as well. Interestingly, hospice care was in its infancy at the same time the 5B ward was built, with the very first hospice center built in 1974. While great strides have been made in the field of hospice care since then, at the time the “caring” mentality of medicine was novel. Previously comfort care was seen as a failure of medical technology. As the film shows, I think that having comfort care as the only option to treat AIDS patients perpetuates others fear of them because they saw how medicine can fail or lose.
To address some of the questions from the lecture on April 1st, I think that what is missing from the documentary are the families and social lives of the nurses involved. I wonder, how did this new approach to care affect the social lives of the nurses when they were off the clock? Did they isolate themselves as many of the COVID-19 healthcare workers currently are?
Hi Grant and Class,
I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe. I am sending my best wishes and prayers to you all.
Here are my thoughts on one of Week 11’s readings:
Reading the introduction of Pricilla Wald’s book, Contagious, I was shocked by the parallels between her description of the SARS pandemic and the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Talking to my parents and grandpa, they are all in shock of the social and medical implications of COVID-19, saying that this is nothing like they have seen in their lives before. Yet as Wald describes, outbreak narratives “follows a formulaic plot” (2), with common, recurring conventions. Three conventions addressed that stood out to me were “superspreaders” (4), “medicalized nativism” (8) and the temporal understanding of outbreaks (8). I believe these conventions are easily translated into today’s pandemic, embodied throughout news reports. There are so many points in this introduction that piqued my interest and framed epidemiology in ways that I have never even thought about before. For instance, Wald mentions social and political climates can shape vocabulary and response. The example that Wald gives is the influence of the politics of the Cold War merged with virology advancements to create the nickname for the Epidemiological Investigation Service as “Medicine’s FBI” (25). It makes me wonder what influences our current political and social climate shaped conversation about COVID-19? How do differences in political organizations in different countries shape the spread and degree of consequences of an epidemic? How can we change the course of outbreak narratives to prevent stigmatization and prevent the exclusion of marginalized groups from treatment?
