Month: October 2019

Last week’s article reading, Good Patients and Problem Patients: Conformity and Deviance in a General Hospital, by Judith Lorber, really caught my attention. I am sure many of us have heard stories from friends or family on the way doctors treat them, such as how nice they are, f they pay attention to them, how long they spend with them and how well they’re being treated. We don’t really see the other side, if we have opinions on doctors, they must have them as well and this article highlights that.

When I read that doctors preferred technique of treating a patient was treatment as a non-person that baffled me, after all no matter what the patient is an actual person. I understand that doctors are busy, they have many patients but for many people going to the doctor is scary, many don’t know what is happening to them and they have many questions, the least they want is a doctor treating them like an object and ignoring them. Yet many doctors label these patients as problem patients, the ones that ask too many questions, complained, demanded, and were uncooperative. Some of these reasons I might understand as not being the best such as demanding and not cooperating but complaining and asking questions to me seems like a person needs to do at the hospital. It said in the article that sometimes doctors don’t explain everything toughly because they don’t want the patient to know too much and as a lot of questions. This is questionable, if I was at the hospital, I would like to know what is happening to me. Those patients that received more attention were less likely than complain than the patients that were ignored. This of course also makes sense since they are there to be treated and understood not ignored.

This article made me think a lot about the different viewpoint in the hospital between doctors and patients. I think being at the doctors shouldn’t just be about treating the body sickness but also be able to fully understand what is happening and being able to communicate clearly with your doctor about any concerns without the doctor labeling the patient as problematic. When you read the article, what stood out the most to you?

In the series Unnatural Causes, the episode In Sickness and in Wealth takes place in Louisville, Kentucky. The episode begins by saying how America has a lot of wealth and health care, but our overall wealth is ranked very low from other countries. Many people are sick, infant mortality is high and health care availability is not 100% to blame. The determinants of health come from economic status, income, education and social determinant of health. In some areas of the state that are close to each other there are some that are dying 5 to 10 years earlier than others, and the map showed, how in different sicknesses, this could be seen as well in other maps, the patterns are the same for cancer and hearth disease.

This episode reflects on three different people from different economic status. The first is Jim Taylor, a father, grandfather and C.E.O., he lives in district 16. He states that he is almost 60 and is pretty healthy, he still keeps active and has a very high income. He live in a safe neighborhood where he can exercise and live calm.

Tondra Young lives in district 24, she is 37, and a lab supervisor. She is financially comfortable, she was better than her mom and goes to school. In comparison to Jim’s district, of an average age of 79.3 years, Tondra’s is 75.3 years, four years less.

Corey Anderson lives in council district 21, with his wife and children. Both Corey and his wife work full time and have an income of $48,000. Corey being 37 years old, has already been diagnosed with hyper tension and about 1/3 of the resident of this district are the same. In this neighborhood, life expectancy is 73.4 years, two years less than in Tondra’s and six years than Jim’s. In this area there are a lot of fat food places, small businesses, liquor stores. The show says that these differences are not natural but rather man made from policies or lack of policies. There are many things lacking in this area that other districts have that help them have better health and a higher average age.

Every time I watch this it still amazes me, how it one small area people’s health is so different, and they come from differences that are hard to change. As we have seen in class, income, education really effect each individual’s health in a big way. Each example that they show in this video shows how some small changes have a huge impact on the health of certain people. Have you noticed these changes in your own cities?

https://csueastbay.kanopy.com/video/sickness-and-wealth

Last weeks articles on stress seemed very interesting and really captivated my attention. The first article titled, Social Stress: Theory and research is trying to differentiate stress consequences from social organization rather than stress from psychological disorders. The second article titled, Stress, Health, and the Life Course: Some Conceptual Perspectives, is about how status and status attainment affect the least privileged by exposing them to more health-related stressors.

Chronic stressors come about more through everyday tasks than in extreme, and crazy, one in a million events. I thought that this fact from the first article was intriguing. We do so many things in our day that contribute to our stress levels and as time passes it affects our health in a great way. For instance, resource deprivation, goal-striving stress, excessive environmental demand, frustration of role expectations are all examples of things that happen in our jobs, family life and school. The people that sufferer the most are women, young people and those in low socioeconomic status in role strains. Racial differences also bring forward issues in psychological distress at low socioeconomic levels, poverty is more damaging to blacks than whites (Aneshensel, 1992).

I remember watching a video called, Unnatural Causes: When the Bough Breaks, and it talked about black women and how stress put on them by racial discrimination affected the health of their baby. They talked about how it wasn’t even about economic status because they talked about a lawyer and how she lived in a good neighborhood, ate good food, exercised but still had her baby premature. They said this resulted from stress related from discrimination, all that stress accumulated in the body and the unequal treatment releases stress hormones that in the long run really harm the body. This also correlates to the second article that says that there is a cumulative effect put on the allostatic load that functions in responding to hardships and demand.

To me these articles showed how the problem of stress and its effects on our health come from deep within our society. Not only the big life events like death hurt us but also stress from work, from not having enough money, and from discrimination. I think changing these stressors to benefit us would be very difficult because of the way society is set up, work is all about time efficiency and moving fast, life now is so fast paced that we don’t have time to unwind and destress. One thing that the articles did say help was social support, from family or friends. I think with this in mind, we should look out for each other and help by being supportive to one another.

https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/blackboard.learn.xythos.prod/57c93be5643d6/9560567?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%2A%3DUTF-8%27%27Aneshensel%2525201992.pdf&response-content-type=application%2Fpdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20191015T061502Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=21600&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIL7WQYDOOHAZJGWQ%2F20191015%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=5e4de59cae0699120250a92c37000b16a1a66747cd879aec881f688f3b4244b5

https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/blackboard.learn.xythos.prod/57c93be5643d6/9560568?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%2A%3DUTF-8%27%27Pearlin%2525202005.pdf&response-content-type=application%2Fpdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20191015T061509Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=21600&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIL7WQYDOOHAZJGWQ%2F20191015%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=0c2ab29f5076413d3e54b2d3d3667126ab622b1471ef06218abff8e28f536801

Grey’s Anatomy is a great show to watch that has many sociological themes. I recently started to watch it and I am already on season two. This prompt reminded me of an episode in season 2, episode 5 called “Bring the Pain”. In this episode there are three different cases that they work on that show the actions and interactions of healthcare professionals.

The first case that shows an interaction between patients and doctors is on a patient called Anna Chue. She came in with back pain after her legs started to go numb and after her tests, it showed to be from a spinal tumor. Her parents came in and the doctors, Derek Shepherd and Meredith Grey, told them that she was going to need surgery to remove the tumor. After hearing that, her father said she was not going to have the surgery and instead go home, and Anna agreed with her father, although the consequences of not getting the surgery would be that she would be paralyzed within 24 hours. When Meredith talked to Anna to try to get her to agree to the surgery, she told her that she was Hmong and since her father was an elder, she had to agree to what her father said. Her father did not want her to get the surgery because he believed her sickness to be caused by one of her souls being missing and before surgery she had to have a Shaman healing ritual. In the end the doctors helped them by flying in their Shaman by helicopter to treat Anna. After the ritual, they took Anna in for surgery where they took out the tumor.

We can see how the doctors reacted in a good way, trying to understand their patients more and meet their needs to be able to care for them. Many doctors do not understand peoples cultural beliefs and don’t treat them as well as they could because of this.

Another example is when George and Alex get stuck in the elevator during a power outage in Seattle Grace with a wounded police officer. As time passed the patient kept getting worse, and one of the doctors, Preston Burke, told them that they needed to perform the surgery in the elevator in order to save his life. Alex froze and wasn’t able to do it so George stepped in, although he had never performed open heart surgery by himself before. Dr. Burke guided him through the surgery until it was complete and the firefighters got them out of the elevator.

This also shows how these doctors do anything and everything int heir power to keep their patients alive and well. Although the intern, George, didn’t know how to do an open heart surgery, with the help of his superior doctor, he was able to stabilize the police officer and keep him alive in a difficult time.

The last example is of a patient with pain that the doctor, Derek Shepherd, prescribed him to watch adult films in order to relieve his pain. In the beginning Cristina was horrified by this patient and how he watched it in the hospital but he told him it was prescribed by the doctor. This caused Cristina to believe his pain was fake and didn’t treat him as well as she should of been. Because of the power outage, he couldn’t continue to watch and his pain came back, this is when Cristina realized that his pain was actually real and what he was watching was actually helping him with his pain. This led her to improvise in a clever way and use her story telling skills to relieve his pain until the power came back.

This example is important because being in pain is hard for doctors to understand sometimes since they cannot see it. Doctors might believe the patient or not, like in this case. There is a very fine line between not believing them and hurting the patient because lack of quick care can lead to worse outcomes. This part of the episode was kind of funny because of the type of person and doctor Cristina is but it shows she really cares for her patients and does even what she doesn’t feel comfortable doing for the sake of her patients.

These three examples show how unique each interaction with patients and doctors are and how prepared they must really be in any occasion. It shows how sometimes doctors might not be right or flawed since they are still people and can make mistakes. Personally I find that Grey’s Anatomy is really interesting in the different cases that they look at in the show. Have you ever seen an episode of Grey’s Anatomy? What did you think of it?