Categories
General MSPress Announcements

New Year Wishes, 2016 Blog Highlights

Wishing all of our readers and supporters a new year blessed with good health, fulfillment, and joy. Thank you to all of those toiling as healthcare workers and defending the right of the pursuit of health for all. May this year be filled with teamwork and  innovation within medicine all towards the goal of alleviating human suffering and illness.

This year, the MSPress continued to enrich medical student dialogue with our various publications.  

Here are my favorite blog pieces from 2016:

The Doctor as the Advocate by Gunjan Sharma

Meaningful Community Involvement by Roy Collins

The Policy on Policy: Why Medical Students Need to Learn About Healthcare by Leigh Goodrich

Thank You for Being a Patient: A Reflection on Gratitude and Its Place in Medicine by Jordan Metsky

Frankenstein: A Tale for the Modern Age by Gunjan Sharma

Storytelling and Patient Advocacy by Ashley Franklin

A Farewell to Oliver Sacks by Josip Borovac

Other highlights include:

The MSPress Journal, Vol 3

The Free Clinic Research Collective, Vol 2

The Medical Commencement Archive, Vol 3

As a final plug, remember that the deadline to submit application to join the executive MSPress board is Jan 30th.

 

Cheers!

Categories
General MSPress Announcements

Call for MSPress Team Member Applications!

The MSPress Call for Applications 
Executive Team applications due by Dec 30th. These roles include: 
  • Executive Editor (in line to become Editor-in-Chief)
  • Medical Commencement Archive Associate Editor
  • Free Clinic Research Collective Associate Editor
  • MSPress Journal Associate Editor
  • MSPress Blog Associate Editor & Copy Editor
General Team applications accepted on a rolling basis. These roles include:
  • Editor
  • Blogger
  • Peer Reviewer
VISIT THE MSPRESS TEAM APPLICATION HERE: http://themspress.org/team-application.html
Categories
Emotion Empathy General Law

Gratitude: A Good Recipe for Holiday Cheer

The “most wonderful time of the year” is often filled with stark contrasts. While glitz and opulence surround us, sorrow and despair seem to grow emboldened. Nowhere is this truer than in a big city, where poverty and privilege so closely intermingle. Minutes after I walked down Fifth Avenue, basking in the glow of the Christmas lights infinitely multiplied in the facets of glittering diamonds displayed on shop windows, I found myself peering down into a simple metal container full of school supplies. This school-in-a-box, provided by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), was on display as part of an exhibit called “Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter”. Insecurities represents one installation in the Citizens and Borders series organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. The Citizens and Borders project aims to highlight experiences of migration, territory, and displacement[1]. Standing in front of this school-in-a-box, I thought of our medical school, replete with its high-tech anatomy lab, treadmill desks, and air conditioning system so powerful it sometimes forces us to use blankets in our lecture halls for warmth. I thought of my comfortable bed at home, and of the night table that stands next to it, teeming with books, and of the shelf above it filled with movies.

Once more, we find ourselves in the midst of the holiday season, awash with bright lights and commercial cheer. This year’s winter holidays occur on the heels of an extremely draining presidential election season that left over fifty percent of Americans feeling stressed and anxious.[2] Already this month, I have seen patients who have related somatic complaints to the election, cooking, and spending time with their extended family To add insult to inury, the commercialism of the season which suggests we ought to see the world through the rosy hues of a colored ornament can exacerbate feelings of stress and anxiety in those who are already overwhelmed and not feeling their healthiest.. As a caregiver, I realize that it is important for us all to be especially sensitive this year to patients who may be feeling a bit less than the usual holiday cheer.

Peering down into the school-in-a-box reminded me of how grateful I am for the many privileges in my life. Some of these privileges, like a loving and supportive family, or being born in a country with free speech and democratic elections, are pure happenstance. Others I have worked hard for, like the privilege of attending medical school and caring for patients. It is important, now more than ever, that we have gratitude for our privileges in life, and help our patients extend an outlook of gratitude in their own life.

Gratitude has11522685876_5d27ebdb25_o consistently been shown to have a positive impact on mental health. Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, asked study participants to write letters of gratitude to people in their lives whose important contributions had previously gone unacknowledged. He then quantified the impact of these letters on the study participants’ letter writers by providing them with a happiness score. Unsurprisingly, the mere act of writing the letter and expressing gratitude was found to boost each participant’s happiness score.[3] As physicians, we ought to support many outlets for creative expression, from yoga to painting, as ways to contribute to our patients’ well being, but we also need to consider gratitude as its own kind of healing salve. Whether we encourage our patients to write expressions of gratitude to special people in their lives, or just to reflect on the small blessings in their everyday lives, gratitude should have a place in our roster of medical advice. We cannot and should not strive to take away the things in our patients’ lives that cause them discomfort, anxiety, and sorrow, whether they be personal events or national political outcomes. Good medicine is not about making the world a more comfortable place, but rather, making our patients more comfortable within the world.

[1] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1653?locale=en

[2] http://www.npr.org/2016/11/06/500931825/how-to-deal-with-election-anxiety

[3] http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/in-praise-of-gratitude

 

Photo credit: Timo Gufler

Categories
General MSPress Announcements

Call for MSPress Team Member Applications!

The MSPress Call for Applications 
Executive Team applications due by Dec 30th. These roles include: 
  • Executive Editor (in line to become Editor-in-Chief)
  • Medical Commencement Archive Associate Editor
  • Free Clinic Research Collective Associate Editor
  • MSPress Journal Associate Editor
  • MSPress Blog Associate Editor & Copy Editor
General Team applications accepted on a rolling basis. These roles include:
  • Editor
  • Blogger
  • Peer Reviewer
VISIT THE MSPRESS TEAM APPLICATION HERE: http://themspress.org/team-application.html
Categories
Reflection

The War Against Aging

‘Back in elementary school, I realized we all have a genetic, lethal disease called aging. I remember being frightened that my mother would die and terrified that my existence was ephemeral and meaningless. At the time, it felt like I was being told I had terminal cancer or some other horrible disease. Death was inevitable. No matter how rich or successful I could be in life, it would all be lost in the end. So, still a child, I found an objective, a purpose for my life: to cure human aging.’
Joao Pedro de Magalhaes (1)

Of all the diseases we have left to conquer, one raises its voice above all others: the disease of aging. From anti-wrinkle creams to advertising billboards, from our conceptions of beauty to our desire for youthful skin, our fear of aging is present in all walks of life.

But is aging a disease? Is it a demon that must that be conquered, lurking beneath our skin, crumpling up our genes until our skin sags and our hair turns grey? Or is it a natural part of life – something that needs to embraced with humility? Is our preoccupation with aging a cultural phenomenon, a type of ignorance or obsession that needs to be tackled by changing social attitudes, or is it primarily a problem of medical science?

Eternal Youth vs Immortality

What is it that we are actually fighting for – do we want to live forever, or do we want to be forever young? Most of us would not wish to live a longer life if it meant we continued to age. What we long for is a good quality of life while still holding on to more years. This is best highlighted in the Greek myth known as Tithonus Error. Tithonus was a mortal who was granted immortality by Zeus but was not granted eternal youth. As a result, Tithonus became increasingly debilitated and demented as he aged (2). This is a fate no one would wish to have. The quest, it seems, is to extend one’s years upon this earth while retaining quality of life, looks, and independence. If this is so, we must ask ourselves: is this something worth fighting for?

One argument against the idea of ‘fighting aging’ is the concept that aging is a natural process. For those making this argument, the insistence on limiting aging is uncomfortable; who are we to go against nature? In fact, some would even argue that it is aging that makes us human. Indeed, without the knowledge of mortality placed upon our fragile shoulders, we would never value those things which are so important in our lives and yet so transient – our first kiss, our first day at school, our first date. If we were to extend our lives infinitely, then the value of the present moment may disappear.

As emotively tempting as this argument may be, if one takes a step back and takes a look at the history of medicine, one begins to see that battling nature is something that science has always done; from antibiotics to vaccinations, from the eradication of smallpox to the application of technology, fighting the natural world is an inevitable component of science. Indeed, battling the features of aging makes up a large part of modern-day medicine; we battle stroke and heart disease, insidious cancers, and debilitating degenerative diseases every day within our hospitals and with our surgeries. What makes ‘fighting aging’ any different?

The Cultural Phenomenon

This question ultimately goes back to the cultural phenomenon of aging. Aging is a rather new phenomenon. At the beginning of the 20th century, only 5% of the population was over 65 years of age, while today people are able to lead active and independent lives well into their 90s (3). With this rise in aging has come new prejudices and stereotypes. It has been argued that our negative attitudes against ageing emerged relatively recently, in the 18th century. Prior to this era, the elderly were often held in high regard, seen as carriers of wisdom and knowledge thanks to their years upon this earth. But as more and more people began to survive into their 80s and 90s, the idea of being a ‘nuisance’ began to take hold. Employers felt that the elderly were holding on to jobs that could be taken over by the “young and fit.” This change in attitude is reflected in our vocabulary with words such as ‘codger’ (meaning an odd, old fellow), and the change in meanings of certain words over time, such as ‘fogey’, which previously meant a wounded war veteran but now is used more pejoratively to describe those who are old and thought to hold ‘old-fashioned’ views.

The social role of the elderly has changed dramatically as well. With fewer multigenerational families living under one roof, the role of the elder within the family structure has been lost (3). This gradual change in society is reflected in the way we view age. We equate youth with beauty and aspire to look as young as possible. Yet on a grander scale, the way we view age has also corresponded to a larger shift in our society’s policies, in our public expenditures, and in our healthcare.

Within medical care, conditions such as depression are often ignored in the elderly and often seen as a part of aging itself. From a social perspective, discrimination in social care is evident in the assumptions that people may have about how older people should live their lives and what constitutes a life worth living for the elderly. On a public health level, there is a strong suspicion that the use of Quality Adjusted Life Years, a tool used in the UK to assess the costs of treatments, will often discriminate against treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Osteoarthritis and Age-related Macular Degeneration, most of which would mainly benefit older people with few remaining years. Within the research sphere, the elderly are often excluded from clinical trials, with this under-representation of the elderly affecting the number of available treatments for them. Most importantly, from the patient’s perspective, older people are more likely to feel talked over compared to other patients when they are in the hospital, often feeling ‘as if they weren’t there’ (5). All of these examples illustrate how our culture of youth has manifested itself within the sphere of medicine, where it is our responsibility to be non-judgemental. Yet this is the world in which we live. If we want to make a change, we must become aware of such uncomfortable realities and understand what has given birth to them.

Even if we wish to view aging as a biological phenomenon, for example by looking for “anti-aging” genes within our laboratories and for drugs that can reverse the damage done to DNA over time, we still have to take into account society’s perception of the elderly. We still have to ask the difficult, philosophical questions. For example, are we battling aging because it will allow us to be healthier and have more fulfilling lives, or because of our modern obsession with youth and beauty? Likewise, how would we evolve or change as human beings if we were able to slow, stop, or even reverse the process of aging?

Perhaps conquering aging is not the same as vanquishing cancer, for growing old is an intricate and natural part of our lives. Indeed, perhaps it is part of what makes us human. These are questions that no one person can answer, and which need to be debated within the public sphere. The discussions that arise from asking these questions will undoubtedly impact the direction medicine takes with respect to its interaction with aging; maybe more resources will be dedicated to ‘diseases of the elderly’. If we are lucky, maybe this will all cultivate an attitude of acceptance and empathy within a culture that sees aging as a part of life. Maybe we can change a culture. Maybe we can even save a life.

“We have added years to life; it is time to think about how we add life to years.”
Robert Kennedy (6)

 

References

  1. Magalhaes, J. P. Fearing Death and Curing Ageing [Online]. Available at: http://www.senescence.info/death_and_aging_fears.html [Accessed: 14th September 2016]
  2. Magalhaes, J. P. Should we cure Ageing? [Online]. Available at: http://www.senescence.info/physical_immortality_myths.html [Accessed: 14th September 2016]
  3. Big Picture. 2014. Ageing and Society [Online]. Available at: https://bigpictureeducation.com/ageing-and-society [Accessed: 30th September 2016]
  4. Jones, R. 2007. A Journey through the Years: Ageing and Social Care. Ageing Horizons. 6: 42-51
  5. Centre for Policy on Ageing. 2009. Ageism and age discrimination in secondary health care in the United Kingdom. Department of Health.
  6. Steinsaltz, D. 2016. Become the New 60;. Nautilus; 36 [accessed 28th May 2016]. Available from: http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/will-90-become-the-new-60

Featured image:
Age by Iburiedpaul