Medical Humanities Blog

Slow Blogging Ahead

There may be some calm blogging seas ahead, as I'll be off at a conference for the next week.  I'll try to post when possible.

On Widening Inequalities and Health

A peer remarked to me recently that MH Blog has in part started to look like "Social Determinants of Health Blog."  This was meant as observation, not criticism, but the observation is a fair one.  To be sure, the medical humanities is significantly more expansive than concerns over health disparities, public health policy, and the social determinants of health.  One of the challenges of working on an interdisciplinary blog like this is that I cannot possibly hope to cover the breadth and length of the medical humanities.  That's one reason I rely so heavily on the skills of the various contributors to this blog, to help me try to expand the reach of the posts here. 

However, from the outset, I freely admitted that this blog will undoubtedly reflect my own interests and pursuits, even though it is not, per se, a personal blog.  This is itself a humanist precept, of course, as we've noted here before.  Moreover, work on health disparities, health policy, and the social determinants of health touches on the medical humanities in important ways.  I think of it as evoking Plato's fundamental question: how shall we live? What kind of society do we want to practice being? I hope the answer to this question is in part, "a society that consciously works to ameliorate human suffering."

Of course, the translation of that general principle into local, particular action is obviously fraught, but this, too, is a quintessentially humanist concept.  In short, I think the medical humanities have much to offer for the socially minded health policy commentator (and what other kind could there be?!?), and that is reflected in this blog.

With that said, the N.Y. Times ran an article on the widening health inequalities in the U.S., continuing the recent spate of coverage on the SDOH.  Excerpts:

WASHINGTON — New government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades.

Life expectancy for the nation as a whole has increased, the researchers said, but affluent people have experienced greater gains, and this, in turn, has caused a widening gap.

[ . . . ]

Some health economists contend that the disparities between rich and poor inevitably widen as doctors make gains in treating the major causes of death.

Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, rejected that idea. Professor Krieger investigated changes in the rate of premature mortality (dying before the age of 65) and infant death from 1960 to 2002. She found that inequities shrank from 1966 to 1980, but then widened.

“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.”

This is significant for a variety of ethical and policy reasons, not least of which is the burgeoning evidence that population health is itself connected in significant ways to overall socioeconomic inequalities.  The idea is that one of the most promising means to improving population health is by reducing inequalities (and there are many ways of doing so that do not expressly rely on wealth redistribution).

As they say, go read the whole thing.

Neuroethics & Law Guest-Blogging

FYI, I'll be guest-blogging for the next month over at Adam Kolber's Neuroethics & Law Blog.  I may be talking a bit more overtly then I do over here about some of my own personal interests, especially pain and pain management.

Slow Blogging . . .

I apologize for the slow blogging.  I'm sandwiched in between two big conferences, and reading for my qualifying exams, working on several grants, etc. 

New posts coming up today . . .

On Podcasting

Pardon the navel-gazing: I (we?) am (are?) toying with the idea of instituting a Medical Humanities Podcast Series.  I'd like to solicit feedback on this, so comments are welcome either on the blog or over email.

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Tacked 12/22

Question for Readers: Blog Workshop

Excuse the navel-gazing, but readership continues to increase, we have four guest-bloggers (but are always seeking more), and the MH Blog has already exceeded my admittedly humble expectations.

The blogosphere has proved more powerful a tool for discourse on the medical humanities than I had dared hope, so I have the relatively ambitious notion of hosting a Medical Humanities Blog Workshop.  This may be over-ambitious, so I'd like to throw some questions out to any and all potential readers:

do you think the idea has legs? Why or why not?

To make this worthwhile, we'd need to have at least 3-4 submissions, though the idea of a Workshop is that works in progress are just as welcome as manuscripts nearing submission.  If there is enough interest, I think that it could be fruitful. 

Please leave a comment with your thoughts or email me separately if you would be so kind as to share your perspectives.

As always, thanks for reading and contributing.

Guest Blogger: Frank Pasquale

Slowly but surely, we are making progress in adding voices to the MH Blog other than mine own.  I am pleased to introduce Frank Pasquale as our latest guest-blogger.  Frank is currently an Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School.  He holds an M. Phil. from Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and a J.D. from Yale.

His scholarship focuses on intellectual property and health law and policy.  I enjoy Frank's work in particular because he brings a decidedly interdisciplinary perspective, especially as to his musings on health law and policy.

Frank is already an extremely active blogger at both Concurring Opinions and at Madisonian.net.  Adding his voice here at MH Blog saves me the trouble of constantly linking to his posts.

Welcome!

Medical Humanities Blog: Syndication

While we try to keep the navel-gazing around here to a minimum, I did think it was important to announce that I have entered into an agreement with Newstex, a commercial blog aggregator that standardizes blog content and delivers it to clients across of a variety of sectors.

Given the Creative Commons 3.0 License the blog content is licensed under, use of the content for commercial purposes is prohibited absent the express permission of the site owner.  I had to think quite carefully about whether I wanted to waive this prohibition in this instance, and it was not easy to do so.

Though the compensation involved is likely to be quite small, the effects of money on behavior are often only weakly correlated with the value of the gift (this comes up frequently in the literature on conflicts of interest in clinical research, for example).  Nevertheless, after much consideration, I decided to accept Newstex's offer and anonymously donate all proceeds therein to an entity connected to the medical humanities (name withheld to preserve the anonymity of the gift!). 

As always, comments are welcome.

Guest Blogger: Patrick S. O'Donnell

We here at MH Blog would like to extend a hearty welcome to Patrick S. O'Donnell, who will be joining us as a guest-blogger.  Patrick has led a fascinating life, to say the least.  After earning a M.A. in religious studies, he worked in construction, and then for over a decade as a finish carpenter.  One of his former instructors at University of California Santa Barbara, Nandini Iyer, wife of the late Raghavan Iyer, and mother of the travel writer, novelist, and Time essayist, Pico Iyer, asked him to fill in for her while she went on sabbatical. 

Soon enough, Santa Barbara City College realized what it had on its hands, and asked Patrick to hang up his toolbelt and teach classes in Comparative World Religions and Critical Thinking.  He has also taught courses in Political Thinking and in Animal Ethics.  He names as mentors two scholars whose work I am well acquainted with, in Dennis Patterson and Oliver Leaman.  His current interests include ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and he is also cultivating interests in philosophy of mind, and, of course, medical humanities.

Like Jeff Lipshaw, I've had the pleasure of "meeting" Patrick in the comments of various blogs I haunt, and a more knowledgeable, insightful, well-read, and decorous interlocutor I have yet to find.  Welcome, Patrick!

Health Wonk Review

Readers of the MH Blog may have noticed a bit of a turn to health policy matters in recent months.  This turn reflects both some of my professional and developing scholarly interests, as I have begun to cultivate an interest particularly in public health policy and associated discourses.

With that in mind, we at MH Blog are proud to join Health Wonk Review, and to link to the latest version, hosted by Bob Laszewski over at Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review.  Shameless Plug: a post of ours made the Review.

Lots of fascinating posts worth looking at. 

FYI, we will be hosting the Health Wonk Review on August 23, 2007.