For 2020 I’m going to see if I can keep up some of the stuff I was blogging last year but decompose it a bit, so I don’t need to feel I have to cover every base to post something. Links are pretty easy, so here are some things I found interesting this month.
Our blanket fear of anything associated with the “C” word, and our blind belief that more screening is always good, beliefs rooted in what we used to know about cancer but is now outdated, are doing us great harm, in many cases more than the disease itself.
Curing Cancer, Curing Cancerphobia
Map naming and (vaguely) locating the CEOs of companies miserably producing more greenhouse. Now, it’s not as if those people grabbing a conscience and doing a Jerry Maguire would solve the problem – systems are going to system, and their replacement is ready and waiting in the corner office on the floor below – but it did strike me to see the names written out so starkly. I had the thought years back that at some point people would start pulling together blacklists of people (and their descendents) who contributed to the collapse, and membership on those lists would result in sanctions so severe that people would become very motivated to do whatever they could to get dad to stop the lobbying, for the love of god please dad they’ve tarred and feathered me twice this term already
Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet
Interest in medical improv has been growing in recent years, as medical schools and teaching hospitals increasingly value the skills it teaches, says Lisa Howley, PhD, AAMC senior director of strategic initiatives and partnerships. Research shows that effective communication can improve patient outcomes, and improv markedly increased communication skills in one study of pharmacy students. Now, researchers believe a new tool published this month can better measure the educational effects of medical improv. Developed by four medical schools, the scale found that participants in a six-hour enhanced medical improv course scored significantly higher than those with no improv training.
In-the-moment listening skills are a profound benefit of improv, says Amy B. Zelenski, PhD, an assistant professor and director of education for the Department of Medicine at Wisconsin.
A colleague once told her about a time when a patient offhandedly mentioned that a close relative had just died. “He just went on with his questions and ignored that information,” she says, “and then later thought, `Oh, man. Why didn’t I respond?’ That’s what improv does — it teaches people to set aside their agenda for the conversation and listen.”
Discovering interpersonal strengths and shortcomings through improv is potentially transformative, Watson believes. “It lets learners identify where they need to build muscle and where they’re flourishing. You’ll have the person who’s very eloquent but doesn’t know how to be quiet. Or a person who is fine handling anger isn’t good with sadness.”
No joke: The serious role of improv in medicine | AAMC
A friend from my cohort got involved in a project in Sierra Leone described in this article:
Imagine you live in a small community that has deep-seated suspicions against outsiders. The concept of infectious disease is unclear or misunderstood. Many in the community believe that illness is the result of a curse, and stigmatize the sick as a result. Then people from other countries descend in what appear to be space suits, disrupt community life, and take the sick away to quarantine them. Most of these people are never heard from again.
given the historical and cultural context, it’s not so surprising that there has been resistance to outside intervention in some areas where the Ebola outbreak is worst….What is needed is action that emerges from within Sierra Leone itself.
After its founding, Commit and Act connected with and helped to train dozens of Sierra Leone counselors in ACT, including the person who is now the current local director of Commit and Act, Hannah Bockarie.
The mission of the organisation is
“to bring psychotherapist support to traumatized people in areas of conflict.” Their goal is to help people find trust again and develop the courage to create their lives according to their own vision.
Since Commit and Act had established roots in Sierra Leone back in 2010, when the Ebola epidemic hit a few months ago, they were in a unique position to help. Bockarie was on the ground when the virus struck, and realized quite quickly that the ACT and PROSOCIAL models could be used in innovative ways to educate the population about the disease and help develop healthy behavioral alternatives that may assist in stemming its devastating tide. PROSOCIAL is a joint effort by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson’s Evolution Institute, and the ACBS to combine ACT with principles from the late Nobel Prize winner, Elinor Ostrom, to foster prosocial groups.
In Sierra Leone (as in much of West Africa) it is customary to keep the bodies of dead relatives in the home for several days — praying over them, washing them, dressing them, even hugging and kissing them….it is incredibly difficult to get people to change burial customs that are so culturally important and entrenched. …But changing these customs — and fast — is of the utmost importance for obvious reasons: Ebola infection is highest at death
Bockarie has begun taking groups of people through ACT and PROSOCIAL sessions to help them come up with alternative burial customs that are in line with their values but still allow doctors and health worker to properly dispose of bodies.
The article describes one such solution, arising from community members and suggests that it is informed by the greater psychological flexibility accessed by the therapy, allowing people to change what needs to be changed while never letting go of core values.
Kissing the Banana Trunk: Will You Commit and Act in the Fight Against Ebola?