Reflection by Lucas Axiotakis M.D., Kensington Cochran, Jude Okonkwo, W. Conor Rork and Owen Lewis, M.D. Within the medical curriculum at the Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, there is a well-articulated program of Narrative Medicine Training from the first through final semesters (Charon et al, 1995, 2016; Devlin et al, 2015; Cunningham et […]
Category: Reflection
Reflections on Teaching Poetry to Medical Students
Reflection by Owen Lewis Since 2017, I have taught an elective course to second semester medical students on poetry reading and craft. It is a six-week elective, three hours per week, one of about a dozen arts electives offered to the students including photography, comic strip writing/drawing, studio drawing, playwriting, and others. The choice of […]
Will AI Hasten a Dystopian Healthcare Landscape?
Reflection by Dr. Thanemozhi G. Natarajan PhD and Dr. Natarajan Ganesan PhD In the movie Idiocracy (2006), a cryogenically frozen man named Joe wakes up in a distant future where the world has become a dystopian wasteland. One of the most striking scenes in the movie occurs when Joe goes to the doctor for a […]
Belonging
by Eunice Stallman, MD I had just received a call that I had been accepted to medical school. The first thing I did was to call my significant other to share the exciting news. The second thing I did was pull up google to search, “best time to have children in medical training?” I was certain […]
Medical Necessity, from the Every Day to Times of Crisis
Reflection by Daniel Skinner When I set out to write Medical Necessity: Health Care and the Politics of Decision Making, I had no idea that it would be published right as a pandemic was beginning to make its way around the world. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but my persistent thought over the past few […]
Classics in Time of Pandemic: Lockdown Reflections from the Ivory Tower
Reflection by Michiel Meeusen Michiel Meeusen received his PhD in Literature from KU Leuven in 2013. He specialises in ancient science and medicine and the literature and culture of the High Roman Empire (Orcid). Western literature starts with a disease. At the beginning of the Iliad, Homer sings of an “evil pestilence” sent by […]
Unintended Impacts of COVID-19 Social Distancing
Blog by Dr. Thurka Sangaramoorthy Thurka Sangaramoorthy is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and an expert on issues of infectious disease outbreaks, health equity, and social justice. She is the author of Treating AIDS: Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention (Rutgers University, 2014) and Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A […]
Ectogenesis at Home? Artificial Wombs and Access to Care
Blog by Claire Horn In our accessibility series, Claire Horn reflects on the moral dilemmas presented by the advent of a new reproductive technology that allows for gestation outside the womb. —Cristina Hanganu-Bresch The last several years have seen significant progress toward the development of an artificial womb which would facilitate the survival […]
Hippocrates Now: Quoting the Father of Medicine
Blog by Helen King Helen King is Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University, UK My latest book is about the Hippocratic corpus, but although I’m a classicist by training I only address the usual issues of authorship, theories and practices to set the scene. Instead, my focus is on what I’ve called […]
Why Graded Exercise Therapy and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy are Controversial in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Commentary by Michiel Tack Sharpe and Greco ask the interesting question of why cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET) are controversial in the field of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), this whe is not combine with a natural testosterone booster to improve the performance. One reason is that the type of CBT prescribed […]