Clinical care for Obesity and Diet Related illnesses needs more attention to Societal Determinants of Health Article from NEJM website about how despite rates of obesity starting to level off overall, the lowest income and minority populations continue to show a sharp increase. A focus on those factors as contributory needs to be a part of the discussion.
Social stigma makes the opioid crisis hard to confront (7min) There are many reasons why the opioid crisis is so hard to confront. One of them is social stigma. It often extends beyond users themselves, to their families. People see addiction as a moral weakness, and by extension, the moral weakness of their families.
When drinking ruins your liver - should you qualify for a transplant? When patients develop alcohol liver disease, they are often forced to wait 6 months to prove they can abstain from alcohol before they will be considered for a transplant. Is that a fair amount of time? Is that a fair practice at all?
Withholding surgery: How gaps in policy fail people who inject drugs A recent New York Times article described a harrowing situation faced by some people who inject drugs and develop endocarditis, a life-threatening infection caused by bacteria that enter the bloodstream and settle in the heart. The article described doctors in Tennessee deciding whether to perform repeat costly heart surgeries on patients who were re-infected with endocarditis as a result of ongoing illicit drug use—and at times declining to operate. There are policy failures that are to blame, too, for how and why resources are allocated this way. This looks at those failures and how our bias influences both the policies and how they are applied.
Injecting Drugs can ruin a heart - how many second chances should a user get? A life-threatening heart infection afflicts a growing number of people who inject opioids or meth. Costly surgery can fix it, but the addiction often goes unaddressed.
American Muslim doctors feel greater scrutiny, even patients' suspicions Reporter Lena H. Sun discusses the prevalence of workplace discrimination among American Muslim physicians and the challenges they face.
The Asian Advantage by Nicholas Kristof The success of minority groups who achieve through education and hard work is often used as an argument that discrimination in the USA is a thing of the past. Unfortunately, it's not.
Transgender, at War and in Love Posted online in June 2015, this 12-minute documentary shares the story of a couple, one deployed to Afghanistan and one at home in Hawaii coping with military regulations as they pertain to being transgender.
Poor Treatment of Mentally Ill Violates Their Human Rights by Lisa Schlein A follow-on to When Doctors Discriminate by Julianne Garey – learn more about the stigma of discrimination and what the World Health Organization has called “a hidden human rights emergency.”
When Doctors Discriminate by Juliann Garey On average, people who have mental illness die 25 years earlier than those without one. Could this be due (at least in part) to a disparity in the care they receive as a result of healthcare workers’ stigma?
American Muslim doctors feel greater scrutiny, even patients' suspicions Reporter Lena H. Sun discusses the prevalence of workplace discrimination among American Muslim physicians and the challenges they face.
The Asian Advantage by Nicholas Kristof The success of minority groups who achieve through education and hard work is often used as an argument that discrimination in the USA is a thing of the past. Unfortunately, it's not.
Transgender, at War and in Love Posted online in June 2015, this 12-minute documentary shares the story of a couple, one deployed to Afghanistan and one at home in Hawaii coping with military regulations as they pertain to being transgender.
Poor Treatment of Mentally Ill Violates Their Human Rights by Lisa Schlein A follow-on to When Doctors Discriminate by Julianne Garey – learn more about the stigma of discrimination and what the World Health Organization has called “a hidden human rights emergency.”