Habit de-forming, for health and happiness

Harvard Center for Health and Happiness (@HarvardCenterHH) tweeted:

"All habits need to be re-examined from time to time."

This @GreaterGoodSC podcast examines the practice of temporarily abstaining from something you find enjoyable. Featuring @michaelpollan & Dr. @DunnHappyLab. https://t.co/bH0Remkn1e https://t.co/LNmO6oJ7DQ
(https://twitter.com/HarvardCenterHH/status/1418658460753858560?s=02)

1st Black woman to earn a medical degree in the US

Overlooked No More: Rebecca Lee Crumpler, Who Battled Prejudice in Medicine
As the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, she persevered to make care accessible to women and Black communities, regardless of their ability to pay.

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

For more than 125 years, people trampled — unknowingly — across the grass where Rebecca Lee Crumpler rests in peace alongside her husband, Arthur, at Fairview Cemetery in Boston.

Her burial plot was devoid of a gravestone even though she held a unique distinction: She was the first Black woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.

It would take more than a century, from her death in 1895 until last year, for Crumpler to be given proper recognition by a group of Black historians and physicians. Were it not for them, she might still be languishing in anonymity... nyt

What the Covid Rookies Saw

As the coronavirus tore through New York, a group of medical students graduated early to help the hospitals under siege and found courage they didn’t know they had.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/opinion/covid-new-doctors-healthcare-workers.html?smid=em-share

Alzheimer’s Drug Poses a Dilemma for the F.D.A.

If the agency approves it, aducanumab would be the first new Alzheimer’s treatment since 2003. Patients are desperate for new options, but some scientists say there isn’t enough evidence it works.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/05/health/alzheimers-aducanumab-fda.html?smid=em-share

‘I Had Never Faced the Reality of Death’: A Surgeon Becomes a Patient

Infected early in the pandemic, Dr. Tomoaki Kato, a renowned transplant surgeon, was soon on life support, and one of the sickest patients in his own hospital.
==

Early in the pandemic, as hospitals in New York began postponing operations to make way for the flood of Covid-19 cases, Dr. Tomoaki Kato continued to perform surgery. Patients still needed liver transplants, and some were too sick to wait.

At 56, Dr. Kato was healthy and exceptionally fit. He had run the New York City Marathon seven times, and he specialized in operations that were also marathons, lasting 12 or 16 or 20 hours. He was renowned for surgical innovations, deft hands and sheer stamina. At NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where he was the surgical director of adult and pediatric liver and intestinal transplantation, his boss has called him “our Michael Jordan.”

Dr. Kato became ill with Covid-19 in March 2020.

“I was in a denial situation,” he said. “I thought I was going to be fine.”

But he soon became one of the sickest patients in his own hospital, dependent on a ventilator and other machines to pump oxygen into his bloodstream and do the work of his failing kidneys. He came close to death “many, many times,” according to Dr. Marcus R. Pereira, who oversaw Dr. Kato’s care and is the medical director of the center’s infectious disease program for transplant recipients...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/health/covid-19-diagnosis-surgeon.html?smid=em-share

How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life

How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life

...How did this great doubling of the human life span happen? When the history textbooks do touch on the subject of improving health, they often nod to three critical breakthroughs, all of them presented as triumphs of the scientific method: vaccines, germ theory and antibiotics. But the real story is far more complicated. Those breakthroughs might have been initiated by scientists, but it took the work of activists and public intellectuals and legal reformers to bring their benefits to everyday people. From this perspective, the doubling of human life span is an achievement that is closer to something like universal suffrage or the abolition of slavery: progress that required new social movements, new forms of persuasion and new kinds of public institutions to take root. And it required lifestyle changes that ran throughout all echelons of society: washing hands, quitting smoking, getting vaccinated, wearing masks during a pandemic... 

Steven Johnson 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/magazine/global-life-span.html?referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

America is Failing Its Moral Test on Vaccines

Vaccinating the world is possible. The United States should lead the way. 

The United States is well on its way to protecting Americans from the coronavirus. It's time to help the rest of the world. By marshaling this nation's vast resources to produce and distribute enough vaccines to meet global demand, the United States would act in keeping with the nation's best traditions and highest aspirations while advancing its geopolitical and economic interests. It is a moment of both obligation and opportunity.

Unfortunately, instead of a bold, comprehensive strategy to vaccinate the world as quickly as possible, the Biden administration has thus far made a string of tactical decisions: donating millions of doses to countries in need, signaling its support for patent waivers that might expedite vaccine production efforts and nudging two companies — Merck and Johnson & Johnson — to collaborate on increasing supply. These are good steps, but they are not nearly sufficient to meet the moment. The United States and the rest of the world's wealthiest nations are facing a great moral challenge.

Covax, the World Health Organization's initiative to pool vaccine resources, remains profoundly underfunded and has failed to meet even its modest target of vaccinating one-fifth of the population in the Global South. Without a major course correction, the rest of the world will have to wait until 2023 or later for large-scale vaccination initiatives like the one underway in the United States. The consequences of this disparity are expected to be severe. Hundreds of thousands more people will get sick and die from a disease that is now preventable with a vaccine. The global economy will contract by trillions of dollars, according to the International Chamber of Commerce, and tens of millions of people will plummet into extreme poverty as the virus continues to fester and evolve in the world's more vulnerable reaches.

As global hunger rises and global life expectancy falls, instability will prevail. Already, Colombia is mired in deadly protests over the pandemic's economic fallout. India is facing its gravest humanitarian catastrophe in a generation. As the United Nations has warned, a similar crisis in Syria would be catastrophic...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/opinion/biden-covid-vaccines-world-india.html?smid=em-share

"a moral and epidemiological failure"

As Covid Ravages Poorer Countries, Rich Nations Spring Back to Life

Despite early vows, the developed world has done little to promote global vaccination, in what analysts call both a moral and epidemiological failure.

The contrast could hardly be sharper.

In much of the developed world, vaccine orders are soaring into the billions of doses, Covid-19 cases are easing, economies are poised to roar to life and people are busy lining up summer vacations. In many less developed nations, though, the virus is raging on, sometimes out of control, while vaccinations are happening far too slowly to protect even the most vulnerable.

That split screen — clubs and restaurants reopening in the United States and Europe while people gasp for oxygen in India — was never supposed to be so stark. Some 192 countries signed up last year for Covax, a vaccine-sharing partnership, and the Gates Foundation poured $300 million into an Indian factory to make doses for the world's poor. The European Union's top executive told a global summit last June: "Vaccination is a universal human right."

But the virus is spreading more rapidly than ever, driven largely by gains in South America and India, and the campaign to vaccinate the world is floundering.

India, an important source of vaccines in normal times, has halted exports as it fights a record surge in the virus and an expanding humanitarian crisis. That has delayed critical shipments, with India making the majority of Covax supplies... nyt

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/world/europe/coronavirus-covax-vaccination.html?smid=em-share

Vaccine hesitancy

What can the history of vaccine hesitancy teach us about this pandemic? "Anti-vaccination movements have, at least in the long run, never succeeded in stopping rollouts," writes @DavidMotadel. https://t.co/Eo7e0v1epM

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) April 30, 2021

Peter Singer interview

The New Yorker has just published a long interview with on a wide range of issues - it's a condensation of 3 interviews over about 5 hours, and has come out well: https://t.co/0owqCXQg7y
(https://twitter.com/PeterSinger/status/1386302543995695109?s=02)

Medical School Needs a Dose of the Humanities

The horrors of Covid-19 may give proponents of the liberal arts an unexpected opening.

Over the past year, ordinary medical research nearly ground to a halt as researchers focused on coronavirus vaccine trials and treatments. Single-mindedness paid off. Drugmakers developed lifesaving vaccines in record time, and now a third of Americans are at least partially vaccinated.

But ultimately, the pandemic is a once-in-a-century crisis that may force health professionals and medical schools to look beyond the traditional tools of modern medicine and think more broadly about how we train doctors to grapple with public health catastrophes.

There were signs of a reckoning at the very start of the pandemic. When Covid-19 hit the Northeast, the Yale School of Medicine moved classes online and pulled many students off clinical rotations. "The dean sent an email that said, go home, take this time to study," Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako, a Yale medical student, told me. "I thought, oh my God, I can't imagine studying for an exam right now." Mr. Tiako and a small number of the faculty and students worked together to create new courses that students could take instead, including an intriguing elective called "Covid-19: A History of the Present."

The class — convened over Zoom, of course — gave the 65 students who signed up an opportunity to document and analyze their pandemic experiences. Some were helping friends and family sift through unreliable medical information; others were caring for children or volunteering in underserved communities in New Haven. But the course was also a beachhead for the medical humanities, a broad field that includes disciplines ranging from philosophy and history to visual art, creative writing and film. The medical humanities focus on a question: "What does it mean to make a healer, to train people who can attend to suffering?" Joanna Radin, a Yale historian who helped teach the new class, told me... 

Molly Worthen
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/opinion/sunday/covid-medical-school-humanities.html?smid=em-share

On Immunity (Eula Biss)

...Biological and social, our interdependence is a defining feature not only of our civilization, not only of our species and all living species, but of life itself — life the physiological process and life the psychosocial phenomenon. "Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you," Walt Whitman exulted in the golden age of chemistry — the new science he saw as "the elevating, beautiful, study… which involves the essences of creation." Meanwhile, the development of cell theory was revolutionizing biology, making of this philosophical field as old as Aristotle an even newer science that illuminated the essence of life. Cells became to biology what atoms were to chemistry. Biology ushered in the revelation that every cell belonging to me as good — as healthy, as vital, as fit for replication — belongs to you.

That delicate interdependence of life and lives, with its tangled roots in biology and cultural history, is what Eula Biss explores in On Immunity: An Inoculation (public library) — a book of penetrating and poetic insight, drawn with that rare scholarship capable of correcting the warped cultural hindsight we call history; a book of staggering foresight, conceived in the wake of the H1N1 flu pandemic, yet speaking with astonishing prescience to the complex epidemiological realities and social dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding more than five years after its publication...

https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/03/19/eula-biss-on-immunity/?s=02

"The Lessons of the Pandemic" (1919)

In 1919, the journal Science published "The Lessons of the Pandemic," assessing what was learned from the Spanish flu. A hundred-plus years of medical progress later, the same challenges remain.  https://t.co/fzmSIoXL5Z
(https://twitter.com/NYTScience/status/1371815489224212483?s=02)

CDC identifies public-health guidance from the Trump administration that downplayed pandemic severity

Federal health officials have identified several controversial pandemic recommendations released during the Donald Trump administration that they say were "not primarily authored" by staff and don't reflect the best scientific evidence, based on a review ordered by its new director.

The review identified three documents that had already been removed from the agency's website: One, released in July, delivered a strong argument for school reopenings and downplayed health risks. A second set of guidelines about the country's reopening was released in April by the White House and was far less detailed than what had been drafted by the CDC and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A third guidance issued in August discouraged the testing of people without covid-19 symptoms even when they had contact with infected individuals. That was replaced in September after experts inside and outside the agency raised alarms...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/03/15/cdc-removes-some-trump-era-guidance/

14 Lessons for the Next Pandemic

We asked doctors, scientists, public health experts and health advocates to take a look back — what would they redo, if they could?

One year. More than 500,000 dead. What did the United States do wrong in handling Covid-19? What needs to be rethought? We asked scientists, public health experts and health advocates to tell us about mistakes, missed chances and oversights — and how to prepare for the next pandemic.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/15/science/lessons-for-the-next-pandemic.html?smid=em-share

Regional disparities in COVID-19 mortality

For many statisticians, virologists, and public-health experts, the regional disparities in COVID-19 mortality represent the greatest conundrum of the pandemic. https://t.co/jceUvjwOAs
(https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1366103402850242569?s=02)

How the Pandemic Defeated America

A virus has brought the world's most powerful country to its knees.

Read More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191/?utm_source=atl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=share

People Have Stopped Going to the Doctor. Most Seem Just Fine.

Do Americans really need the amount of treatment that our health care system is used to providing?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/opinion/coronavirus-reopen-hospitals.html?smid=em-share

Money, dinners and strip clubs: How pharmaceutical executives bribed doctors to prescribe dangerous fentanyl drugs - 60 Minutes - CBS News

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opioid-epidemic-pharmaceutical-executives-60-minutes-2020-06-21/

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Tweet by Boston Review on Twitter

	Boston Review ⁦‪@BostonReview‬⁩ Lillian Wald, a social services pioneer, coined the term "Public Health". She understood that an individual's health depended upon their community, and the community's on the individual. But more than a century later, we still have not taken this to heart.bostonreview.net/gender-sexuali…   6/18/20, 2:52 PM

Download the Twitter app

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude