Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Mortality In Medicine, Maren Dougherty

Honors Projects

Practitioners in the medical field attend to health issues across one’s lifespan from birth to death and everything in between. A common conflict in today’s practice of medicine is establishing the true function of medicine. The complete reliance on medicine to ward off death proliferates the biomedicalization of natural life processes, like death. Biomedicalization is the process in which medical authority and its accompanying technology begin to control other aspects of daily life. With medicine’s ultimate goal being to cure disease and fight death, it interferes with the inevitability of human mortality. End-of-life treatment can be taken too far without …

Mommy, Me, And We: Why Black Mothers Have Turned To Doulas, Janessa Harris

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

Maternal mortality mates have disproportionately affected black mothers for far too long due to the lack of value that black bodies hold in medical spaces. Because of this concerns voiced by black people are often disregarded and ignored until the very last minute. But what if this was changed? This paper will focus on how black mothers have worked against Western medical systems that silence our voices, but instead turn to doulas who work to make these mothers feel seen, heard, and cared for. Through this, we make birthing a careful and collective effort to turn Mommy&Me to Mommy&We.

The Impact Of Location On Healthcare Access For Individuals With Disabilities, Addison Kimber

Honors Scholar Theses

This paper analyzes healthcare access for individuals with disabilities living in rural areas. In current political discussion, we typically think of insurance coverage as the metric to analyze healthcare access. However, as demonstrated by studies of healthcare in the United Kingdom, people with disabilities continue to face barriers to health care even with universal healthcare systems. In particular, individuals in rural areas have less healthcare access than urban residents. This is due to factors including socioeconomic status, insurance coverage, access to competent care, and transportation. This study aims to understand if disability status exacerbates the issue of access in rural …

Prescribing Biases: Evaluating Race And Gender Biases Held By Medical Professionals, Adelaide Scenti

Sociology

Evaluating medical professionals implicit racial and gender biases compared to other professions provides a window into medical professionals’ covertly biased behaviors. I examine whether or not medical professionals, compared to other professions, are more likely to hold predisposed racial and gender biases. Analysis of 2000 to 2014 General Social Survey Data (N=4,772) found the framework of implicitly biased behavior against Black and female- identifying individuals held by medical professionals to be faulty. The results from the multivariate regression revealed the opposite of my hypothesis, regarding sexist (pro-natal) attitudes, medical professionals were less likely than other professions to exhibit sexist attitudes. …

Do Racial Stereotypes Contribute To Medical Misdiagnosis Of Child Abuse? Investigating Tunnel Vision In The Emergency Room, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Kimberly M. Bernstein, Katherine S. Wahrer

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Despite growing recognition that misdiagnoses of child abuse can lead to wrongful convictions, little empirical work has examined how the medical community may contribute to these errors. Previous research has documented the existence and content of stereotypes that associate race with child abuse. The current study examines whether emergency medical professionals rely on this stereotype to fill in gaps in ambiguous cases involving Black children, thereby increasing the potential for misdiagnoses of child abuse. Specifically, we tested whether the race-abuse stereotype led participants to attend to more abuse-related details than infection-related details when an infant patient was Black versus White. …

Reducing The Waiting List For New Referrals To The Ent Outpatient Department, Jana Crowley

Jana Crowley

Empty Metal Jacket: The Biopolitical Economy Of War And Medicine, Sandra Lee Trappen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Empty Metal Jacket: The Biopolitical Economy of War and Medicine undertakes study of how global conflict and violence shape the entire range of social production, from commodities and culture to social goods and social theory. The research presented in this work draws from cutting-edge theories in body and science studies, in addition to theories of affect and biopolitics to address how war became a problem solving paradigm in medicine. Combat casualties are shown to serve as a material nexus for medical knowledge production. Although the focus here is on medicine and medical innovation in particular, these developments are connected to …

Health Care Agency: Statewide Awareness Of Patient-Centered Care In Maine’S Mental Health Care Facilities, Holly Hogan A

Honors Theses

This research project focuses on patient-centered care (PCC) in the context of inpatient acute psychiatric units. Hospitals have been claiming their renewed outlooks on health-care via PCC. It has become an increasingly popular term to use on hospital websites and in presidential statements. The technologies and practices surrounding psychiatric care have evolved in such a way that patients are more welcomed to have an input in their care. This project discusses the discourse around PCC at Mental Health Care Facilities in Maine. There is no consensus on the definition; the meanings ascribed to it are derived from the individual institutions. …

Undergraduate Student Attitudes On Concierge Medicine, Sushane Gupta

Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the opinions of undergraduate students on a field of personalized primary care known as concierge medicine, as well as assess their satisfaction with their current non-concierge healthcare providers. Concierge medicine aims to provide patients with a high level of customer service and satisfaction, and in exchange for an annual fee, they receive benefits such as lower waiting times for appointments, access to the physician by phone or e-mail, and a stronger patient-physician relationship focused on preventative care. The current literature on non-concierge healthcare reveals several deficiencies including poor insurance coverage, poor patient …

The Doctor-Patient Relationship Revisited. An Analysis Of The Placebo Effect., Herbert M. Adler, Md, Van B. Hammett. Md

Herbert M. Adler

An overview of prescientific medicine, evolution, and individual human development is presented in an attempt to discover the generic factors operating in all interpersonal therapies. We hypothesize that the placebo effect rests on the universal human need for a group and, by symbolic extension, a system.

Utilization Of Preventative Health Services By Nevadans With Disabilities, Jennifer R. Pharr, Sheniz Moonie

Nevada Journal of Public Health

Health disparities are differences in access to health care, quality of health care and health outcomes observed between population-specific groups of people (Health Resources and Services Administration, 2000). Previous research has found that people with disabilities experience unequal access to preventative health care services. The purpose of this study was to conduct a secondary data analysis using data from the 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to determine differences in utilization of preventative health services between adults with and without disabilities in Nevada. Nevadans with disabilities were significantly more likely to have access to health insurance and to have …

Racial Differences In Preventive And Complementary Health Behaviors And Attitudes, Steven E. Shive, Grace X. Ma, Yin Tan, Jamil I. Toubbeh, Lalitha Parameswaran, Lalitha Parameswaran, Joe Halowich

Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice

Screening tests have been developed for many diseases—the presence of cancer, especially—but are differentially utilized among racial/ethnic groups. In addition to standard medical screening techniques, some patients opt to use Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) for prevention and treatment. The purpose of the current study is to examine racial/ethnic disparities in primary and secondary preventive health behaviors, determine differences in use of complementary and alternative health regimens, and determine which health attitudes and health self-management factors are associated with use of complementary alternative medicine. If differences among ethnic/racial groups in perceived health status, preventive health care behaviors, and use of …

The Social Context Of Oncofertility, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

A field known as oncofertility provides female cancer patients with a variety of ways to preserve their fertility so that they may bear genetically related children after successful cancer treatment. Some women delay cancer therapy so doctors can collect their eggs, which are then cryopreserved in an unfertilized state or used to create embryos through in vitro fertilization for freezing. An experimental procedure for preserving the fertility of prepubertal girls, known as ovarian tissue cryopreservation, involves surgically removing their ovarian tissue and growing the immature eggs to a mature state so they can be frozen and stored until the girls …

A Study To Reduce Medication Administration Errors Using Watson’S Caring Theory, Tommie Nelms, Jackie Jones, Linda A. Treiber

Linda A. Treiber

The Corporate Practice Of Medicine: Competition And Innovation In Health Care (Book Review), Linda Treiber

Linda A. Treiber

Review of the book "The Corporate Practice of Medicine: Competition and Innovation in Health Care," by James C. Robinson

Student's T-Test And The Glasgow Coma Scale, Joseph Lucke

Joseph Lucke

Study Objective: To explore how Student's t test, which assumes normal errors, is affected by the nonnormal distribution of Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) scores.

Methods: A sample of 145,295 GCS scores from the Pennsylvania Trauma Systems Foundation was assumed to represent the true GCS distribution. Four Monte Carlo simulations, each based on 40,000 replications, were conducted to approximate the distribution of t values arising from samples drawn from the GCS distribution, using sample sizes of 10, 30, 60, and 100 per group.

Results: The histograms of t values derived from the GCS distribution resembled the corresponding Student t distributions for …

The Doctor-Patient Relationship Revisited. An Analysis Of The Placebo Effect., Herbert M. Adler, Md, Van B. Hammett. Md

Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior Faculty Papers

An overview of prescientific medicine, evolution, and individual human development is presented in an attempt to discover the generic factors operating in all interpersonal therapies. We hypothesize that the placebo effect rests on the universal human need for a group and, by symbolic extension, a system.