A BLOG to support my book, Talking About Health; Why Health Communication Matters
Author: Roxanne
I have always loved to learn. After years of trying to pick a major as an undergraduate, I met a professor who guided me to graduate school. And from graduate school, I learned that I could always go to school and keep on learning. And so I have...
I discovered a new site and a beautiful poem there. I will share it at the end of this post. But to begin, it is worth considering what we know about poetry as ‘talk’ and its effects for our health. Doctors benefit. Reading poetry has been found to increase empathy for patients. [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2929.2005.02178.x/full]
[http://www.stfm.org/fmhub/Fullpdf/July01/lame.pdf]
Patients can benefit from reading poetry aloud, contributing to healthier and less stressed breathing and heart rates. [http://ajpheart.physiology.org/content/287/2/H579.short]
In my book, Talking about health, I tell the story about dealing with back and shoulder pain with physical therapy and the exercises I learned to use during the day. One includes setting a 30 minute timer to remind me to get up and move around… Well, another strategy that a colleague has adopted is a motorized desk…
I talked about visiting a Marcellus Shale drilling site last spring. I didn’t say much about the noise. But it was …loud. I guess the noise starts well before the drilling begins. And we know quite a bit about the effects of noise on human health. The Environmental Protection Agency summarizes it at this link: http://www.epa.gov/air/noise.html …things like increased blood pressure, hearing loss, sleep loss, and then loss of productivity…
I am reading some research about how math anxiety leads us to avoid doing things that might have math or numbers included. I read one study where it all came rushing back to me. I was a freshman at the University of Michigan and taking the first of three classes in calculus. I didn’t quite understand some of the homework, so I visited the graduate teaching assistant’s office and was told, “If you don’t understand this, you better get out while you can ‘cuz it only gets harder.” I wasn’t feeling anxious about math until that meeting. In fact, I have always loved math and have a high aptitude for math. But worry and anxiety washed over me. There was no one to ask about this that I knew. It was my second week at a huge university with 10s of thousands of students. The TA must know what he was talking about. I dropped the class. Only to pick it up again and complete the three calculus courses with success later.
Still, I read the research conducted by Jackson and colleagues and that experience came flooding back, as the researchers found that at the college level, especially freshman year, “Students were told to leave class if they did not understand the material.”
Perhaps such experiences and our own love for math and science leads us to spend time with our granddaughter and grandson doing math. Making it a game more often than not, with me playing with my grandson–who will be 4 years old in the next week–counting and arranging and rearranging.
My three favorite food groups are salsa, salsa, and more salsa. I prefer to have a beautiful garden of fresh tomatoes and onions and peppers to pluck and prepare my own salsa. But I don’t. So I use Green Mountain Gringo Salsa, the ‘hot’ variety. And I am forever happy when Dr. Oz talks about healthy eating and I find that my salsa qualifies. It has some sea salt in it but that’s the last ingredient in the list of fresh vegetables.
And then there is the message, ‘No Genetically Modified Ingredients’. I think they mean to say, ‘No Genetically Engineered Ingredients’. I think that because what I believe is true about the salsa I love is that the ingredients have not been genetically altered with the DNA of one organism combined with another. No salmon in the tomatoes, for example. [read about this here: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/dna/pop_genetic_gallery/index.html ].
This method of informing consumers about GM content in food is called negative labeling — it tells us something isn’t present. In cases where there is no ‘negative label,’ we can reach the conclusion that there is such content in the food. We don’t know what. We don’t know how much. But we also don’t know based on any systematic research conducted over time whether we need to know.
http://youtu.be/MfTQergr29M
April 1982, my friend had an article about the birth of her twins in baby talk: THE FIRST BABY MAGAZINE where she described her experience and mentions me, her “second childbirth coach, a close friend”… Her other coach was her husband. As her labor progressed, my friend tells the story about how the nurse put an I.V. in her arm ‘just in case’ and how her two coaches looked away, leading the nurse to remark, “If you can’t watch this, how do you expect to watch these babies get delivered?” But we did. And the babies were beautiful.
I wrote about my own diagnosis with Lyme disease in this forum in the past. This is one of those conditions that is too often undiagnosed. It is one of the most commmon causes of peripheral neuropathy. Dad are you reading this?
It is a common cause of tiredness, exhaustion, and fatigue. It is a common cause of joint pain.
But don’t take my word for it. The Insitute of Medicine has recognized the frightening scope of this condition in the U.S. and held a workshop to get some conversation going. They are currently getting ready to conduct a fuller study. For now, you can read the workshop report for free online. Go here: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13134#toc
Health communication’s role is highlighted on p. 36: “One participant highlighted the current gap in communications, noting that how information is provided on the Internet can vary, with implications for how those to whom it is disseminated (e.g., schools, insurance companies) will respond to the disease. The same participant called for a centralized source of information on the latest research to facilitate patient/family efforts to obtain such information. Another participant called for better communication between patients and their physicians, noting the damaging effect of this disconnection between two groups who have worked together on other illnesses. By working together in creative ways, physicians and patients may help to advance the science and understanding of the disease processes and chronic manifestations to permit earlier diagnosis and better treatment outcomes.”
On p. 31, there is a summary about conditions that often occur together with Lyme disease and need to be considered by patients and doctors as well, “Completing this community of patients are the coinfected: those with babesiosis, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, or some other tick-borne infection. Surveys around the country report that ticks can transmit these well-known human diseases, yet primary care physicians almost never consider or test for them, even if they seriously consider Lyme disease.”
