For me, one of the biggest differences between being a student of biology and a student of public health is the emotional exhaustion I now experience. Biology was a much more mentally demanding discipline- demanding memorization of countless organisms, structures, cell signalling pathways and the interactions between everything under the sun. Health Promotion, Education and Behavior places more strenuous demands on my heart than my mind. It also orders me to a careful reckoning of how my mind and heart are interacting- is my compassion for a particular situation leading me to jump to a solution, rather than deliberate over the best use of limited resources? How do I balance the urgency of life and death with the need to not be wasteful, to choose the best intervention?

This week I've been working on a short paper on the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe, which has necessitated reading a vast quantity of UN "on the ground" reports. I sort of stumbled into this topic, having lived in Latin America during the epidemic of the 1990s. Cholera, that classic well- studied -yet- unsolved problem of public health, was what brought me into the field in the first place, so it's only fitting (though unintentional) that my first "real" paper be an attempt to wrestle with it.

"Knowledge alone is not enough to change behavior"
"An educational curriculum is NOT a health promotion program"

New mantras- they don't replace DNA => RNA => Protein though.

Bits and pieces...tools in a toolbox...

These things take time.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christian Bleeding Hearts?

Given my great fondness for books and propensity for writing up lengthy reviews or responses, taking some time to blog a response to Half the Sky really was inevitable. Nicholas Kristof holds the distinction of being one of three living human beings I'm in love with (the other two being Barbara Kingsolver and Michelle Obama- I get along much better with dead people for some reason), so I'd anticipated this book all summer. It didn't disappoint. Kristof and WuDunn make their points about brutality without being excessively graphic, making this a book I can recommend to others (unlike, say Sunday at the Pool in Kigali ). It's hard to imagine the amount of work that went into this book. Lots of first person interviews and a massive amount of time spent in the library. End notes are respectable, and do a decent job of pointing readers to primary sources. Personally, I had one issue with the end notes- the authors state that studies that evaluate the efficacy of abstinen
Read more

Two things

1) NOTHING sets my blood boiling like people who state in passing that emergency contraceptives and IUDs are abortifaceants. Medically, biologically, a pregnancy is defined as beginning when a fertilized egg has attached to the uterine lining. If you're going to disagree with the medical community's working definition, the burden is on you to explain why. And if your explanation is "fertilized eggs have souls" my next question will be whether you think all women of reproductive age should have their menstrual cycles monitored, to be sure that all fertilized eggs have the absolute best chance of implanting, because that seems like the next reasonable step to me. Followed by causing women to take pregnancy tests daily, so we can monitor and investigate extremely early miscarriages. Because otherwise, I'm not so sure that you're serious about sticking up for fertilized eggs. 2) I'm officially off my maintenance meds. Took the last pill Sunday (Feb 12) Accor
Read more

My right to (sexual and reproductive) health.

(Every time I log into Facebook, one of my friends has posted something infuriating. I need my blood pressure down, and I need to not engage in pointless flame wars. So I'm going to say quite a bit here, both today and probably later) A few weeks ago, a blog post on the right to decide when and how to start a family caught my eye. This is something my husband and I are pretty serious about. Between two doctoral programs, the assortment of jobs we juggle between the two of us (I think we might be down to just two jobs each now. Maybe), and a newly diagnosed autoimmune disorder, now is not the time to get pregnant. (When you have a whacked-out immune system that likes to attack your own tissues, there's a definite possibility it will recognize a fetus as foreign and just try to get rid of it). If you walked through our house, you'd find my pack of birth control pills in the kitchen, condoms in the nightstand by our bed, and emergency contraception in a drawer in the bathr
Read more