Societal Questions Flashcards
What do you feel are the social responsibilities of a physician?
- Educational Responsibility:
Help educate their patients and the public about medicine and health. Empowering them to make the right decisions that lead to less disease like promoting vaccinations, promoting healthy habits like eating and exercise. They should be heavily involved in health messaging and in helping to guide health policy in the right directions. Countering anti-vaccine sentiments. - Advocate Responsibility:
Responsibility to speak out politically against inequities in the healthcare system, about things you see in the clinic.
That’s the only way physicians can be true patients advocates is to advocate for their patient’s in all ways and speak about of the social determinants of health. - Responsibility for their Clinics:
Responsibility to create a safe, accessible health-care experience that enhances the well-being of the whole community. To make people feel comfortable when they access the resources, when they enter your office.
What do you consider an important/the most important social problem facing the United States today and why?
Tribalism, inequality.
How do you think national health insurance affects physicians, patients, and society?
Affordable Care Act – might be repealed by the supreme court.
Prior to affordable care, if you were sick insurance companies didn’t have to take you. Beneficial to only take healthy people bc its cheaper.
Lifetime limits of care and then insurance ends
ACA mandates 10 essential health benefits – including preventative care, hospital stays, drugs. Ambulances and forces
Put rules private insurance companies and allows them to remain the main way.
Forces insurance companies to insure people with pre-existing conditions but also forces healthy people to get insurance.
Medicaid – for poor people. Medicare – for old people (65+)
Affects people and gives them healthcare – it’s not perfect, there are still almost 20 million unemployed people, but hopefully more patients feel able to get the medical care they need.
Society – you want a society with less inequity with people who don’t make a lot of money can get the care they need.
I think if you were starting a program from scratch, a single-payer system would probably be ideal. It provides a lot less of the inequities we see with different health care insurance quality based on income. Some people can only get medicare. You just pay more taxes and people get their services covered by the government. It does feel really difficult to implement and there are lots of countries that have mixed the public and private option efficiently, including the Netherlands and Germany but they have more regulated markets.
In what manner and to what degree do you stay in touch with current events?
I actually stay in touch with current events a lot. I try to read the New York Times a lot of morning, or at least skim it as much as I can. I think that’s where my dad has actually had a major influence on me in that regard because for as long as I have been alive, he wakes up every single morning at 530 and reads the entire New York Times and WSJ cover to cover. A major source of news is that I actually have a twitter account which is the only social media I use regularly where I follow tons of doctors and scientists as well as political reporters, op-ed writers and I from there get a pretty rich source of new scientific articles and updates on COVID, as well as long form journalism in places like the New Yorker.
What books, films, or other media come to mind as having been particularly important to your sciences/non-sciences education?
Deep Medicine Eric Topol – I am reading right now has been crucial to me honestly. It details the ways in which medicine fails, as well as the amazing things that it does. I think when people talk about artificial intelligence, it’s super hyped up and we talk about it as this cure-all for all problems and it’s gonna take away doctor’s jobs because it can do everything personally but that’s not true at all. He talks a lot about how AI can be paired with physicians to make them better at their jobs. So, he talks about how most of medical appointments are spent just entering information and perhaps if we recorded and then used natural language processing we could do a much better job and doctors would be freed up with their time to spend more time with patients and to learn more about them and to show more empathy.
The Undoing Project Michael Lewis – Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky about two Israeli psychologists who team up and basically find out a bunch of cognitive biases that cause people to make poor decisions. I think it appealed to me obviously since I have a neuroscience background but also because these ways that we think apply to every field and every person. They are completely pervasive – the availability heuristic where if something’s more available in your mind and easier to picture, you think it tends to happen more often, like vending machines and shark attacks for example. This could apply to medicine with bias in diagnoses, over-diagnosing the prevalence of a specific disease for example.
Moonwalking with Einstein – Memory palaces, so you place objects into your memory and retrace them. I wrote a sample grant proposal investigating the differential role of the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain for memory, in spatial memory.
Soccernomics/Moneyball – taught me about cognitive biases in sports and how to avoid them.
The Righteous Mind/Coddling of the American Mind – Jonathan Haidt
Searching for Sugarman.
About a singer named Rodriguez who works as a construction worker in Detroit he plays gigs at a local bar and gets discovered by a local record label. They put out an album and only a few copies are sold. The rest of the copies get sent different places and he thinks he’s missed his chance. Meanwhile, in South Africa, he’s become a hero and his album is incredibly popular – there’s this legend about him burning himself on stage or something, but meanwhile he just works as a construction worker in Detroit. For me, that was an amazing lesson in coincidence and I listened to that album all throughout my hospital stay.
Lives of Others, Shawshank Redemption, Do the Right Thing, Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Can you think of any examples in our society when healthcare is a right? When is it a privilege? When is it not clear?
Healthcare is generally always a right when it comes to procedures that improve the health of an individual. Unfortunately, we still have a ton of uninsured people and vast inequities in the healthcare system. About 30 million people are uninsured still. Insurance companies prior to affordable care act could just say no you’re too sick we don’t want you because we don’t want to pay because you have a pre-existing condition.
I think it’s a bit easier to take cosmetic or plastic surgeries as elective. It becomes a little more difficult if you start thinking of cosmetic procedures as perhaps improving the mental health of an individual or their own self-perception, but generally this is a privilege to me.
