[Week 4: Feb. 24-28] Changes

Hey guys, here's what I've been doing.

I'd like to thank my previous onsite advisor for letting me intern with him, but because of changing circumstances, I've switched internships.

As a result, I've also changed my blog title.
Health Literacy and Medical Science Education → Modeling a Lysosomal Storage Disease in Caenorhabditis elegans

I'd like to thank Dr. Nadja Anderson for helping me get in contact with Dr. Johnny Fares whose lab in which I currently intern. Dr. Fares currently studies the disease Mucolipidosis type IV by modeling it in the roundworm C. elegans.

[Week 3: Feb. 17-21]

Hey guys, here's an update on what's been happening on my end of things. 

My week's been pretty average, and a bit heavy on the note-taking side. I didn't have much time to meet with my advisor. I'm still working on content analysis of Harvey Fineberg's talks, and I've started cataloging related videos and drafting a research questionnaire that'll be used to try to quantify where Dr. Fineberg stands on certain medical science-related issues such as patient efficacy to obtain health literacy. 

Most of the readings I've been doing have been familiarizing me with the big wigs in medical-science education: 

• The American Academy of Arts & Sciences' Science and the Educated American: A Core Component of Liberal Education (2010)
  
• The National Academies Press' A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas (2012)
  
•  Abraham Flexer whose report was instrumental in moving medical science off of undergraduate campuses

 and have been helping me get a context for the basis of my project.

Hope you guys have had a good week and a relaxing weekend!

[Week 2: Feb. 10-14]

Hi, everyone. I hope you've all been doing well. I love reading your guys' posts and keeping up with what everyone's been doing. It's awesome seeing what you've been up to. 

Here's a recap of what's been happening on my end. 
In this second week, my current internship's been changing. Since my initial plans didn't work out, I've been up to a variety of things while trying to reformulate my research plans. I'm still working on content analysis of Harvey Fineberg's talks, and I've also been retrieving journal articles for them for my advisor's research (cardiology in relation to service members-- health services to remote locations). So far, my advisor and I have been discussing the merits of YouTube as an interview-esque primary source. 

I haven't had very much time to meet with my onsite advisor this week since things have been pretty busy for everyone. Additionally, one of the Arizona Telemedicine Faculty members is retiring: scholar in residence and professor emerita Dr. Anna R. Graham. I took a class with her in the summer of 2011. You might have seen her at BASIS several times, since she's been teaching the 7th graders material from an adaptation of a second-year medical school course on the nature of disease.  We'll miss you, Dr. Graham! 

[Week 1: Feb. 3-7] Blog Title Subject to Change

Annika here, I hope you've all been having a good week. Here's an update of what I've been up to. I started off this week wanting to find out if health literacy, someone's ability to navigate through a health care system, could be affected by his or her level of medical science education. I wanted to design an experiment to compare how groups of people would perform on various health literacy-related tasks before and after being taught pertinent medical science topics, but along the way, I ran into some problems, notably, how to organize a volunteer group. Experiments with volunteers tend to work better when there’re more volunteers, but the more people there are, the more difficult it is coordinate the whole group. I talked to my on-site adviser about it. I learned that my initial premise was flawed: health literacy isn’t that influenced by education.

Health literacy, as defined by the CDC, is “the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services to make appropriate health decisions,” so an example would be being able to read a prescription and take the appropriate drug dosage. Health literacy’s more similar to reading comprehension than to active engagement of patients in their own health.  My on-site adviser pointed me to another direction, which is similar to what I wanted to first look at. I’m looking at the “attitudes” in medicine where patients are supposed to be encouraged to get involved with their own health, while medical practice itself resembles a guild, which can discourage people who aren’t medical service providers from being engaged in their own health. So far, I’ve been doing a content analysis of talks given by Harvey Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine. Also, I was doing some reading and I stumbled across an article titled Guild Medicine, the editorial of the Annals of Surgery (1950): 132: 4. At this moment, my project’s shifted toward a history of science kind of focus. Things have been turning out differently than I how I expected, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing! Have a nice weekend, guys.

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CDC Quote from: Center of Disease Control. Accurate, Accessible and Actionable Health Information for All. CDC Website: http://www.cdc.gov/healthliteracy/