Cell 2 Soul: The Humane Health Care Blog

Pupil as Teacher

Daniella Lamas was an intern when she met a young man with terminal heart failure on I.C.U. rounds.  Through Facebook she learned  "[h]e was 'single,' and he liked Radiohead and Tom Clancy. He’d been sending upbeat status updates from the I.C.U.; to read them, you’d never know he was so sick, but to me they were missives from a dying man"

Her essay, Friend Request, is as moving as any I've read.  I know you will appreciate  it.

Osler wrote:  "The pupil and the teacher working together on the same lines, only one a little ahead of the other.  This is the ideal towards which we should move."  Daniela Lamas, medical intern, with this essay is the professor for all of us: her colleagues, professionals and laypeople alike.

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Jane Austen, Paul Farmer and the Medical Student

At a recent conference at McGill, Nora Hutchinson, a second year medical student gave a moving presentation on how Pride and Prejudice and the Paul Farmer bio Mountains Beyond Mountains have inspired her in her journey from student to doctor.

Emily Dickinson wrote:  "The soul selects her own Society/ Then shuts the door."  Nora, in the company of Jane Austen and Paul Farmer, has chosen invaluable and important mentors.

We think you will enjoy reading her brief essay. Download Nora

You may contact Nora at:  NH Email

A Teenager Accompanies Grand-pere to Yellowknife

14 year-old Kate Jackson from Ottawa, Ontario accompanied Cell 2 Soul member Dr. Robert Jackson on a journey to Yellowknife, NWT, Canada.  Dr. Jackson asked her to write a brief summary of their trip.  Attached, you will find a teenager's impressions of her travels to an exotic place with her grandfather.

" One would think that a highlight of a trip to Yellowknife would be the midnight sun or perhaps all the diamonds. However, as much as these sights did excite me, I found that one of my favourite components to my trip, was not a well-known attraction, but a dessert. If it wasn’t for my grandfather inviting my mum and me to Yellowknife for the International Congress on Circumpolar Health, I would have never come across a rich chocolate torte, accompanied by splashes of colour from fresh fruit, meringue, a sugar cage, handmade chocolate straws and celery leaves."  To read more: Download YellowknifeKate2009

Please email comments to Kate.

Chef Bernard's memorable creations and Kate's favourite eatery.

 

Advice for Returning Students

On Sunday, September 6, 2009, the Times had a helpful column offering advice to returning students.  The authors are seasoned professors with national and international reputations. Perhaps most helpful for incoming college freshman, these brief homolies will be helpful to all students, and, indeed, to those of us who remain students but have left the formal academes years or even decades ago.

College Advice, From  People Who Have Been there Awhile.

Educators give some helpful advice to young adults entering school this fall.

Authors and Topics Addressed:

The Hunt for a Good Teacher
By STANLEY FISH

An Argument Worth Having
By GERALD GRAFF

By HAROLD BLOOM
Get Lost. In Books

By CAROL BERKIN
Once in class, participate.

Play Politics
By GARRY WILLS

A good newspaper; will be your path to the world
By JAMES MacGREGOR BURNS

My Crush on DNA
By NANCY HOPKINS

College is never what one expects.
By STEVEN WEINBERG

Think about life, not just a job.
By MARTHA NUSSBAUM

Amerika, America, Ameriqa

Who are you and where to do come from?

Illustrator, author and designer Maira Kalman  has a new column iI the NY Times called  "And the Pursuit of Happiness."  It deals with American democracy, will appear on the last Friday of each month.  Here's a sample:

  Your time spent with this amazing column will be mind-expanding and rewarding!

"And the Pursuit of Happiness"

Truck-Stop Girls

by  Catherine Maternowska

This fine essay appeared in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, August 23, 2009.  "In May, I was traveling down a South African highway with a colleague and a driver, headed toward Swaziland. A private foundation had assigned me to assess a health clinic that it set up for truckers and the girls and women who trade sex with them for cash and goods. Truckers are well known to transmit H.I.V. up and down the highways. And Swaziland, a small, landlocked country dependent on its busy trucking corridors, is particularly troublesome. It has the highest H.I.V. rate in the world: one in three people is infected..."  Full article "Truck-Stop Girls."

How to Swim With Sharks

by Voltaire Cousteau
(This article is a dinner talk given by Richard Johns in ~ 1974.  It appeared in the Trans Assoc Am Physicians. 1975;88:44-54.  It was entitled "Dinner address. How to swim with sharks: the advanced course.")

Forward

Actually, nobody wants to swim with sharks. It is not an acknowledged sport and it is neither enjoyable nor exhilarating. These instructions are written primarily for the benefit of those, who, by virtue of their occupation, find they must swim and find that the water is infested with sharks.

It is of obvious importance to learn that the waters are shark infested before commencing to swim. It is safe to say that this initial determination has already been made. If the waters were infested, the naïve swimmer is by now probably beyond help; at the very least, he has doubtless lost any interest in learning how to swim with sharks.

Finally, swimming with sharks is like any other skill: It cannot be learned from books alone; the novice must practice in order to develop the skill. The following rules simply set forth the fundamental principles which, if followed will make it possible to survive while becoming expert through practice.
Download HOW TO SWIM WITH SHARKS

This is an important article for anyone in academia, the professions or business.

A Caregiver's Story

Nell Burger Kirst, a 4th year medical student at the University of Michigan, tells a memorable and important story in the March 31st New York Times: Comforter and Comforted relates the story of a person who is called to be a "care giver."  Little is written about this important human subspecies, yet they are the substructure of the entire health care system.  Some are unlikely candidates. 

Please read Nell's vignette.  It's a keeper!

White Whispers by Karen Lee

"Go back to China," a woman yells from her car window as I cross the street.  Her White Whispers soak in and echo.  Drench my body like the agony of song."  So begins a powerfully moving "autoethnography" by Karen Lee from Vancouver, B.C. Download White Whispers

This essay is particularly timely since some newspapers (NY Post for one) have published racist cartoons aimed at President Obama.

Karen V. Lee is a Faculty Advisor and co-founder of the Teaching Initiative for Music Educators cohort (TIME) at the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B. C, Canada  Her research interests include issues of musician/teacher identity, music/teacher education, performance ethnography, women’s life histories, autoethnography, writing practices, and arts-based approaches to qualitative research.  Her doctoral dissertation, was a book of short stories, titled Riffs of Change:  Musicians Becoming Music Educators.   She is a musician, writer, music educator, and researcher.   Currently, she teaches undergraduate and graduate students in traditional and online contexts at the university.  You may contact her at: Email

Hospitalist Anonymity

Image pilfered from New York Magazine

There is a short disturbing article in the NY Times summarizing a recently published study which found that "hospital patients are rarely able to identify their doctors by name or to describe their roles in the patients’ care."

To me, shockingly,  Dr. Ernest Moy, medical officer at the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality said “Do you really need to know who your doctor is, or is it more important to know some processes that will help you get at the information you need?” He added, "In some ways, ignorance is bliss."

Read the Times article and come to your own conclusions:  Download Hospitalist Anonymity

The article in the medical literature the Times piece summarizes is:

Ability of hospitalized patients to identify their in-hospital physicians.  Arora V, Gangireddy S, Mehrotra A, Ginde R, Tormey M, Meltzer D.  Arch Intern Med. 2009 Jan 26;169(2):199-201.

Your thoughts will be welcome.