Howell 6-8

The breakthrough on bloodwork really was something incredible. Knowing how important the makeup of our blood is and what we can see from it might be the best things in medicine. It doesn't take huge, dangerous machines. You can look up multiple things that could lead to the problem at once. It is minutely invasive. I recently had blood drawn for heart palpitations and they could check my thyroid levels, electrolyte levels, and for infection all at once. I thought it was just incredible that they could detect things like hormone levels, which can direct doctors in so many directions. With the understanding of blood also came the understanding of so many more diseases, especially viruses. Because blood circulates through the whole body it can tell us so much about whats happening inside at the microscopic level. The smaller pathogens we didn't know about before we now do, and it is limitless what we can find from it.

Howell 3-5

This chapter I found so interesting because I feel like true patient care by the doctors is slowly becoming a lost art. I remember when I went to check if I had strep, the nurse smelled my throat swab. I thought it was so bizarre and she saw me looking at her, so she explained how in nursing school in the 70s this was what they were taught. Tests and labwork was expensive and took a lot of time. I feel like this kind of doctor care should be brought back, as I feel like it would actually be much more cost efficient. We spend so much money on tests because of things like malpractice, but I feel like if you have a good knowledge of what you think it is, it is less cost to test for one thing instead of six. It was very interesting to see how doctors had to truly make up the basic care for patients. Things that we look past now, like checking ears or abdominals, seems so routine. But at one time there of course was no routine. Its fascinating to think of how many trials and errors it took to build care up to the standard it is today.

Howell 1-2

The numerical values in medicine was a defining change in the medical world and launched hospitals into the category of patient care they are today. In my opinions, hospitals became professional with the introduction of machines. Machines were something hospitals could offer as part of treatment that home care could no longer. It truly altered people's views on what seeking medical entailed. It was really interesting to see the trends in disease began to develop once it started being officially documented. I think the most incredible machine had to be the x-ray machine. Knowing how often we use them today, its difficult imagining how internal medicine even existed before it. I really enjoyed reading about the business side of hospitals as well. I've always had in interest in the management of hospitals because of the levels upon levels of responsibilities and aspects there are to running a hospital. I think this is so vital because if hospitals weren't run efficiently or correctly, they would have never started up.

Hoffman 6-

Many of the government policies we have were designed around the particular number of people in certain socio-economic groups. Over the years, with the current distribution of wealth, there is a much larger lower middle-class than before. We used to have the poor, a big and healthy middle class, and a few very rich. That's not the case anymore. Our systems in place simply do not fit the population.

It was really quite horrible to read more about race and the healthcare system. I think that when we think of segregation and civil rights, we think of separate schools and the right to vote. No one like to talk about when our nation's racism actually kills a human. We look back at lynchings and the KKK like they were these isolated events carried about by evil, uneducated people. But this is not the case of hospitals. The section about how doctors were suspected of intentionally allowing African-American babies to pass is just horrific. I can't imagine that level of ignorance and the lack of basic humanity to kill a baby. I was cringing just thinking about how much deeper the racism we learn about it history class actually goes. The horrifying part is that its happening again with people of certain religions and the growing Latino population in America. It really opened my mind to rethink what I have learned about American's history. I think we all are so ashamed of the horrible things we were capable of and allowed to be the social norm that we try to sweep it under the rug. In another one of my classes, we were talking about African-Americans are one of the only groups not paid reparations for the crimes against them. The native American communities did, but for some reason native slaves were seen as deserving and African-American slaves are not? Needless to say, I was shocked about how much more I saw after reading those examples.

Hoffman 1-5

I enjoyed this book very much since it focused more on the history of healthcare in the past like Humphrey's book. I think the Great Depression is such a major factor in so many policies we have today for impoverished people. I think the depression changed the attitudes on the poor immensely in America. Because it hit the rich as much as it hit the poor, people opened their eyes to the fact that being poor wasn't always in that persons control. Being poor was often seen because of lack of education, a bad family, and laziness. The depression showed that people who worked hard and were successful could fall right down to their level in one swoop. This led to the government taking on a new roll as an active protector of impoverished people.

Her discussion of healthy v. unhealthy populations of African-Americans in the past and the poor today are just proof of why we need to improve our healthcare system. The shift of the discrimination on race is now a discrimination on socio-economic status. I think so much time has passed from the depression and that idea that we are all need to care for eachother had disappeared. People use the excuse of "this is America, you can always make your own wealth, so there's not excuse to be poor" aged out when people couldn't casually claim land left and right. You need money to make money in todays world. Despite the few exceptions of some raw talents, people need to go to college to make a decent living. Even singers need money for studio time and vocal lessons. Actors need to go to theater school. If people are born into an unfortunate situation, there's not much that they can to do get out of that situation. And these situations get worst with poor health. Basic care for everyone in the nation should be a primary concern for everyone.

Brasfield 6-10

This section of the book was much more interesting to me because it was less about financial issues and more about the important social issues we're facing. The issue of the elderly is always sticky because no one wants to admit it, but being old is an expensive problem. It also is an inevitable problem unless voluntary euthanasia is offered in the US, but even then the numbers won't go down significantly. People think that nursing home are for the 100 year old grandmas that need help with every task. But the reality is that so many people need nursing homes as a basic safety net. If a partner passes, children move out, or a health problem arises that someone needs to be constantly close to help and care, living in a home with assistance is a necessity. The culture of children caring for their old parents is slowly passing since many parents see it as being a 'burden' to their children's lives. In today's world, children often have very different lifestyles than their parents, a main point being that now more families have to full-time working parents. Even in the home, there needs to be care for an elderly person during the 9-5 workdays. I feel that there needs to be a new level of care like assisted living did in comparison to a nursing home. What comes to mind is a community home,  with several older adults and only a few care takes. My mom always jokes about how the divorced women of my town should come together and live on a compound. It may sound bizarre and a little hippie, but it makes sense. One property tax, one cable bill, one phone line, and one yard to maintain can save a group of people thousands of dollars every year. If a major reason for people to move into nursing homes earlier is because it is too expensive to live on their own, a system like this could help those people and alleviate some of the financial pressure of paying for nursing homes.

Brasfield 3-5

The discussion about the future of Medicare was very interesting in that I feel like I hear very little to nothing about this topic in politics now, but it is such a huge issue that is looming ahead of us. I think this is how many of the policies in government are running now. Everything is ignored until it become such a huge issue that they must scramble to find a quick fix to the problem before things start to crumble. The system has not been updated to fit the time we are living in today. Every decade a new group of people reach the age of Medicare assistance, and every decade that group is getting larger. The life expectancy is only going to increase over the years, and there needs to be a system in place to support that before it happens. The need for Medicare assistance will not go away, but if it is not progressing with the population, it will simply fall apart. While the argument was made that we can not predict these numbers of people, age, and care costs, we know that they will go up. Birthrates are not seen to be going down in the US yet, there is no denying that people are getting older, and everything is getting more expensive. Even if there is an overestimation of the money needed, why does that matter? We would have leftover money to use for emergencies to to pay off our immense debt. I don't think that either political party would be against lowering the nation's debt at any point in time.

Brasfield 1-3

I liked the way that Brasfield made the information much more easily understood than some of the other books. When talking about these sort of concepts he helped greatly to see graphs and pictures to visualize how much the percentages are in comparison to each other. It helped especially to see who is using these funds. When I saw that the uninsured population was significantly less healthy, I was not surprised. The cost of health insurance makes it so that people who have health as a priority invest in insurance. They are also the people who invest time and money on a daily basis to be healthy and prevent possible expensive procedures and medications. The people who don't have the ability to see a doctor for a routine visit of course will have major issues go unnoticed until it is too late. Healthcare is not a priority in the US and it shows. Preventative care is expensive on an everyday basis, with gym memberships and health groceries and sending kids to soccer camp. But this is done to make sure that they don't need tens of thousands dollars worth of surgeries and medications in the future. Healthy lifestyles are an easy way to cut corners on everyday costs, but they don't save money.

It was frustrating to read about the process in which a bill must pass through so many people- and their personal stances on things. A major flaw of our political system is that more often than not elected representatives forget that they are acting for other people, not themselves. So many times politicians promote that they are there to service the people, but when it comes down to it, will always decide what they want and not what is best for the people. That is simply how we've been failing to progress as a nation in recent decades as a nation and are continuing to do so with Obamacare.

Altman pt. 4-Epilogue

I think it is interesting how with the medical systems we already have in place, that universal coverage is such an issue to establish in America. You would think that it is just the natural progression of a nation to move towards universal care, and because the other systems passed, that it would not as actively argued against as it has been. I did not understand at the time of this motion passing that Obamacare also included an entire reform of the insurance system. I do agree that the insurance policies often are too powerful in their freedom to accept or decline people. A huge detail that seems to be completely overlooked is how it would actually lower the deficit billions of dollars over 10 years. So much concern comes from the cost and how it will put the US even more in debt, but the financial assessment states the exact opposite. It makes sense after understanding that the government gives hospitals providing large amounts of free care some sort of compensation. I think that there are several certain agreements like this that the government has to help people that isn't widely known. In a case like this, people's taxes really are paying for others. I think the new system is actually less 'socialist' than some of the current alternatives.
I really like how the author included several examples of Republican politicians putting similar plans in action previously. I think it called to a larger issues of the US blaming things on political groups and generalizing them into scapegoats for the issues of the country. So much of the lack of progress comes from the arguments over things that the country wants to make an issue, although often there is no actual issue at hand.
The end of the book sent a great message to the readers. I think it is so important to put the past issues behind us and as a country focus on making the new plan beneficial for everyone and please everyone on the political spectrum.

Paper Progress

The Role of Pregnancy Prevention and Planning in the Alleviation of Poverty:
What Subsidized Birth Control Pills can do for America

Look at status of women/families in different areas with different birth rates and pregnancy ages
Costs for government benefits for poor mothers
Costs for men in terms of child support
Usual trends for young mothers, their education, their income, and general situation
Costs to provide free pill and one OB/GYN visit for all women
Look at the issues in the way of bringing this to action
Look at how the overall economy can change with more women going to college, higher paying jobs

Altman Pt. 2 and 3

The issue of balancing the budget is the biggest boulder in the way of a successful healthcare system. There is no money, the people do not want to pay more money, some people don't have money, and all want good, full, solid healthcare. Just like today, the cries for healthcare came at a time of recession when people were losing their job-provided healthcare and faced having to pay for private insurance without an income. I think the dangers on depending on businesses and corporations to provide Americans' health insurance is that jobs aren't always guaranteed, and small businesses, which American is built on, can't afford it. While reading this, a lot of the policies and decisions I couldn't fully follow since I don't fully understand economics. But what it always came back to was the power struggle of one party not wanting the other party to do so well that they gain more support. The political system of America is really sad in that sense, that the people who represent the average citizen is more concerned about their party's popularity than the wellbeing of the people.

Also, I couldn't stand the writing in third person. The pompous voice that came through the writing made it hard to believe if Altman's ideas were truly brilliant or if he just wrote them in a way that we would think they were the ultimate solution everyone overlooked.

Altman Pt. 1

The main think that I really noticed in the first part of Power, Politics, and Universal Healthcare was that it truly came in that order. Those in politics with the most power, like Ted Kennedy and Richard Nixon, were not only politicians in leadership positions, but they held tremendous power and had a strong following of supporters. Next came politics before healthcare. It's a sad truth that a lot of progress we hope for and wish to see is held back by the politics behind the legislature. And not in the sense of actual politics, but in terms of Liberal/Conservative balances, concerns about support groups and funding, and worries about future candidacy. I think one of the hardest challenges that come ups when trying to find a suitable universal healthcare system is the drastic differences in incomes and cost of living across America. While many people will agree that healthcare costs are inconceivable and there should be some way that Americans should be able to pay a reasonable fee for solid coverage, there are just far too many people who simply cannot even pay that fee. It is those people that usually need help the most, as they are already more prone to violence and do not have the same access to preventative care and healthy lifestyles. The complications of having such a vast country with different needs under one system is too difficult for so many politicians to all benefit from, and therefore agree on.

Paper Topics

Potential paper topics:

The Role of Sex  Education and Accessible Contraception in Ending the Poverty Cycle

Motherhood is the number one reason girls drop out of school. The United States has the highest rate of teen pregnancies in the developed world (three times higher than the next, ), increasing about 40% since the mid-1990s. The main reasons for unplanned and underaged pregnancies include lack of education, lack of access to contraception, and high-risk behaviors in low-income communities. I would like to look closer into the education programs offered young American's, how mandatory information about prevention versus abstinence could affect rates, the costs of free/easily accessible contraception  versus the cost of welfare for  impoverished mothers, and other health factors like the effects of the lack of pre-natal care in unplanned pregnancies all contribute to the poverty cycle in the US.

The Implication of microbial Copper in Healthcare Facilities 

Medical breakthroughs today usually focus on technological machines and the development of new drugs. However, I would like to uncover the costs and benefits of investing in a very basic adaptation of copper to solve health issues in medical facilities. I would like to see how many lives would be saved from the avoidance of illnesses caught from bacteria in hospitals setting, the money saved in no longer having to treat these infections causing longer hospital stay, and the logistics of adding a new mandatory item to the standards.

The Potential of HIV as the Cure for Cancer

A doctor made an incredible discovery that the self-damaging HIV virus was very good at damaging cancer cells. The other side: living with the more manageable HIV instead.

How Defnitions Deterine Our Fate

Explore the obsession with people 'finding a reason' (any reason) to why they are not up to par with the world's more successful, athletic, and genius. I would mainly focus on the wide spectrum of Autism and ADHD and how high standards and low tolerance for average performance had lead to constant excuses, explinations, and reasoning.

Marrow of Tragedy: Final Chapters

A point made that I didn't connect before this class was the idea that war and battlefield hospitals were in a way needed to make the changes in the healthcare system. While hospitals were for the poor and traveling, the people in need of aid during the war were neither forgotten beggars or wealthy businessmen with the means to afford good care. The military hospitals were full of people that the country needed, families care about, and were unable to afford medical care outside  the home. The war also brought larger numbers of people closer together. Some of the largest cities were half the size of what a military hospital had to care for. These military hospitals were in some way a "trial run" that would prepare us for growing cities, including how to manage general sanitation, food, housing, and safety.
Before then, it was difficult to prove how and why clean streets, air, and water was important to the overall health of a community. While it was easy to see that cleaner places had healthier people, there needed to be a pin-pointed reason as to what made the difference. The war created experts that could verify what other people suspected. Just like today, the more experienced/recognized/decorated/educated professional you have to vouch for you, the more people can trust the opinion.
The idea of tracing back illnesses finally emerged, and to me that seemed to be the real start of modern medicine. The idea of having a product, looking back into where it came from, the symptoms as a whole, the location it was contracted, and how to either prevent or cure it is exactly what my experience going to a doctor's visit is today.
After all these years of progress, I find it a rather somber concept of how backwards we are going now. The idea of "pure air, pure water, wholesome food" seems lost in our society today. We have to much knowledge and proof about how these things affect our heath, yet we take it for granted and simply ignore it. Not just the people, but corporation and industry as well. In terms of health, business has moved in as a high priority than health. It's a disappointing thing to see after learning how difficult it was to reach that point of understanding.

Marrow of Tragedy- Final

First off, I found the final chapters of this book extremely hard to focus on because of the 'attitude' (I don't know if that's the best term) that the author seemed to have when talking about Samuel Preston Moore. While comparisons are important in understanding the differences between the medical care systems, I felt that the author did not give the southern system a change to participate in the 'race' for the best system. She constantly compared even the smallest details. I don't know if I was the only one who read it that way, but I felt it was very hard to focus on what she wanted to teach with her personal opinion in the way.

A major fact that stood out to me was the infant mortality rate. It seems like such a waste of life when the methods were there to lower the rate, but each side seemed almost too ignorant and wrapped up in themselves to think of how it affects the people. When I think of healthcare and doctors and nurses, I think of people who always put the needs of others before their pride.

I find it very interesting that the north and the south still participate in this competition for the best. Wether it sports teams, education, city popularity, and being from Boston with a sister in Houston, medicine too. Hospitals in different areas have different specialties, and still today many of those come from what is in demand in that place like the 'Southern illness of malaria'. My sister in Houston was shocked to see the number of obesity, diabetes, and gastric bypass specialist there are in every hospital. This is the new 'Southern Medicine', while places like Boston have major children hospitals and oncology departments.

Marrow of Tragedy 4-6

The first chapter of this section focused on the start of the USSC and the new "efficiency, organization, and expertise" it provided for medical care. What I found rather funny is the USSC is essentially just a strict 'mother' that was missing from essentially a frat house of young men. Details like "cleaning undergarments once a week" and going to the bathroom only in dedicated ditches seem like basic behaviors expected from men, but I guess if there is no 'mother' to nag and remind you it doesn't happen. Things like clean sheets were cleaned by 'mother', balanced meals were cleaned by 'mother', and disapproving behaviors with alcohol and stealing were not tolerated by 'mother'. Like last week, it was difficult to read how little details that were not thought out before war hospitals came about could have made life so less miserable then it was. Things like scurvy plaguing troops because they forgot to ensure that citrus fruits could reach the men before it set in. Especially now, it is hard to think of a medical system that wasn't sterile or safe, or even have an ambulance system to transport you comfortably. I also found it interesting how much distrust there was in a health system for the public with concerns about corruption, rights, and dependability. Because we still today have the same issues but with healthcare. Maybe it's American tradition to not want help out of some fear that we'll one day not be able to support ourselves.   I was very impressed by the first hospitals of Philly. Since the trial and error had already been done in homes for centuries, and practice in the military hospitals, the description of the logistics of a hospital were amazing for it to be so early on.

Marrow of Tragedy: 1-3

Major Facts:
killed more than a million Americans
major influence was Christianity blended with American culture
2:1 Illness to battle wound death ratio
Movement from care in home to care in hospital
Design and architecture of new hospitals
Gender issues in professional medicine
Lack of consistent medicine


A very interesting idea that came from the introduction was the idea of preachers changing their sermons to justify the war. I feel like for us today, a similar thing occurs with our politicians while religious leaders change their sermons on social issues.
There was no knowledge about how to organize the number of wounded and sick during the war. It's so sad to think of how many lives in history could have survive if the importance of good sanitation was understood. So many survived the battle but not the bunkers. Women, the main providers of care at home, emerged as one of the most valuable assets to war. While at the time no one saw women as having any contribution to battle, they gained recognition for cleaning up after the battles so that men could go on to fight the next one. The realized the importance of "will"  and gave the men more than medical attention, but encouragement. The smallest things, like dysentery, were the most lethal. The ideas of straws to drink water or IV fluids with electrolytes, Imodium pills and Gatorade could have saved people. With amputations, I was surprised that they knew about blood infections, but not to heal some basic wounds. The idea that hospitals before this time had never seen affluent patients made me think that care before in hospitals was not real care at all. I presume that the poorer patients were sometimes seen as lesser humans, but not anymore. It seems to me that medical progress could have been decades more advanced had people accepted the skills of women and learned from them rather than ignored them. I love the recognition the author gives women in that they were promoted socially and professionally.

Before the 20th century, the care of the sick was driven by trial and error. Although there were dedicated to heath the sick, from wise elders with knowledge of natural remedies to professionals with tools and drugs, most of their knowledge was from experiences and not science. Before the establishment of the Germ Theory, there was little scientific understanding of why, how, when, and where illnesses stemmed from. The idea that the body needed balance in order to be healthy was true in some sense, as one must balance relaxation and work for stable mental health. But this theoretical kind of balance was not the biggest issue at the time. As time passes, people learned what worked best with a fever, what herbs were dangerous, and that filthy homes are no place to raise children. The scientific findings sped up the process of finding the reasoning behind how illnesses manifest themselves in people and animals.