Eat Your Ice Cream
According to the art: A major conceit of the book is that if we are to incorporate all the recommendations for achieving good health into our lives, some tradeoffs will be necessary.
J. Russell Teagarden
Russell Teagarden came to his interest in applying insights from the humanities to biomedicine after decades in clinical pharmacy practice and research. He realized that biosciences explained how diseases and treatments work, but not how they affect people in their everyday lives. Through formal academic studies and independent research in the humanities, he discovered rich and abundant sources of knowledge and perspectives on how specific health problems and clinical scenarios can be better understood than from the biosciences only. He shares these discoveries through his blog, According to the Arts, and the podcast, The Clinic & The Person.
Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror
A Metaphor
According to the art: Shannon Vallor uses the metaphor of a mirror to reveal how AI reflects and distorts our shared humanity.
Of Pain and Profit:
Montaigne’s Kidney Stones
Remastered
According to the art: The essayist Michel de Montaigne tells of the excruciating pain of his kidney stones but also how be benefitted from them in certain ways; a notion not likely shared by any of those who have experienced them. This post is a remastered version of a post from March, 2024.
This Blog That Podcast
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: Associated with this blog is the podcast, The Clinic & The Person first published in September of 2022 and over the subsequent three years to its end, published 30 episodes. Descriptions of and links to the individual episodes are provided.
Three Views of Death Throes in TB: Biomedical, Literary, Opera
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the arts: Considered together, the perspectives from biomedicine, literary fiction, and opera provider a fuller account of the final stage of TB than any of them individually.
The Room Next Door
Best Friends Forever?
According to the art: When we have reached a certain age, we can find that we easily pick up where we left off with friends we knew well, for a short time, a long time ago. Almodóvar asks what will we still do for them?
Lights, Camera, Deny
When Managed Care Went to the Movies
According to the art: The fatal shooting of a health care insurance executive in December, 2004 brings to mind four movies from the late 1990s and early 2000s. They depicted a building rage about new restrictions to health care coverage and the methods used to apply them, that spring from underlying structures and incentives embedded in US health care.
This is a Test
A Breezy Novel Warns of Damaging Winds
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: Novelists can be quite prescient about particular future events. Their speculative fiction has been known to become reality. Baxter’s novel portrays a scenario closer to transitioning from speculative fiction to nonfiction than either one.
Of Doctors and Health Care
Montaigne’s Harmony
When Montaigne considered seeking help for health problems, he considered with trepidation, the impact it would have on his habits, the reliability of medical knowledge, and the way to engage health care services.
Of Rabies, Demons, and Iatrogenesis
According to the Art: The story centers on a twelve-year old girl set in late 1700s’ Columbia, who was bitten by a presumably rabid dog. Her subsequent course prompts thinking about how more than only medical professionals and institutions should be held accountable for iatrogenesis.