#Social Science and Medicine

[justinsentertainmentcorner]

Ramon Antonio Vargas at The Guardian:

Taylor Swift’s willingness to openly talk about struggles with body image and disordered eating have aided the pop superstar’s fans in grappling with those issues themselves, according to new scientific research.

The authors of a University of Vermont (UVM) study published in the July issue of the Social Science & Medicine journal reached that conclusion after analyzing the top 200 TikTok and Reddit social media posts containing more than 8,300 comments pertaining to Swift, eating disorders and body image. “Our findings suggest that fans who felt highly connected to Swift were influenced to positively change their behaviors or attitudes around eating or their body image because of Swift’s disclosures and messages in her music,” said a press statement attributed to study co-author Lizzy Pope, a registered dietitian nutritionist and associate professor in UVM’s nutrition and food sciences department. Pope’s fellow registered dietitian nutritionist and study author Kelsey Rose, a UVM clinical assistant professor, added: “Fans seem to take inspiration from the fact that Swift had recovered from disordered eating and subsequently appeared to be thriving.”

Yet the study’s findings about the “parasocial” – or one-sided – relationship between Swift and the so-called Swifties who support her career aren’t exclusively good news. The survey found that some fans ignore Swift’s message and insist on objectifying the her body, demonstrating “the limitations of personal disclosures to [affect] understanding of systemic issues like anti-fat bias”.

Swift earned news headlines in 2020 when the songwriter-vocalist detailed how she grappled with outsiders’ perception of her weight – and the physical beauty standards by which many women are measured – in her Miss Americana documentary. The singer explained how seeing pictures of herself made her feel like her “tummy was too big” or how speculation over whether she was pregnant would trigger “to just starve a little bit”. “If you’re thin enough, then you don’t have that ass … everybody wants. But if you have enough weight … to have an ass, your stomach isn’t flat enough,” Swift remarked. She then uttered the words which provided the title of Pope and Rose’s recent study: “It’s all just fucking impossible.”

Taylor Swift’s frank talk about body image is inspiring to her fans.

[mysharona1987]

[crippled-peeper]

High Rent Prices Are Literally Killing People, New Study Says

[hjellacott]

Psychology academics are not here to treat you with kid gloves, sweetness and love and tell you what you want to hear

I work in film. I'd already gotten a uni degree, I was happy, and then I got into reading psychology books and became hooked. And when I became hooked, I got myself a BSc in Psychology out of pure fascination for the subject.

I am not a therapist, nor a counsellor, purely because I still work in film, I love working in film, and psychology is a passion which I find extremely helpful in my work and in my life, but I have no desire to spend every day of my life listening to people's drama. Sounds cold? Well, welcome to science.

But obviously in social media one finds all kinds of things, and I'm always interested in anything related to psychology, so one thing I keep finding is people, somehow, always assume if you know psychology you must constantly treat people like they're injured animals and you're a vet? We must be sweet and loving with complete strangers, and treat them with kid gloves, as if the air might hurt them??? It's wacky.

Anybody who knows anything about psychology knows you ought to distance yourself emotionally from mentally sick people, or else it'll kill you. You've got to be a scientist, be objective, not get attached, not get emotionally involved. And it isn't our duty to treat people like they're fragile. Our duty is to be honest, to do what we can to help out, specially for those who are actual therapists, and only when paid to do so, because hey, it's a job.

Psychology isn't there to pamper people, make them feel better and tell them what they want to hear. Psychologists who do that are the shit ones who then cause a ton of trouble. Psychology is a science, it looks at things objectively, and if you're a piece of shit, it's supposed to hold you accountable, to make you responsible for your actions and to help you have the right tools to turn your life around. But responsibility and accountability are essential in any self-respected therapy, so don't expect to be pitied and given a hug if what you need is a bloody wake up call.

[medsocionwheels]

Medical Sociology 101: What is medical sociology, and how is it distinct from other approaches to studying medicine, health, illness, disability, and healthcare?

Medical sociology is both a social science and a health science—it is one of the social scientific approaches to studying topics in health science. So, how is the sociological approach to studying topics in medicine, health, illness, and disability, distinct from other approaches to examining these topics?

Medical sociologists study health, illness, and healthcare, in terms of social problems and social factors. They are not looking at individual issues, nor are they interested in biological or cognitive factors independent of social factors.

Now, it’s important to note that social problems do, in fact, impact individuals, but sociologists aren’t interested in this impact to the individual as much as they’re interested in the shared impacts of social problems across groups of individuals. 

So, sociology is not always useful for understanding personal experience; however, sociological research can give insight as to whether your experience is similar to experiences of other people with shared characteristics. instead of asking something like, “why does this individual patient have this experience” the medical sociologist might instead ask, “are there characteristics shared by many patients with this experience which may predispose an individual to have said experience?” So, here, not asking why this individual patient has the experience, but why does this group of patients have this experience while another group does not.

Medical sociology demonstrates that things like likelihood of health or illness, experiences and perceptions of medicine, health, illness, and disability, who provides health care, how healthcare is provided, and to whom it is provided, and institutional aspects of the healthcare system itself, are not random, but instead, are shaped by social factors. Medical problems become social problems when they are shared by many individuals with some similar characteristic, experience, or circumstance.

Watch Here:

Originally posted on wordpress:

[shenaniganeryfromtheabyss]

waiting for the day some poor soul comes across my art, sees the tiny notes i add in Starry's MTMTE arc doodles that he's pregnant, and innocently asks

wait, he's pregnant?? wha???

because then i get to explain the lore

[ruvviks]

successfully put together an overview of everything you can study at the fictional university mallory went to when she was younger

[wlwaerith]

no one asked, but the reason all of my ocs are either healers or very knowledgeable about poisons and/or disease (or both!) is because it all relates to my special interest of All Time

[redgoldblue]

just realised i have to get permission from two separate deans if i want to do a masters. i don't want to contact deans :( emails :(

Edit: made a list about it. am telling myself that if I got through year 1 med surely I can write six emails and also a cv. not sure i believe myself.

[eccentricphilosoph]

The idea that objective Truth is “white” is ignorant. That’s a close-minded assumption because many cultures had such intellectual ideas as objective Truth before any “white influence” and even came to similar conclusions on the same subjects

Things like astronomy, mathematics, engineering, medicine, etc. were all practiced independently by different ancient cultures in the West, Africa, and Asia. All these cultures have shared practices and understanding of these scientific factual concepts. As a first generation US Asian, I take offense to this idea. Sure, maybe I shouldn’t take offense because perhaps the idea of “objective truth” “shouldn’t be taken so seriously”. Yeah. Idc.

The biggest differences in such scientific endeavors were the methods used and the overall belief systems of each culture. Furthermore, another difference is how much emphasis was put on each facet of society such as empirical evidence.

Some may not have held such things in as high a position as other parts of the culture. That is the main difference. However, even in native cultures, they still had such things as justice systems and sciences.

It’s short sighted and close-minded, and dare I say, bigoted, to assume that other ancient and native cultures didn’t independently come to similar conclusions of objective fact as the rest of the world. The only difference was the general cultural importance of such things and the methods used for get to the same objective Truth.

Carl Jung poses the idea of the Collective Unconscious where the whole of human kind is connected through a large uconsciousness (some people may refer to this as God or spiritual energy) whereby common ideas may be shared by all cultures, independent of influence from one another.

So, no, the ideas of objective Truth and logic and critical thought are not “white”. The methodologies seen in European countries, the UK, US, Australia, etc. are “white”, but not the conclusions nor the practices.

Not to mention, postmodernism as we know it, was posed by white people studying other cultures. The hypocrisy knows no bounds in the idea that objective fact and knowledge doesn’t exist at all. Even the ideas of magic and science are not as dissimilar as we may believe.

We aren’t living in a virtual world where we can do anything we want or change anything we want at our own whim without any repercussions either from others or from the natural world, but even in a video game, for example, there are still boundaries that are objective facts put in by the developers. Sure, you can go in and change the game code, but you’re still working within the frame of the game itself unless you want to make an entirely new video game, which can only be done when you have the boundaries of who, what, when, where, and how to get it done.

Nothing is boundless. If you want no boundaries, good luck. Even if you managed it, you’d spiral into oblivion. And yes, I do mean the kind of spiraling you do when you are anxious.

Logic and reasoning to come to objective truths are not inherently white and those who pose postmodernism are almost all white people appropriating an amalgamating other non-white cultures into one school of thought framed from a white perspective.

So, within the postmodern framework, what I said is “my Truth” and is “valid”.

[struggling-academic]

I met with some very cool people today to discuss their new research project about parasite-animal-human relationships, which hopes to touch on social and biological anthropology, primatology, veterinary medicine, human medicine and others. It's genuinely one of the most amazing projects I've heard about recently and I'm thrilled to (hopefully) be a part of it.

For my fellow scientists, please suggest your favorite books, research papers, anything really on the subject of parasites from any point of view!! I'd really appreciate it.

[medsocionwheels]

Compliance, per the two main approaches to medical sociology

Sociology in medicine is research that’s of interest to medical professionals, medical educators, medical scientists— things that are important to medicine as an institution.

Sociology of medicine tends to be research of interest to the general scientific field of sociology, not only sociologists who study matters of medicine, health, illness, healthcare, and disability. Importantly, it is not that medicine is simply disinterested in sociology of medicine, the institution of medicine sometimes has a vested interest in silencing or arguing against sociology of medicine. Sociology of medicine may not be useful to medical professionals, but if, for example, sociology of medicine is critiquing medical practice, as is often the case, it might move beyond useless to being perceived as offensive.

To further explore the difference between sociology in versus of medicine, let’s take the issue of compliance.

From the medical perspective, patient compliance is vital for successful medical practice and treatment. if your patient is not listening to you–for example, if they’re not taking their medication, and that medication is supposed to get them better, than you are going to have a much more difficult time treating that patient, and thus, a much harder time doing your job, than if the patient “complied” with your treatment plan. Same thing if your patient won’t have surgery. Well, if operating is the way that you do your job and the patient refuses, you cannot do your job as well. So, sociology in medicine would examine compliance with this medical perspective in mind. Sociology in medicine might investigate the barriers to patient compliance, and they might ask about these barriers in terms of patient behavior, asking something like "why are these patients non-compliant?" with the goal of identifying things that can be addressed to help patients better comply, so that medical professionals can have better chances of success when trying to do their jobs.

Now, moving to sociology of medicine—the greater field of sociology is interested in issues of power and inequality. When examining compliance in terms of power and inequality, we might look at something like physician control over patients, which would contribute to areas of sociology beyond medical sociology, such as the larger sociological literature on deviance and social control.

From this perspective, physicians offer something that patients cannot obtain on their own—prescription medications, surgery, imaging…these are all things that are considered both illegal and dangerous when obtained from non-credentialed entities. This means patients must be compliant to avoid severe consequences, like physical injury, disability, or even death. Healthcare providers hold power to help people feel better when they have few, if any, safe alternatives.

Instead of looking at compliance as inherently positive or necessary, we can critique the concept, and most importantly, the continued endorsement of compliance as “positive” and “necessary” by credentialed actors in medicine. So, sociology of medicine, similarly to sociology in medicine, may examine barriers to compliance, but because it does not assume compliance is necessary or helpful to the patient, it leaves room to explore the patient experience. Sociology of medicine can explore things like mistrust of medical professionals, experiences with bias and discrimination in the clinical encounter, and the patient’s understanding of a potential treatment as helpful versus their belief that the treatment is useless (independent of the science on said treatment’s effectiveness).

So, while sociology in medicine and sociology of medicine might both be interested in the question of “why do patients become noncompliant,” sociology in medicine might approach that question with the intent of identifying something that will lead to increased compliance, whereas sociology of medicine may approach the question in terms of medical harm, so not taking the assumption that compliance is positive, instead, taking the more skeptical view that compliance might be an exercise of power on the part of the healthcare provider over the patient and focusing on issues like the potential for patterns of exploitation and/or harm of certain groups of patients with shared characteristics. Sociology of medicine might ask whether healthcare providers, because they are powerful, are inherently good or right. Sociology in medicine would probably not ask this question at all, instead assuming the answer to be "yes"

[killjoygem]

Recently discovered the take that Medicine isn't part of STEM, which feels even more ridiculous than Psychology not being stem

[toastyslayingbutter]

"In 2004, Gilead Sciences decided to stop pursuing a new H.I.V. drug. The public explanation was that it wasn’t sufficiently different from an existing treatment to warrant further development.

In private, though, something else was at play. Gilead had devised a plan to delay the new drug’s release to maximize profits, even though executives had reason to believe it might turn out to be safer for patients, according to a trove of internal documents made public in litigation against the company."