#Socioeconomic factors and health outcomes

[greenthestral]

Unleashing the Power of Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being for a Thriving World

In our quest for a better world, one of the most fundamental goals we must strive for is Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being. Recognized as a crucial part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Goal 3 aims to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. This ambitious goal encompasses a wide range of factors, including disease prevention, access to healthcare, mental health, and the promotion of healthy lifestyles. By addressing the challenges and opportunities presented by Goal 3, we have the potential to transform societies, empower individuals, and create a healthier and more prosperous world.

The Importance of Good Health and Well-being

Good health and well-being serve as the foundation for individuals, communities, and nations to thrive and prosper. When individuals enjoy good health, they are more equipped to actively participate in their communities, pursue education, and engage in productive work. Healthy individuals have the energy, physical strength, and mental resilience to contribute meaningfully to society. They can be more productive, innovative, and creative, leading to overall progress and development.

Conversely, poor health poses significant challenges to individuals and society as a whole. When individuals suffer from ill health, their ability to contribute to their communities becomes constrained. Limited physical capabilities, chronic illnesses, and mental health issues can hinder their participation in various aspects of life, including education, employment, and social activities. This not only diminishes their own potential but also limits the overall productivity and growth of communities and nations.

Moreover, the impact of poor health extends beyond individual well-being and has broader socio-economic implications. Inadequate health systems, prevalence of diseases, and lack of access to healthcare services can hamper economic growth and exacerbate existing inequalities. When a significant portion of the population is burdened by illness, it leads to increased healthcare costs, reduced workforce productivity, and higher rates of absenteeism. The consequences of poor health ripple through society, hindering progress and perpetuating cycles of poverty and inequality.

Recognizing the significance of good health and well-being, Goal 3 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) places a strong emphasis on ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages. It acknowledges that achieving good health is not only a moral imperative but also a strategic investment in human capital and sustainable development.

By investing in healthcare infrastructure, disease prevention, and health promotion initiatives, nations can lay the groundwork for a healthy and productive population. Accessible and affordable healthcare services, including preventive care, vaccinations, and treatment options, play a crucial role in reducing the burden of diseases and improving overall health outcomes. Strengthening health systems and ensuring universal healthcare coverage is not only a matter of justice but also a smart investment in the well-being and economic stability of a nation.

Promoting good health and well-being is not limited to physical health alone. Mental health, often overlooked or stigmatized, is an integral component of overall well-being. Mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, and stress, can significantly impact an individual's quality of life and ability to function effectively. By prioritizing mental health, providing access to mental health services, and fostering supportive environments, societies can create conditions that enable individuals to thrive holistically.

Furthermore, achieving Goal 3 requires addressing the root causes of health disparities and inequalities. Socioeconomic factors, including income inequality, education, and social determinants of health, can significantly influence an individual's health status. Vulnerable populations, such as women, children, older adults, and marginalized communities, are often disproportionately affected by health inequities. To achieve good health and well-being for all, it is essential to implement policies and programs that specifically target these groups and reduce disparities.

Technology and innovation also play a vital role in advancing Goal 3. The integration of digital health solutions, telemedicine, wearable devices, and data analytics can enhance healthcare delivery, improve access to services, and facilitate preventive care. These advancements have the potential to bridge geographical barriers, reach remote populations, and empower individuals to take control of their health. By harnessing the power of technology and encouraging further innovation, we can overcome challenges in healthcare delivery and maximize the potential for good health and well-being worldwide.

Good health and well-being are not only essential for individuals to flourish but also for communities and nations to thrive. By prioritizing Goal 3 and investing in disease prevention, access to healthcare, mental health support, healthy lifestyles, and addressing inequalities, we can create a society where everyone has the opportunity to lead a healthy and fulfilling life. Achieving good health and well-being is not just a moral obligation; it is a strategic investment in human capital and sustainable development that will pave the way for a brighter and more prosperous future.

Disease Prevention and Universal Healthcare

At the heart of Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being lies the fundamental objective of disease prevention and ensuring access to quality healthcare for all individuals, regardless of their socio-economic background. This objective encompasses a range of strategies and initiatives aimed at reducing the burden of diseases, improving health outcomes, and promoting overall well-being.

Effective disease prevention is a cornerstone of achieving good health. Immunization programs have proven to be one of the most successful public health interventions, preventing millions of deaths each year from vaccine-preventable diseases. Through vaccination campaigns, individuals are protected from diseases such as measles, polio, hepatitis, and influenza. Immunization not only safeguards individual health but also contributes to herd immunity, reducing the overall transmission and impact of infectious diseases within communities.

Furthermore, clean water and sanitation initiatives play a crucial role in disease prevention. Access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation facilities is essential for preventing waterborne diseases, such as cholera, typhoid, and diarrhea. Improved sanitation practices, including the provision of adequate toilets and waste management systems, help minimize the spread of pathogens and promote better hygiene practices.

In addition to disease prevention measures, health education campaigns are essential for promoting awareness and empowering individuals to make informed decisions about their health. These campaigns provide valuable information about disease prevention, early detection, and healthy lifestyles. By educating communities about the importance of hygiene, nutrition, sexual and reproductive health, and other health-related topics, individuals can take proactive steps to protect themselves and their families from diseases.

Universal healthcare coverage is a crucial aspect of Goal 3, ensuring that everyone has access to essential healthcare services without facing financial hardships. It means that individuals should be able to access healthcare when needed, without fear of incurring catastrophic expenses that could push them into poverty. Universal healthcare coverage encompasses a broad range of services, including preventive care, primary healthcare, emergency care, essential medications, and specialized treatments.

Achieving universal healthcare coverage requires a comprehensive approach that addresses both financial and non-financial barriers to accessing healthcare. Governments and policymakers must work towards developing robust healthcare systems that are accessible, equitable, and efficient. This involves establishing healthcare facilities, training healthcare professionals, ensuring the availability of essential medicines and technologies, and implementing health financing mechanisms that protect individuals from financial hardships.

The importance of disease prevention and access to quality healthcare for all cannot be overstated. Timely access to healthcare services enables early detection and treatment of diseases, reducing the burden on individuals and society. It also promotes preventive care, which focuses on addressing risk factors and promoting healthy behaviors to prevent the onset of diseases.

Moreover, universal healthcare coverage contributes to reducing health inequalities. It ensures that individuals from all socio-economic backgrounds, including marginalized populations, have equal opportunities to access healthcare services. By addressing disparities in healthcare access, we can work towards creating a fairer and more just society, where everyone has the chance to live a healthy and fulfilling life.

Disease prevention strategies, clean water and sanitation initiatives, and health education campaigns are crucial components of achieving Goal 3. These measures help reduce the burden of communicable diseases and improve overall health outcomes. Additionally, ensuring universal healthcare coverage is vital to guarantee that everyone has access to essential healthcare services without facing financial hardships. By prioritizing disease prevention and working towards universal healthcare coverage, we can lay the foundation for a healthier and more equitable society, where good health and well-being are attainable for all.

Mental Health and Well-being

While the focus on physical health is essential, it is crucial to recognize that mental health and well-being are equally significant components of Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being. Mental health issues affect millions of people worldwide, cutting across age, gender, and socioeconomic boundaries. However, these issues often go unnoticed, undiagnosed, or stigmatized, resulting in individuals suffering in silence and without appropriate support.

Promoting mental well-being requires a multifaceted approach that addresses both the societal and individual aspects of mental health. Firstly, it is vital to destigmatize mental health conditions and raise awareness about the prevalence and impact of mental illnesses. Challenging misconceptions and educating the public can help dismantle the barriers that prevent individuals from seeking help and support.

Integrating mental health into healthcare systems is another crucial step in promoting well-being. Mental health services should be accessible, affordable, and integrated into primary healthcare settings. This integration allows for early identification, intervention, and treatment of mental health conditions, ensuring that individuals receive the support they need in a timely manner.

Mental health promotion should extend beyond healthcare settings and encompass various sectors of society. Schools, workplaces, and community organizations play a significant role in fostering mental well-being. Implementing mental health programs in schools that focus on emotional literacy, stress management, and resilience building can equip young people with the tools they need to navigate the challenges of life.

In the workplace, creating a supportive environment that values employee well-being can significantly impact mental health outcomes. Encouraging work-life balance, providing mental health resources, and promoting open dialogue about mental health can help reduce stress and improve overall employee well-being.

Community organizations and grassroots initiatives also play a vital role in promoting mental health. Support groups, helplines, and community-based mental health services can provide individuals with a safe space to seek support and share their experiences. These initiatives foster a sense of belonging, reduce isolation, and promote social connections, which are crucial protective factors for mental health.

Investing in research and evidence-based practices is essential to inform mental health policies and interventions. By prioritizing research, policymakers can make informed decisions, allocate resources effectively, and develop targeted interventions that address the specific needs of diverse populations.

Furthermore, addressing the social determinants of mental health is integral to promoting mental well-being. Factors such as poverty, inequality, discrimination, and violence can significantly impact an individual's mental health. By addressing these social determinants, societies can create the conditions that support mental well-being for all.

Prevention is a key aspect of promoting mental health. By focusing on early intervention and prevention strategies, societies can reduce the incidence and severity of mental health conditions. This includes promoting healthy coping mechanisms, resilience-building programs, and providing support for individuals who may be at higher risk, such as survivors of trauma or individuals experiencing significant life transitions.

Creating a more compassionate and supportive society requires collaboration and the involvement of various stakeholders. Governments, healthcare systems, educational institutions, employers, communities, and individuals all have a role to play in promoting mental health and well-being. By working together, we can create an environment that fosters understanding, empathy, and support for individuals facing mental health challenges.

In conclusion, while physical health is essential, mental health and well-being must be equally prioritized in achieving Goal 3. Promoting mental well-being requires destigmatization, increased awareness, and the provision of accessible mental health services. By recognizing the importance of mental health and integrating it into healthcare systems, educational settings, workplaces, and communities, we can create a more compassionate and supportive society where individuals can thrive and achieve overall well-being.

Promoting Healthy Lifestyles

Promoting healthy lifestyles is a proactive and preventive approach to achieving Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being. Encouraging individuals to adopt healthy habits, such as engaging in regular physical activity, maintaining balanced diets, and avoiding harmful substances, can have a profound impact on their overall well-being and contribute to the prevention of various health conditions.

Regular physical activity is crucial for maintaining good health and preventing chronic diseases. Engaging in physical activities such as walking, jogging, cycling, or participating in sports not only improves cardiovascular fitness but also strengthens muscles and bones, enhances mental well-being, and reduces the risk of conditions like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Governments, educational institutions, and communities should collaborate to provide accessible recreational spaces, sports facilities, and promote physical education programs to encourage individuals of all ages to engage in regular exercise.

Balanced diets are essential for providing the body with the necessary nutrients for optimal functioning. Encouraging individuals to consume a variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats can promote overall health and prevent nutritional deficiencies. Governments can implement policies that support the availability and affordability of nutritious food options, while educational institutions can incorporate nutrition education into curricula to empower individuals with the knowledge and skills to make informed dietary choices.

Avoiding harmful substances, such as tobacco, excessive alcohol consumption, and illicit drugs, is crucial for maintaining good health and preventing a range of health problems. Governments play a significant role in implementing and enforcing policies and regulations to control the availability and marketing of harmful substances. Educational institutions and community organizations can provide education and awareness campaigns to highlight the detrimental effects of these substances and promote healthy lifestyle choices.

Collaboration between various stakeholders is essential to promoting healthy lifestyles effectively. Governments can enact policies that create supportive environments for healthy choices, such as implementing taxes on unhealthy products, restricting advertising of unhealthy foods to children, and creating smoke-free public spaces. Educational institutions can integrate health education into curricula, teaching students about the importance of physical activity, nutrition, and the risks associated with substance abuse. Communities can establish initiatives that provide access to nutritious food options, create safe spaces for physical activity, and organize community events that promote healthy lifestyles.

Furthermore, utilizing technology and digital platforms can be effective in promoting healthy lifestyles. Mobile applications, wearable devices, and online platforms can provide individuals with tools and resources to track their physical activity, monitor their diet, and receive personalized recommendations for healthy living. These technological advancements can facilitate behavior change, provide motivation and support, and connect individuals with a community of like-minded individuals striving for healthy lifestyles.

It is crucial to recognize that promoting healthy lifestyles is not just about individual choices but also about addressing the underlying social and environmental factors that influence behavior. Socioeconomic factors, such as income, education, and access to resources, can significantly impact an individual's ability to adopt and maintain healthy habits. Therefore, efforts should be made to reduce health inequalities and create equitable environments that enable and empower individuals from all backgrounds to make healthy choices.

Promoting healthy lifestyles is a proactive approach to achieving Goal 3. Encouraging individuals to engage in regular physical activity, maintain balanced diets, and avoid harmful substances can have a positive impact on their overall well-being and prevent various health conditions. Governments, educational institutions, and communities should collaborate to provide resources, education, and infrastructure that support healthy choices and facilitate behavior change. By fostering environments that promote and support healthy lifestyles, we can create a society where good health and well-being are accessible to all individuals.

Addressing Inequalities and Vulnerable Populations

Achieving Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being for all requires a comprehensive approach that addresses inequalities and reaches out to vulnerable populations. Various factors, including socioeconomic status, gender disparities, and geographic location, can significantly impact individuals' access to healthcare services and their overall health outcomes. In order to create a more equitable society and ensure that no one is left behind, it is crucial to implement policies and programs that prioritize the needs of marginalized groups, including women, children, older adults, and those living in poverty or conflict-affected areas.

Socioeconomic factors play a significant role in determining an individual's access to healthcare. Poverty and income inequality can limit individuals' ability to afford essential healthcare services, medications, and treatments. Lack of access to quality education and employment opportunities can further perpetuate health disparities. To address these issues, governments should implement policies that focus on poverty reduction, promote inclusive economic growth, and provide social safety nets to support vulnerable populations. It is crucial to ensure that healthcare services are affordable, and financial barriers are minimized, allowing individuals from all socioeconomic backgrounds to access the care they need.

Gender disparities also have a profound impact on health outcomes. Women and girls often face unique health challenges and may encounter barriers to accessing healthcare services. This includes limited access to reproductive health services, maternal healthcare, and gender-based violence. Governments and organizations should prioritize gender-responsive healthcare policies that address the specific needs of women and girls, including reproductive health services, access to family planning methods, and support for maternal and child health. Furthermore, efforts should be made to empower women through education, economic opportunities, and gender equality initiatives, as these factors have a direct impact on their health and well-being.

Geographic location is another critical factor that can influence access to healthcare. Individuals living in remote or rural areas often face challenges in accessing healthcare facilities, transportation, and specialized services. This issue is compounded in conflict-affected regions, where infrastructure and healthcare systems may be disrupted. To overcome these barriers, governments should invest in healthcare infrastructure in underserved areas, provide mobile healthcare units or telemedicine services, and implement strategies to attract healthcare professionals to remote regions. Additionally, humanitarian organizations and international efforts should prioritize providing healthcare assistance to populations affected by conflicts and disasters, ensuring that those in crisis situations receive the necessary support.

Addressing health inequalities and reaching out to vulnerable populations requires a multi-sectoral approach. Governments, healthcare systems, non-governmental organizations, and community-based initiatives must collaborate to develop targeted programs that address the specific needs of marginalized groups. This includes raising awareness about health issues, providing culturally sensitive healthcare services, and integrating community health workers who can bridge the gap between healthcare providers and underserved communities.

In addition to addressing immediate healthcare needs, it is essential to focus on long-term preventive strategies. This includes health promotion and disease prevention initiatives that target vulnerable populations. For example, promoting sexual and reproductive health education among adolescent girls can empower them to make informed decisions about their health and well-being. Implementing nutrition programs in schools and communities can address malnutrition and promote healthy eating habits among children. Moreover, focusing on geriatric care and providing specialized healthcare services for older adults can support healthy aging and enhance the quality of life for this population.

Achieving good health and well-being for all requires addressing inequalities and reaching out to vulnerable populations. Socioeconomic factors, gender disparities, and geographic location significantly impact individuals' access to healthcare and health outcomes. By implementing policies and programs that prioritize the needs of marginalized groups, we can work towards creating a more equitable society. It is imperative to address poverty, gender disparities, and geographic barriers to healthcare, while also focusing on preventive strategies and long-term health promotion. Through concerted efforts and collaborative actions, we can strive towards ensuring that everyone, regardless of their background, has the opportunity to lead a healthy and fulfilling life.

Technology and Innovation in Healthcare

Technology and innovation have the potential to transform healthcare and play a pivotal role in achieving Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being. The rapid advancements in technology, such as telemedicine, mobile health applications, electronic health records (EHRs), and artificial intelligence (AI)-based diagnostics, are revolutionizing healthcare delivery, making it more accessible, efficient, and cost-effective. By harnessing the power of these tools and promoting further innovation, we can bridge gaps in healthcare delivery and significantly enhance health outcomes on a global scale.

Telemedicine, or remote healthcare consultations, has emerged as a game-changer in healthcare accessibility. It allows individuals to consult with healthcare professionals from the comfort of their homes, eliminating the need for physical visits to healthcare facilities, especially in remote or underserved areas. Telemedicine facilitates timely access to medical advice, follow-up care, and specialist consultations. Moreover, it can improve healthcare outcomes by enabling early detection and intervention, particularly for chronic conditions that require ongoing monitoring and management.

Mobile health applications, or mHealth apps, have gained popularity as powerful tools for health promotion and disease management. These apps offer a wide range of features, including personalized health tracking, medication reminders, fitness monitoring, and access to educational resources. mHealth apps empower individuals to actively participate in their own healthcare, promoting self-management and preventive behaviors. Additionally, these apps can facilitate remote patient monitoring, allowing healthcare providers to track patients' vital signs and provide timely interventions when necessary.

The adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has transformed healthcare documentation and data management. EHRs enable the secure storage and exchange of patient information among healthcare providers, improving coordination and continuity of care. They streamline administrative processes, reduce medical errors, and facilitate evidence-based decision-making. EHRs also serve as valuable repositories of health data that can be utilized for research and population health management, leading to better understanding of diseases, treatment outcomes, and public health trends.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms have shown great promise in healthcare diagnostics and decision support. AI-powered diagnostic tools can analyze medical images, such as X-rays and MRIs, with remarkable accuracy, aiding in early detection and diagnosis of diseases. AI algorithms can also analyze large datasets to identify patterns, predict outcomes, and personalize treatment plans. These advancements have the potential to revolutionize disease management, improve patient outcomes, and optimize healthcare resource allocation.

Furthermore, wearable devices and remote monitoring technologies are becoming increasingly prevalent in healthcare. These devices, such as smartwatches and fitness trackers, can monitor vital signs, physical activity levels, and sleep patterns. They provide valuable data for individuals to track their health and wellness, while also enabling healthcare providers to remotely monitor patients with chronic conditions, detect abnormalities, and intervene when necessary.

Innovation in healthcare technology is not limited to high-income countries. Low-cost and scalable solutions are being developed to address the unique challenges faced by resource-constrained settings. For example, mobile-based diagnostic tools, point-of-care testing devices, and low-cost telemedicine solutions are being deployed in underserved areas to improve access to healthcare and diagnostics.

However, it is important to acknowledge that technology is not a panacea for all healthcare challenges. It should be seen as a complementary tool that works in synergy with healthcare professionals' expertise and human touch. Ethical considerations, privacy, and data security must also be taken into account to ensure that technological advancements are used responsibly and to the benefit of patients.

To fully leverage the potential of technology and innovation in healthcare, it is essential to foster an ecosystem that encourages collaboration between healthcare providers, technology developers, policymakers, and researchers. Governments should support research and development initiatives, promote regulatory frameworks that facilitate the safe and effective deployment of healthcare technologies, and invest in digital infrastructure to enable widespread adoption.

Technology and innovation have the power to revolutionize healthcare and drive progress towards Goal 3. Advancements such as telemedicine, mobile health applications, EHRs, and AI-based diagnostics are already transforming healthcare delivery and improving access to quality care. By embracing and further promoting these technological tools, we can bridge gaps in healthcare delivery, enhance health outcomes, and bring us closer to achieving universal good health and well-being. It is crucial to foster an ecosystem that supports collaboration, research, and responsible use of technology to ensure equitable access to healthcare for all individuals, regardless of their geographic location or socioeconomic status.

Conclusion

Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being is a critical pillar of sustainable development that demands our attention, collaboration, and innovation. By working towards disease prevention, universal healthcare coverage, mental health support, healthy lifestyles, and addressing inequalities, we can build resilient communities and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to lead a healthy and fulfilling life. Together, let us unleash the power of Goal 3 and create a world where good health and well-being are within reach for all.

[communistkenobi]

(genuine question, sorry if any of my language is incorrect/outdated) I was reading that post you reblogged about the distinction between gender and sex and how both concepts are linked and oppressive & the ask you answered where you said that we should abolish sex distinctions on medical records. and I don’t disagree with your point, but I’m wondering how feasible it is? Or I guess, how we would then navigate the medically differences between different groups of people. Because the unfortunate truth is that some biological factors do affect your predisposition to certain diseases or how you’ll react to medication.

For example, Black people in the US are more likely to have diabetes. and obviously a lot of this is due to poverty and other socioeconomic problems, but if we were to abolish the concept of race (before solving the underlying issues), it could lead to people not being diagnosed with the correct illness as quickly, since there’s no longer that demographic information available (I’m realizing that diabetes was a bad example for this specific problem, but I’m drawing a blank on a better example).

I remember for years growing up that there was a push to recognize that the stereotypical “pain in left arm” depiction of a heart attack was more common among cis men, and cis women usually presented differently. And I’m a cis woman with ADHD, but when trials were being conducted to prove that medications were effective, they focused only on cis men, so now I just have to deal with my meds being way less effective whenever I’m on my period.

The example you gave of a trans man’s insurance denying him coverage for a pap smear seems more like an issue of the insurance company linking gender and sex, rather than respecting that someone saying that they are a man on government forms doesn’t inherently describe what organs they do or do not have. Which seems like it would be a point in the favor of people who draw a distinction between gender and sex. Yes, he is a man, but he has organs that need to regularly be screened for cancer, the same way a trans woman might need to be checked for prostate cancer.

The medical field is definitely sexist and transphobic (and just about every other -ist and -phobic), but couldn’t abolishing both gender and sex exacerbate these issues? The only thing I can think of is, like, checkboxes for what organs you have, but that seems like it’d still be the concept of “sex”, just in slightly different language.

so, a couple points before we get into this conversation:

Current gendered distinctions in the medical field to address health issues are not nearly as helpful as you are suggesting

You cannot abolish the concept of race (or gender or class or etc) without addressing the underlying systemic violence and inequality that gives those social categories power in society

Like, baseline - how helpful is it to sort all of humanity into 2 bins, male or female, medically speaking? To use a hypothetical, if you were to sort all human beings into 2 categories, either “young” or “old,” what medical information about those people could you glean from that alone? The answer is probably more than zero, but it’s still not a lot, and if we were to construct an entire insurance and medical apparatus on the basis of whether you’re young or old alone would be very silly.

Now what you’re talking about is using a collection of demographic information - gender, race, age, weight, etc - to construct standard benchmarks by which to measure medical outcomes in people. However, the origins of things like gender and race are not medical, they’re social, and are used to enforce social positions in society that may produce specific medical outcomes as a result of either oppression (eg, certain racial minorities are more predisposed to certain health conditions) or inference (eg, “only women can get pregnant”).

You, as a cis woman, telling your doctor you’re a cis woman, does not actually describe your ability to get pregnant, only a rough probability. If we want to describe the group of people in society who can get pregnant, we should call them “people who can get pregnant.” then we’re including everyone who can, and not including anyone who cannot (infertile cis women, some intersex people, trans women, some nonbinary people, people who have had their uterus removed, post-menopausal cis women, etc). That results in a de-gendering of pregnancy, and allows for a more precise description of what medical resources those people may need access to.

Additionally, race is not a biological determination of health (it is not biological at all). It is a social position that we all occupy different positions in, which, by virtue of being in those positions, gives us access to different social and physical environments that produce varying health outcomes. If you are black and live in a food desert, and suffer health problems as a consequence, that is not a biological difference on the basis of your race, that is purely a social one. The solution there would not be to codify race as a biological determinant of health, it would be to alter the built environment so that no one lives in a food desert. White supremacy is what produces these outcomes.

To use your ADHD trial example - the problem there is that it is assumed that the gender of cis men is medically trivial while treating all other genders as significant; they are presented as the human default, and anyone who does not fit that standard (ie, roughly 50% of all human beings) is a deviation from normalcy. We see this most especially with race, where white people are assumed to be non-racial, existing outside the construct of race, and therefore we act as a handy baseline by which all other races can be measured (which is bad). The solution to this problem is not to draw more precise gender or race boundaries around symptoms, conditions, or medical trials, but to decouple gender and race from it entirely and describe in exact terms what affects whom. Race does not affect health outcomes; white supremacy does. Gender does not affect health outcomes; patriarchy does.

This is where systemic solutions come in! These are tricky because they’re comprehensive and require mass upheaval of existing institutions and norms. To use a historical example - the USSR* instituted a policy whereby women would be fully compensated for all reproductive labour (child-rearing, domestic labour, etc), effectively making housekeeping a full time job. Does this abolish patriarchy? No, but it certainly helps reduce misogyny in society by offering economic equality and enshrining domestic labour as being on par with productive labour. This also does a lot to help women medically, socially, legally, etc. by reducing economic dependency on their husbands and therefore reduces abuse, unhappy marriages, all of those things. this is the kind of policy that acts as a handy starting point for thinking about systemic solutions to systemic problems.

When talking about the abolition of a given social category (gender, race, etc), addressing the violence that social category does to the people who end up on the bottom of it is how abolition works. It’s not merely changing language or expanding existing norms (which are not useless of course, but they’re insufficient). Doctors offering HRT to trans people after we receive a mental illness diagnosis is like, better than not having access to care at all, but it still sucks! Trans people, in some countries, are in the process of being folded into the medical institution and are being constructed as a special medical class of people. That doesn’t get rid of transphobia and it doesn’t help all trans people, just those lucky enough to access it, and then the even smaller group of us who are lucky enough to convince doctors and psychiatrists to write the prescriptions and diagnoses and referrals required for us to be respected as our own gender. I could not legally change my name and gender marker until I had the sign-off from a doctor who was treating me medically for gender dysphoria, a professional person who knew me for at least five years, and a lawyer - and I’m in the incredibly privileged position to be able to get all of their signatures. That’s not freedom, that’s just paperwork!

The institution of medicine does not exist external to societal pressures; phrenology and eugenics are medical concepts that are deeply destructive and violent. Accounting for human variation does not require us to rely on social constructions of gender and race; we have precise terminology that we can use that will more accurately describe those things. I’m not a medical doctor, so I don’t know what those terms will all be, nor can I pretend to know what a fully equal medical institution looks like. but for example, I’ve seen people describe human bodies in terms of “estrogen dominant endocrine systems” and “testosterone dominant endocrine systems.” Is that better? Maybe! It’s probably a lot more useful of a description of a human body than man or woman is.

*me invoking the USSR as an example is not an endorsement of the entire state across its 70 year lifespan, nor is it an invitation for people to tell me how bad it actually was

[thoughtportal]

Childbirth Is Deadlier for Black Families Even When They’re Rich, Expansive Study Finds 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/12/upshot/child-maternal-mortality-rich-poor.html

In the United States, the richest mothers and their newborns are the most likely to survive the year after childbirth — except when the family is Black, according to a groundbreaking new study of two million California births. The richest Black mothers and their babies are twice as likely to die as the richest white mothers and their babies.

Research has repeatedly shown that Black mothers and babies have the worst childbirth outcomes in the United States. But this study is novel because it’s the first of its size to show how the risks of childbirth vary by both race and parental income, and how Black families, regardless of their socioeconomic status, are disproportionately affected.

“This is a landmark paper, and what it makes really stark is how we are leaving one group of people way behind,” said Atheendar Venkataramani, a University of Pennsylvania economist who studies racial health disparities and was not involved in the research.

The study, published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, includes nearly all the infants born to first-time mothers from 2007 to 2016 in California, the state with the most annual births. For the first time, it combines income tax data with birth, death and hospitalization records and demographic data from the Census Bureau and the Social Security Administration, while protecting identities.

That approach also reveals that premature infants born to poor parents are more likely to die than those born into the richest families. Yet there is one group that doesn’t gain the same protection from being rich, the study finds: Black mothers and babies.

Are you a Black parent who recently gave birth? Tell us about it.

“It suggests that the well-documented Black-white gap in infant and maternal health that’s been discussed a lot in recent years is not just explained by differences in economic circumstances,” said Maya Rossin-Slater, an economist studying health policy at Stanford and an author of the study. “It suggests it’s much more structural.”

If anything, the study’s findings understate the dangers of childbirth in much of the United States, a variety of researchers said, because California’s maternal mortality rate has been declining over the last decade, as deaths have gone up in the rest of the country.

Rich Families Have More Premature Babies. But Those Babies Are Less Likely to Die.

Perhaps unexpectedly, babies born to the richest 20 percent of families are the least healthy, the study finds. They are more likely to be born premature and at a low birth weight, two key risk factors for medical complications early in life. This is because their mothers are more likely to be older and to have twins (which are more common with the use of fertility treatments), the researchers found.

But even with those early risk factors, these babies are the most likely to survive both their first month and first year of life.

A similar pattern emerged when it came to the health of the parents themselves: Rich and poor mothers were equally likely to have high-risk pregnancies, but the poor mothers were three times as likely to die — even within the same hospitals. Rich women’s pregnancies “are not only the riskiest, but also the most protected,” the paper’s authors wrote.

 A pair of charts showing the relationship between a mother’s income and rates of premature births and infant mortality. The first chart shows that as a woman’s income rises, the likelihood of preterm birth rises. The second chart shows that as a woman’s income rises, rates of infant mortality fall.  

This finding suggests that the American medical system has the ability to save many of the lives of babies with early health risks, but that those benefits can be out of reach for low-income families.

Resources outside the medical system also play a role. Separate research on children with leukemia, for example, has found that even when treated at the same hospital and using the same protocol, those from high-income families fared better than those from poorer families.

“It’s not just about the medical care that kids are receiving,” said Anna Aizer, a health economist at Brown University. “There are all sorts of other things that go into having healthy babies. If you’re a higher-income mom who can take time off work, who doesn’t have to worry about paying rent, it’s not surprising you’ll be able to manage any health complications better.”

Money Protects White Mothers and Babies. It Doesn’t Protect Black Ones.

The researchers found that maternal mortality rates were just as high among the highest-income Black women as among low-income white women. Infant mortality rates between the two groups were also similar.

 Two charts showing the relationship between a mother’s income and rates of infant mortality by race. The first chart shows that as a Black mother’s income increases, the rate of infant mortality generally drops. The same is true in the second chart for white mothers, but at much lower rates than for Black women.  

The richest Black women have infant mortality rates at about the same level as the poorest white women.

The babies born to the richest Black women (the top tenth of earners) tended to have more risk factors, including being born premature or underweight, than those born to the richest white mothers — and more than those born to the poorest white mothers. It’s evidence that the harm to Black mothers and their babies, regardless of socioeconomic status, begins before childbirth.

“As a Black infant, you’re starting off with worse health, even those born into these wealthy families,” said Sarah Miller, a health economist at the University of Michigan. She was an author of the study with Professor Rossin-Slater and Petra Persson of Stanford, Kate Kennedy-Moulton of Columbia, Laura Wherry of N.Y.U. and Gloria Aldana of the Census Bureau.

Black mothers and babies had worse outcomes than those who were Hispanic, Asian or white in all the health measures the researchers looked at: whether babies were born early or underweight; whether mothers had birth-related health problems like eclampsia or sepsis; and whether the babies and mothers  died. There was not enough data to look at other populations, including Native Americans, but other research has shown that they face adverse outcomes nearing those of Black women and infants in childbirth.

 Charts that show the relationship between a mother’s income by group. The groups are Hispanic mothers and Asian mothers. Generally, rates for Hispanic mothers and Asian mothers track more closely with those of white mothers than Black mothers.  

Even before the new paper, research found that Black women with the most resources, as measured by education and class mobility, did not benefit during childbirth the way white women did. The new study demonstrates that disparities are not explained by income, age, marital status or country of birth. Rather, by showing that even rich Black mothers and babies have a disproportionately higher risk of death, the data suggests broader forces at play in the lives of Black mothers, Professor Rossin-Slater said.

“It’s not race, it’s racism,” said Tiffany L. Green, an economist focused on public health and obstetrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The data are quite clear that this isn’t about biology. This is about the environments where we live, where we work, where we play, where we sleep.”

There is clear evidence that Black patients experience racism in health care settings. In childbirth, mothers are treated differently and given different access to interventions. Black infants are more likely to survive if their doctors are Black. The experience of the tennis star Serena Williams — she had a pulmonary embolism after giving birth, yet said health care professionals did not address it at first — drew attention to how not even the most famous and wealthy Black women escape this pattern.

But this data shows how the effects of racism on childbirth start long before people arrive at the hospital, researchers across disciplines say, and continue after they leave. The stress of experiencing racism; air pollution in Black communities; and inequitable access to paid family leave, for example, have all been found to affect the health of mothers and babies.

“Even when it’s not about the direct disrespect that’s going on between the patient and the care provider, there are many ways systemic racism makes its way into the well-being of a pregnant or birthing person,” said Dr. Amanda P. Williams, the clinical innovation adviser at the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative.

California Is a Best-Case Scenario. It Still Lags Behind Other Wealthy Parts of the World.

Many parts of the United States have much higher maternal mortality than California, and fewer policies to support families. California was the first state to offer paid family leave. It has one of the most generous public insurance programs for pregnant women. The state has invested in specific programs aimed at reducing maternal deaths and racial disparities in childbirth.

Yet even in this best-case American scenario, mothers and babies fare worse compared with another rich country the researchers examined: Sweden. At every income level, Swedish women have healthier babies. This held true for the highest-income Swedish women and those from disadvantaged populations, including low-income and immigrant mothers.

 A pair of charts showing the relationship between birth outcomes in Sweden and California. The first chart shows that Swedish women have heavier babies at every income level. The second chart shows that Swedish women have lower rates of preterm birth than California women at every income level.  

Swedish women have heavier babies at every income level ...

... and far lower instances of preterm birth.

In the United States, earning more regularly translates into superior access to the fastest, most expensive health care. But even with that advantage, the richest white Californians in this study still gave birth to less healthy babies than the richest Swedish women. Their newborns were more likely to be premature or underweight. The two groups had roughly equal maternal death rates.

“That finding really does strongly suggest that it’s something about the care model,” said Dr. Neel Shah, chief medical officer of Maven Clinic for women’s and family health and a visiting scientist at Harvard Medical School. “We have the technology, but the model of prenatal care in the United States hasn’t really gotten an update in the last century.”

 A chart showing where the U.S. falls on the spectrum of maternal mortality among peer countries. The U.S. is last in a ranking that includes New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, Britain, Canada and France, in that order.  

Paper

Sweden, like most European countries, has universal health insurance with low out-of-pocket costs for the patient. Midwives deliver most babies in Sweden and provide most of the prenatal care, which has been linked to lower C-section rates and lower rates of preterm births and low birth weights. It has long paid leaves and subsidized child care.

Like California, Sweden has also started targeted efforts to reduce maternal deaths. When officials there recognized that African immigrants giving birth were dying more frequently, they began piloting a “culture doula” program, with doulas who were immigrants themselves helping pregnant women navigate the country’s health system.

Local maternal health programs could begin to help reduce racial disparities in the United States, too, as could a more diverse medical workforce, research suggests. Nonprofits and universities have experimented with ways to address racism and poverty, with programs like cash transfers for low-income pregnant women and initiatives to improve the environments of Black communities.

By the time a woman is pregnant, Professor Miller said, “it’s almost too late.”

“Health is going to depend on exposures throughout her life, health care she’s received, environmental factors,” she said. “A lot goes on prior to the pregnancy that affects the health of the mother and baby.”

About the data

The researchers collected birth certificate data for all babies born to first-time mothers in California from 2007 to 2016. The final sample included 1.96 million births. They collected hospitalization and death records for babies for one year from the California Department of Health Care Access and Information, as well as hospitalization records for mothers for nine months before the birth and a year after. They collected maternal death records for the same period from a Social Security Administration data set. They provided birth records to the Census Bureau, which assigned anonymous identification codes to access I.R.S. data and determine new parents’ incomes in the two years before the birth. (Infant mortality records were  available only until 2012. Maternal mortality data covers a longer period than in government records, which generally include data for six weeks after a birth, and most likely capture some deaths unrelated to childbirth.)

In Sweden, the researchers collected similar health and mortality data from the National Board of Health and Welfare. The final sample included 463,865 births. Analogous maternal morbidity data was unavailable. They linked babies to their parents and collected parents’ demographic and financial data from Statistics Sweden. Sweden has a smaller gap between the highest and lowest earners than the United States.

[ukrfeminism]

The number of women dying during pregnancy or soon after childbirth has reached its highest level in almost 20 years, according to new data. Experts have described the figures as “very worrying”.

How many women are dying?

Between 2020 and 2022, 293 women in the UK died during pregnancy or within 42 days of the end of their pregnancy. With 21 deaths classified as coincidental, 272 in 2,028,543 pregnancies resulted in a maternal death rate of 13.41 per 100,000.

This is a steep rise from the 8.79 deaths per 100,000 pregnancies in 2017 to 2019, the most recent three-year period with complete data. The death rate has increased to levels not seen since 2003 to 2005.

Where have the figures come from?

The data comes from MBRRACE-UK, which conducts surveillance and investigates the causes of maternal deaths, stillbirths and infant deaths as part of the national Maternal, Newborn and Infant Clinical Outcome Review Programme (MNI-CORP).

MNI-CORP aims to improve patient outcomes and is funded by NHS England, the Welsh government, the health and social care division of the Scottish government, the Northern Ireland Department of Health, and the states of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man.

Why are so many women dying during or just after childbirth?

The main cause of death was thrombosis and thromboembolism, or blood clots in the veins.

The second most common cause was Covid-19. But even when deaths due to Covid were excluded, the maternal death rate for 2020 to 2022 – 11.54 per 100,000 pregnancies – remained higher than the rate for 2017 to 2019.

Heart disease and deaths related to poor mental health were also common, according to a review of the data by the Guardian.

Why is the mortality rate increasing?

The researchers behind the data project, led by Oxford Population Health’s national perinatal epidemiology unit at the University of Oxford, highlight several issues.

They say maternity systems in the UK are under pressure but also point to pre-pregnancy health and the need to tackle conditions such as obesity, as well as critical actions to work towards more inclusive and personalised care during pregnancy.

Is there any good news?

Not really. The maternal death rate among black women decreased slightly compared with 2019 to 2021, but they remain three times more likely to die compared with white women. Asian women are twice as likely to die during pregnancy or soon after compared with white women.

Are there other factors aside from health?

Absolutely. Women living in the most deprived areas of the UK have a maternal death rate more than twice that of women living in the least deprived areas.

Persisting ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities show the UK must think beyond maternity care to address the “underlying structures” that impact health before, during and after pregnancy, such as housing, education and access to healthy environments, said Dr Nicola Vousden, co-chair of the women’s health specialist interest group for the Faculty of Public Health.

Are deaths during pregnancy only increasing in the UK?

No. Maternal death rates are rising in many countries, yet this alarming trend has not been seriously addressed by governments and healthcare systems worldwide.

Rates have doubled in the US over the last two decades, with deaths highest among black mothers, a study in Journal of the American Medical Association found. Indigenous women had the greatest increase.

It is difficult to compare precise death rates between countries because the data is not uniform. But other countries seeing substantial rises in rates include Venezuela, Cyprus, Greece, Mauritius, Puerto Rico, Belize, and the Dominican Republic.

What can be done to reverse the trend?

Urgent action is needed to bolster the quality of maternal healthcare, ensure it is accessible to all, and repair the damage inflicted by the pandemic on women’s healthcare services more generally.

Clea Harmer, the chief executive of bereavement charity Sands, said improving maternity safety also needs to be at the top of the UK’s agenda.

The government said it was committed to ensuring all women received safe and compassionate care from maternity services, regardless of their ethnicity, location or economic status.

Anneliese Dodds, the shadow women and equalities secretary, said Labour would seek to reverse the “deeply concerning” maternal mortality figures by training thousands more midwives and health visitors and incentivising continuity of care for women during pregnancy.

NHS England said it had made “significant improvements” to maternity services but acknowledged “further action” was needed. It has introduced maternal medical networks and specialist centres to improve the identification of potentially fatal medical conditions in pregnancy.

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

What do you think about HEAS?

Long story short, I support it.

So anon is referring to the "health at every size" movement, or the movement spurred by many fat people claiming that the majority of their health problems stem from doctors failing to treat them properly because they assume, at a glance, that they have a plethora of health problems based on their weight. So they fail to run proper tests, often costing fat patients years of wasted time that would have made a massive difference in health outcomes.

I have seen this happen. I know that fat people are not making it up when they say they experience this. I have a close friend who got fat in early childhood. This person did not eat significantly more than I did, and in fact, their mom was a hippie who introduced all different kinds of vegetables, vitamins, etc and eschewed all inorganic treats. As for me, I grew up with two parents who worked full-time and had gotten their nutritional information in the 70's, so I grew up on Kid Cuisine, McDonald's, and wonder bread. By looking at us, though, people would have assumed the opposite, because I was much thinner.

I saw this friend subjected to fat camp when we were in our teens, and taught to starve and over-exert themselves in ways that had lasting mental and physical health consequences. They developed anorexia and nearly fainted every time they stood up, but people praised them for this behavior because all they saw was weight loss, which they assumed was a sign of improved health. This same friend experienced a lifetime of medical abuse too lengthy to document here, and I suppose that's their story to tell anyway. However, one event that sticks out in my mind was when they developed gallstones. They experienced severe stomach pains after they ate anything, and this went on for a period of several months. Doctors kept telling them to eat less fatty foods, assuming that must have been what made up their diet. However, it was quite the opposite. Because their stomach pain had gotten so bad, they were only nibbling apple slices and saltines each day. As it turned out, they suffered months of gallstones before the problem was finally diagnosed.

Because health is complicated, there's no way to do a side-by-side comparison between mine and my friend's. But I know theirs would have been much better if they had been allowed to live fat in peace, and taken seriously by medical professionals.

The "health at every size" movement posits that people can experience their peak health at, well, every size, and that restricting down to a conventionally acceptable size is actually more harmful to the body than just letting them live. Now, there are a lot of complicated factors that go into size and health outcomes, but among them are frequently genetics, as well as inherited trauma, environmental and socioeconomic factors. (So, for example, there's the idea that if your ancestors experienced starvation, your body may resist losing weight.) None of this is straightforward. As I said, body outcomes are influenced by a number of factors.

But embracing health at every size could help a lot of fat people, which is important - and it could help thin people too, I believe. It could help everyone. A lot less eating disorders would form if we were all able to let go of the societal fear "but what if I get fat?" The truth is that bodies change naturally through life - puberty, for example, and then adulthood, menopause, pregnancy, the stress of a health crisis, a new medication, et cetera. We cannot retain a certain "look" forever. We remain in flux always. And there is no morality in gaining weight or changing shape during many of these life events. We often do a lot more health damage to ourselves trying to retain thinness than we would just eating intuitively and letting our bodies grow as they will.

But I feel there's something else that's important to mention in all this. Illness strikes many people in invisible ways, and there is no morality in experiencing illness either. I am a chronically ill person who isn't fat. If I got fat, my illness still would have nothing to do with my weight, though of course then everyone would assume that it did. The truth is, there are a lot of people who are not at their peak health, both fat and thin, and all of these individuals deserve respect, support, and to have their individual health needs taken seriously. It's very harmful to assume that all health problems are caused by somebody's weight.

Look, I'm not a doctor. But neither are most of the fatphobic people who claim feelings of superiority for their thinness. I think that a lot of ED sufferers would benefit from being able to let go of the fear that fatness inspires in them, and I think there are a lot of fat people that would be healthier at their resting weight than if they were pushed to restrict.

So yeah, I support health at every size. But I'm also supportive of providing respectful care for people who are not in good health.

[mercurialbadger]

When we are talking about charity, there must exist a level of certain precaution to not let your emotional turmoil result in subpar actions. If empathy is a natural response to seeing people in pain, then it makes sense to liken it to a kneejerk response, much different from a graceful strike of a soccer player.

Very often, personal face-to-face ingroup charity is used to displace the actual efforts at improving people's conditions, and if your organization lacks political oversight or a certain analytical capacity, you might have serving the community replaced with individual help which eventually accumulates every bias and/or ends up being co-opted by some cult.

I am seeing especially egregorious horrific examples of that on Twitter right now, so I will use them to illistrate a point that is otherwise too global and deep-rooted.

In order to understand how this approach does its harm, you need to understand cause and effect, past and future.

THE CAUSE

We are talking about a clique that talks about investing in trans community by helping homeless and/or unemployed trans women by "paying their bills" for some months before they "get up on their own legs". Thankfully, it's a US based clique, so a lot of sociological studies exist to demonstrate the current situation with trans rights.

Let's investigate the causes of queer people being unemployed and/or homeless. The obvious systemic cause is trans-/homophobia, which results in people losing their capabilities immediately after leaving their parents/coming out to them (see e.g. https://doi.org/gq37kh), or otherwise follows the patterns of stigmatization, exclusion and victimization. If we address more widespread political economy of this vulnerability in the USA, topics of mental health, such as PTSD burnout, substance abuse and sexual abuse - including significantly from within queer community - emerge as vulnerability categories (https://doi.org/ggsjt6). As for how inventive abuse from within "community" is, one might refer themselves to the concepts of "hot allostatic load" and "identity abuse" (https://doi.org/ggmdcd).

Failures of t4t ethos and "community short-circuit" also have been described as sources of chronic homelessness among queer youth (https://doi.org/mpx8).

One must be especially mindful of the fact that level of education is an important - if not the most important - predictive factor of queer homelessness, effects were described in depth by Rachel M. Schmitz in the dissertation work "ON THE STREET AND ON CAMPUS".

While the effects identified the author ascribes to better socioeconomical standing of college students majorly, author both identified " experiences of homelessness" as "uniting people through a shared sense of struggle and conflict", and notably gives credit to educational endeavor of academia as vastly superior to "street experience", and studies in countries with accessible education still identify low education level with risks of anxiety and depression. (https://doi.org/mpx3) (https://doi.org/mpx4)

As Negura notes, "Ultimately, the three concepts—‘social support’, ‘social capital’ and ‘social bonds’ — are complementary. These terms are used here to understand the same reality of mutual help amongst people, from different social perspectives."

CONSEQUENCES

The most recognized effect of homelessness is anxiety and depression. Recent works identify that both of these health effects are significantly resolved through providing housing, however meta-analysis of the works being done is very complicated by poor methodology of studies: short follow-up, making it impossible to judge the homelessness outcomes, and high group heterogeneity. (https://doi.org/mpxx)

Among the outcomes of homelessness specifically in queer people, "utopian thinking" is seen, in accordance with England, 2022, "an inevitable part of community responses: to improve the present it, it is necessary to look beyond the present and to an alternative in which queerness does not only survive, but is valued, celebrated and encouraged".

To a materialist that would mean death of the community as a utopianism-free endeavor, but it is not, however, it should be noted that imperfect solutions to the crisis provide fertile soil to these cognitive failures.

Actual observations of the long-lasting effects of experienced homelessness are, indeed, lacking, but so far there's no data that homelessness and unemployment actually have significant lasting damage in the queer population, nonetheless remaining the risk factor in their duration.

One, however, important effect of escaping and avoiding homelessness is resiliency. As Cronley, 2017 notes, "Rather than understanding how youth are surviving in extremely adverse environments, research applies socially normative models of behavior to their actions such that conclusions of deviancy and marginalization are inevitable" and "youth rely on informal social networks to survive on the street and that spirituality, mental health, and creativity are associated with improved coping". Once again we are drawn to connections to education systems within this approach.

And therefore we must remember establishment of education systems during historical cases.

PAST

Expansion of educational processes has long been demonstrated to be a driver of establishing new or maintaining old hegemony.

One might remember Huguenots, who existed both in France and in Netherlands. Often, for example in Van der Lem's "Eighty Years War", Erasmus of Rotherdam is remembered to be as a reason for catholics' loss in the region - humanism, moderateness and church reforms were indeed the ideas of his. It's not easy for me to believe, considering how Netherlands were absolute leaders in amount of exterminated heretics during the 1520-1540, therefore you cannot imagine the humanism and spirit of mercantile freedom helping very much.

But comparing the historical evidence between French Huguenot fighting and Netherlands' Huguenot fighting, one stark difference is seen immediately without even examining the evidence - it's the material amount of Evidence piled up.

Netherlands of XVI century was ultimately a literature-centric country: rational argument, presented with necessary charisma and efficiency, put into the easy epistolary style allowing for open discussion - all that erased the differences between catholics and protestants.

And using this positional leveling, protestants spent 10-20 years before, well, protesting with continuous work of printing press, while catholics of Netherlands continued, thinking themselves safe, sat complacent, only satisfying the demands of the already intellectual public.

Indeed, you can not let a worldly peasant work with biology, err, theology, lest they will be mistaken and fall into the tenets of sin themselves. A good example of this "Don't give the North Korean kids iGEM distribution" was dutch translation of La Bouclier de la Foy by Nicole Grenier, which the translator prefaced with an easy explanation that you should never actually argue with heretics, the priestly class knows best.

In France, enjoying the closeness of Rome, literacy was synonymous with military industry, err, Raytheon, wait, wrong, Catholic Church.

Of course it was literacy ultimately sympathetic to the plight of the layman, and easily putting itself into their shoes - «Les disputes de Guillot le porcher et de la Bergère de S. Denis en France contre Jehan Calvin prédicant de Genesve» is exactly about the lower classes destroying Kalvin himself with facts and logic.

And, like this, simply by virtue of being able to work with higher reasoning in lower genres, you can win the Hegemony.

The ultimate victory of feminism in 1917 also answers a lot about where did soviet feminists come from - from the intermediate spaces where people of higher class can interact as equals with people of lower class, without financial or institutional power relationship between them. An example is, of course Pavlov teaching women's courses and creating a whole host of women physiologists, actual hymnasia and schools, such as in Sonya Yanovskaya case.

Masonic secret societies, where jews could freely talk to christians and nobles mingles with commoner bourgeois were this driver in bourgeois revolutions, universities drove February and October revolution, and even in the USA the connectedness to high-socioeconomic status, what is called "bridging social capital" remains a primary predictor of success of people from oppressed groups. (https://doi.org/gqmpxx)

FUTURE

As such, I cannot see a way for personal charity - bonding social capital, excising queer people from support networks and from solidarity with marginalized, destructive to both people outside of it and to attempts to build a queer community — to be excused in modern conditions.

Build new platforms to, instead of elevating select voices, sing together.

[don-lichterman]

Genetics and environmental factors contribute to how socioeconomic status shapes the brain architecture

Genetics and environmental factors contribute to how socioeconomic status shapes the brain architecture

Your education, your job, your income, the neighborhood you live in: Together these factors are considered to represent socioeconomic status (SES) and contribute to a variety of health and social outcomes, from physical and mental health to educational achievement and cognitive capacities. The brain acts as an obvious mediator between SES and many of these outcomes. But the mechanism by which it…

[arizonaconservativegal]

CNN anchor Sara Sidner revealed her cancer diagnosis to the world. I read this article to point where the writer a leftist feminist claimed that cancer is racist towards non white female when comes to breast cancer? I wonder where they come up with all this.

I assume they meant that black women have higher rates of diagnosis and mortality? Which is true and although I know fuck all about such things, I'd guess that's a combination of genetic and/or socioeconomic factors. I'd be curious to see someone do the numbers and control for economic status. I suspect genetics have more to do with diagnostic rates and economic status has more to do with mortality rates, but obviously that's just a guess.

Regardless, it would be nice if we could talk about improving health outcomes without having to performatively accuse people of bigotry. That seems counterproductive.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

This piece titled “Throwaway Kids” reports researchers surveyed “nearly 6,000 inmates in 12 states — representing every region of the country — to determine how many had been in foster care and what effect it had on their lives. Of the inmates who took the survey, 1 in 4 said they were the product of foster care. Some spent the majority of their childhood in strangers’ homes, racking up more placements than birthdays.”

In the Los Angeles county foster care system (my beloved alma mater), only 64.5% of foster kids graduate from high school. Maybe not so surprising.

Here’s something more surprising. According to the same report from LA county, the overall high school graduation rate in LA is 86.6%.

And the graduation rate for students categorized as “socioeconomically disadvantaged” is also 86.6%. Poor kids graduate at the same rate as everyone else.

The gap between poor kids and foster kids exists nationwide, too.

72.4% of kids across the U.S. in the lowest socioeconomic quintile graduate from high school. In contrast, nationwide, only 58% of foster kids graduate from high school.

What about college? 11% of kids in the bottom socioeconomic quintile graduate from college. For foster kids: 3%.

Incarceration rates are similar. About 8% of males from families in the bottom socioeconomic quintile do time in prison or jail. For males who were in foster care: 60%

Consider that to become foster parents, people must meet a minimum economic threshold. They can’t be poor.

Which means kids in foster care are not in as materially impoverished an environment as kids in the bottom income quintile.

So what explains the gap in graduation and incarceration rates between foster kids and poor kids?

One reason worth highlighting comes from this widely-cited paper in Developmental Psychology titled, “Evolution, Stress, and Sensitive Periods: The Influence of Unpredictability in Early Versus Late Childhood on Sex and Risky Behavior.”

The researchers used a longitudinal data set. In the 1970s, women at a public health clinic agreed to respond to questions that tracked both themselves and their then unborn children.

Both the mothers and, later, their children, responded to questionnaires at multiple time points until the children reached early adulthood.

The researchers were interested in how 2 different environmental factors affected 5 key variables.

One environmental factor was the amount of environmental harshness children experienced before age 5.

Researchers measured environmental harshness by the mother’s socioeconomic status, occupational prestige, and household income. How materially comfortable was the kid?

The other environmental factor was the amount of environmental unpredictability children experienced before age 5.

The researchers measured environmental unpredictability by number of changes in residence (e.g., moving to a different house/apartment), changes in cohabitation status (e.g., whether and how often male romantic partners moved in or out of the house/apartment), and changes in employment status.

In short, how often the kid moved, how frequently the adults in the kid’s life appeared and disappeared, and how frequently his mom changed jobs. How chaotic was the kid’s life?

And the researchers wanted to know how these two factors influenced 5 outcome variables:

Age at first intercourse

Number of lifetime sexual partners at age 23

Criminal acts

Aggression (e.g., “I deliberately try to hurt others,” “I destroy things belonging to others”)

Delinquency (frequency of lying/cheating, breaking rules, setting fires, stealing, drug use)

Researchers found that childhood poverty (harshness) was not significantly associated with any of the 5 outcome variables.

In contrast, there was a significant correlation between childhood unpredictability ans 4 of the 5 outcome variables—number of sexual partners, aggressive behavior, delinquent behavior, and criminal behavior. For males, but not females, instability predicted having sex at an earlier age.

The correlation between unpredictability in childhood and criminal behavior in adulthood was particularly striking (r = .40, p < .01). This effect size is equivalent to the correlation between socioeconomic status and SAT scores.

The luxury belief class loves to talk about the effect of wealth on test scores. Few discuss the effect of instability in childhood giving rise to harmful behaviors in adulthood.

The researchers re-analyzed the data while controlling for harshness. The relationship between instability in childhood and harmful behaviors in adulthood remained significant.

They conclude their discussion:

“The findings revealed that the strongest predictor of both sexual and risky behavior at age 23 was exposure to an unpredictable environment during the first 5 years of life. Individuals exposed to more unpredictable, rapidly changing early environments displayed a faster life history strategy at age 23 as indicated by having more sexual partners, having sex at an earlier age (for males only), engaging in more aggression and delinquent behaviors, and being more likely to be associated with criminal activities/behavior. By contrast, exposure to either harsh environments or experiencing unpredictability later in childhood (ages 6–16) did not significantly predict these outcomes at age 23.”

Plainly, being poor doesn't have the same effect as living in chaos.

There are some people who will respond "Bruh, it's all in the genes."

Behavior is modifiable for just about everyone, regardless of their genetic propensities and endowments. Behavior responds to incentives and environmental inputs.

Suppose each of us has a different innate propensity to punch others. In this scenario, some researcher collects data on how many people each person punches per year.

In a completely free environment with no norms or consequences, I would punch 10 people a year. And in this free environment, you would punch 3 people a year.

A difference of 7 people. In this simple hypothetical example, I am "genetically" more prone than you to punch.

Now suppose we both exist in an environment with strong norms against punching. In this environment, people lose status for violence. And violent people experience swift and unfavorable consequences.

In this environment, I now punch only 8 people a year, and you now punch only 1. I am still punching 7 more people than you each year.

The gap is the same as it was before.

But—and this is crucial—we are punching fewer people than before. Fewer people overall are being punched.

The average number of punched victims was 6.5 a year in the free environment. And now it is 4.5 in the rigid environment.

Relative differences exist.

But so do absolute differences. Those matter too.

I am well aware of the behavior genetics research, twin studies, and so on indicating little effect of home environment on personality, propensity for crime, addiction, and so on. These studies are inapplicable for kids living in extreme dysfunction.

Behavior geneticists investigate the relative role of genetic and environmental variation within the sampled population.

Behavioral genetics studies report findings from within the environmental variation in their samples, not in all conceivable environments.

For example, there are many studies on identical twins separated at birth who are adopted by different families.

Researchers find little difference between these twins when they are adults. Their personalities, IQ, preferences, and so on are very similar.

But twins are usually adopted by intact middle-class families.

They are typically taken in by married parents with the means to jump through the hoops to qualify for adoption. Additionally, adoptive parents are the kind of people who would adopt, which introduces another layer of similarity.

I’ve yet to see any twin studies with one set of identical twins raised in extremely bad environments and another in good ones.

The psychologist and intelligence researcher Russell T. Warne has written:

“A problem with heritability study samples is that they tend to consist of more middle and upper-class individuals than a representative sample would have…results of behavioral genetics studies will indicate genes are important—if a person already lives in an industrialized nation in a home where basic needs are met...it is not clear how well these results apply to individuals in highly unfavorable environments.”

The "parents don't matter" idea from behavior genetics comes from an era where most children were raised in homes with two biological parents (range restriction). Families and values were pretty similar across the board. Even when data were collected from children of single parents, most of those children were raised in neighborhoods where most of the parents were married, and attended schools with classmates whose parents were mostly married. Genes will always play a large role in the trajectory of our lives, but as variation in family type expands, my strong suspicion is that the environment will account for more and more of the variance in outcomes between individuals.

In a chapter titled Genes and the Mind, the psychologist David Lykken states:

“If twins were separated as infants and placed, one with a middle-class Minnesota family and the other with an 18-year-old unmarried mother living on AFDC in the South Bronx, the twins will surely differ 30 years later.”

Yes, genes are responsible for human traits and behavior. But these traits are responsive to social norms and other environmental factors too.

Education and weight are both 70 percent heritable.

In the 1970s, 13 percent of Americans graduated from college. Today it’s 35 percent.

In the 1970s, about 13 percent of Americans were overweight. Today, it’s around 70 percent.

Did our genes make us smarter and fatter over the last 50 years?

No.

The environment (incentives, accessibility, social norms, etc.) made it easier to go to college. So more people went.

The environment (incentives, accessibility, social norms, etc.) made it easier to get fat. So more people did.

The heritability of divorce is around 40% percent. In the 1950s, 11 percent of children born to married parents saw their parents get divorced. By the 1970s, more than 50 percent of children born to married parents saw their parents get divorced.

Did genes change that much in 20 years?

No. It became easier to divorce. So more people did.

Crime skyrocketed in 2020. Did genes transform overnight?

No. Lawlessness became easier to get away with. So more people committed crimes.

Height is 90 percent heritable. But it is still malleable by the environment. Before Korea was divided, Northerners were taller than Southerners. Today, North Koreans are 6 inches shorter, on average, than South Koreans. Did their genes change? No. Their environments did.

Tobacco use is highly heritable (60-80%) but the percentage of Americans who smoke has dropped by half since 1982.

Strong norms against smoking contributed to people changing their behavior by smoking less.

Genes have something to do with behavior. But behavior can be unleashed or constrained depending on the norms of a society.

Some people interpret behavior genetics findings to mean environment is unimportant. I interpret them to mean certain aspects of environment matter even more. Norms and customs constrain differences between individuals. The absence of norms and guardrails magnifies them. [...]

Of my closest friends in high school, two went to prison and one was shot to death. These guys were never going to go to a fancy college. But they didn’t have to end up incarcerated or murdered at age fourteen. The truth is that most foster kids or poor kids could not get a Ph.D. in mathematics at MIT (though some could), regardless of how they are raised or how many resources are dedicated to them. But we could drastically reduce the number of kids who later land in prison, rehab, on the street, and so on. We might not be able to raise the ceiling. But we could raise the floor. That starts at home.

[blackhistorychatgpt]

Tell me about income and wealth disparity in America

I went to a panel tonight on Reimagining Public Health in NYC - A Discussion on the Racial and Wealth Gap and Health Equity

Me:

Can you write an essay about the connection between redlining, income and wealth gap, and health outcomes in the Black community? Highlight the disparity in maternal mortality race based upon race

ChatGPT:

The connection between redlining, income and wealth gap, and health outcomes in the Black community is multifaceted and complex. Redlining, a discriminatory practice that involves denying financial services or access to housing based on race, has had a significant impact on the economic wellbeing of Black families. This, in turn, has contributed to the widening income and wealth gap between Black and white households, which has led to disparities in health outcomes.

Redlining began in the 1930s and was a federal government policy that allowed banks and other financial institutions to deny loans and insurance to people living in certain neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were typically populated by Black families and other minorities, and the practice was based on the assumption that these communities were risky investments. As a result, these neighborhoods were deprived of essential resources such as quality education, healthcare, and healthy food options.

The legacy of redlining has contributed to the income and wealth gap between Black and white households. According to a study by the Brookings Institution, the median wealth of white households is ten times that of Black households. This disparity is largely due to historical and ongoing discrimination that has limited Black families' access to education, employment, and housing opportunities.

The income and wealth gap has had a profound impact on the health outcomes of the Black community. Black Americans have higher rates of chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, which are often linked to poverty and limited access to healthcare. They are also more likely to die from these diseases than white Americans.

One area where the impact of these disparities is particularly stark is maternal mortality. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women. This disparity cannot be explained by differences in income or education level, as it persists across all socioeconomic levels.

There are several reasons for this disparity, including the fact that Black women are more likely to experience complications during pregnancy, such as hypertension and pre-eclampsia. They are also more likely to receive substandard care during pregnancy and childbirth, including being ignored or dismissed when they report symptoms of distress. Studies have shown that implicit bias and stereotypes about Black women's pain and abilities to cope with childbirth are also factors.

To address these disparities, it is essential to address the root causes of redlining, income and wealth gap, and implicit bias in healthcare. Policies and initiatives that promote equitable access to education, employment, and affordable housing are essential. Additionally, healthcare providers must receive training to recognize and address implicit biases that may affect their care of Black patients. Finally, Black women must be empowered to advocate for their health and hold healthcare providers accountable for providing high-quality care.

In conclusion, the connection between redlining, income and wealth gap, and health outcomes in the Black community is a complex and multi-layered issue. The legacy of redlining has contributed to the income and wealth gap between Black and white households, which, in turn, has led to disparities in health outcomes, including maternal mortality. Addressing these disparities will require a comprehensive approach that involves addressing the root causes of redlining, income and wealth gap, and implicit bias in healthcare.

[mariacallous]

The cost of the biological clock for women in the marriage market

Both men and women value the income of a potential marriage partner. But most men also have a preference for a younger spouse. This means that in the marriage market, women face a trade-off between age and earnings, since earnings typically rise with age. In a new paper drawing on data from real online daters, Corinne Low finds that for every year a woman ages, she needs to earn $7,000 more annually to remain equally attractive on the marriage market. These preferences of men seem largely to be driven by questions over fertility: Low shows that men who already have children, or have limited knowledge of the age-fertility relationship (specifically, believing wrongly that female fertility doesn’t decline until 45), do not have the same preferences for younger women. Low’s paper highlights the increasing complexity of marriage markets, and the sharper trade-offs that are faced by women because of sex differences in the relationship between age and fertility.

Higher minimum wages result in better care in nursing homes

Higher minimum wages have been shown to be good for consumers, for example by improving the quality of produced goods – where quality improvements are relatively easy to measure. But what about in a service sector environment? Krista Ruffini examines the impact of higher wages on quality of service in nursing homes. She shows that an increase in the minimum wage nudges up earnings by 1% to 2% and reduces staff turnover. The minimum wage increases seemed to improve outcomes for clients too, with fewer health inspections, a drop in the number of moderate-to-severe pressure ulcers, and lowered mortality. Of note, however, was a slight fall in the share of Medicaid patients (equivalent to 0.3 fewer in a 100 bed facility following a 10% minimum wage increase), almost certainly to offset higher labor costs with more clients paying out of pocket.

Joint taxation and Social Security benefits for spouses significantly lower female employment

Are taxes and benefits for married couples reducing the incentives for women to be in the labor force? Margherita Borella and co-authors use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Health and Retirement Study, with a focus on the 1941-1945 and 1951-1955 birth cohorts, to answer this question. They highlight two major factors influencing labor decisions for married women. First, second-earner spouses, historically women, face a higher marginal tax rate when filing taxes jointly. Second, they are eligible for Social Security spousal and survivor benefits based on the past contributions of their spouse. Taken together, these create significant disincentives to employment. Their model finds, for example, that eliminating both Social Security spousal and survivor benefits as well as joint income taxation for the 1945 cohort would raise labor force participation by 20 percentage points for married women over 25, and by five percentage points for single women. They find similar results for those born a decade later, and with even larger general welfare gains because of higher levels of human capital for women in this cohort.

Top chart: Time spent on child care by socioeconomic status

In a paper for the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Sarah Flood and co-authors look at time spent on caring for children by education and socioeconomic status. Parents with higher levels of education spend fewer overall hours on child care but spend a little more time on “direct” child care activities such as playing and reading.

Choice opinion: Are standardized tests racist, or are they anti-racist

“These days universities often claim to have goals of inclusion. They talk about the value of educating not just children of the elite, but a diverse cross-section of the population. Instead of searching for and admitting students who have already had tremendous advantages and specifically excluding nearly everyone else, these schools could try to recruit and educate the kinds of students who have not had remarkable educational opportunities in the past,” writes Neil Lewis Jr. in The Atlantic.

Self-promotion: More students are enrolling in college, but gaps in academic preparation still persist.

Young adults today are more likely to enroll in college than in previous generations, but there are still significant gaps by race, gender, and socioeconomic background. Sarah Reber and Ember Smith use the High School Longitudinal Survey to look at these disparities in two-year and four-year college enrollment and examine how factors such as GPA and test scores affect student enrollment. They find that students with higher GPAs and better test scores are more likely to enroll, and that enrollment gaps by race and gender are quite small once among students with similar test scores and levels of academic preparation.

[kingpicardythethird]

“Nor do Justice Jackson's statistics regarding a correlation between levels of health, wealth, and well-being between selected racial groups prove anything. Of course, none of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race rather than socioeconomic status or any other factor and individual outcomes.

So Justice Jackson supplies the link herself: the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth. This, she claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste.

Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victim-hood. If an applicant has less financial means (because of generational inheritance or otherwise), then surely a university may take that into account. If an applicant has medical struggles or a family member with medical con-cerns, a university may consider that too.

What it cannot do is use the applicant's skin color as a heuristic, assuming that because the applicant checks the box for "black" he therefore conforms to the university's monolithic and reductionist view of an abstract, average black person.

Accordingly, Justice Jackson’s race-infused world view falls flat at each step. Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives.

A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals' skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.”

—Justice Thomas, concurrence, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

[ausetkmt]

Medical News Today: Racism and discrimination are public health threats, experts warn

When acknowledging the impact racism can have on health, it is important to remember that less than a century ago racist ideas were given legitimacy by scientific and medical communities in Western countries.

While Charles Darwin is held up as a symbol of rationality and scientific progress, it is important to note that his theory of evolution by natural selection in the Origin of Species published in 1849, was appropriated by eugenicists.

Eugenicists arguedTrusted Source for the selective breeding of humans with the aim of improving the heritable traits in a population.

Originally, these ideas claimed that people on low incomes had lower mental capabilities and morals, and that preventing these people from being able to reproduce would prevent these traits from being passed on, allegedly improving the human gene pool.

These ideas were quickly applied to preexisting ideas of racial categories of humans, with impacts on the health of people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, which we are still seeing today.

This is just one of the topics highlighted in a recent series of papers published in The LancetTrusted Source, which explores the role racism has played in health outcomes globally.

Written by a group of scientists at University College London in the United Kingdom, the papers explore the different ways in which racist ideas and practices have infiltrated science and medicine and caused harm. Racism, they state, is a threat to public health.

To drive the point home, the authors explain that their own workplace, University College London, was once the home of “racist pioneers” Francis GaltonTrusted Source and Karl Pearson, whose work started to document human differences in an attempt to categorize certain traits.

Some scientists and theorists have applied these ideas to the concept of humans belonging to different races that had existed for over 100 years prior to that, which had been used to uphold first colonialism by Europe of other countries, and then neocolonialism.

The series of articles goes on to provide numerous examples of people being mistreated by doctors and scientists for racist and xenophobic reasons, from the Tuskegee Study of Untreated SyphilisTrusted Source in Black men, through to more recent COVID-19 vaccine inequity.

It also explores the reasons why scientists worldwide upheld the notion of “othering” some groups for so long, and why they were able to do so for so long.

When asked by Medical News Today why the series was being published now, lead author Prof. Delanjathan Devakumar, professor of global child health and honorary consultant in public health at University College London told us in an email that there was no particular reason to publish the series now, as the problem is long-existing and ongoing.

He said:

The COVID-19 pandemic both exacerbated and revealed much of the divisive politics that define our era, as well as the inequities racist politics can cause.

Black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian, and Pacific Islander people have been disproportionately more likely to become infected with SARS-CoV-2, or die from the infection in the United States to date. This trend continued globally.

These differences were picked up quickly, and research into their causes was initially inconclusive. While socioeconomic factors and comorbidities explained some of the differences in infection and death rates that were observed, they did not explain all of them, and theories abounded.

One of the most contentious theories that arose initially blamed skin color, claiming that vitamin D deficiencies were to blame for the higher infection and death rate in people of color living in areas where deficiency was prevalent among these groups. This notion has since been disproven.

One doctor who carried out research in the earlier days of the pandemic into these racial inequities was Prof. Ladan Golestah, a professor of nephrology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine working in the Bronx during the first surge of COVID-19, in the spring of 2020.

She told MNT in an interview: “I think we were kind of struck by how overwhelmingly it kind of […] took over all of our realities. And I think part of the problem was there was so much death, honestly […] So many bad outcomes [resulted] out of that initial COVID surge that we were, we felt, powerless.”

She, along with her colleagues decided to use the data they had available to try to “lay bare what was happening and what was behind it.”

Their research eventually appeared in eClinical Medicine, and showed that all-cause mortality rates were 60% higher for Black people than white people during the first COVID-19 surge, and this was “incompletely explained by age, multiple reported comorbidities and available metrics of sociodemographic disparity.”

Looking back, she says she realized what was “hidden in plain sight” was the scale of undiagnosed comorbidity which led to much worse health outcomes for Black people.

This was due to a lack of access to healthcare due to the financial barriers which were disproportionately experienced by this group.

COVID-19 had in turn resulted in more trauma, and physical damage to these groups of people, further exacerbating those inequities. The introduction of telemedicine also exacerbated some groups’ ability to access healthcare, she explained.

However, even where some financial barriers to healthcare access were removed, for example for National Health Service (NHS) patients in the U.K., the COVID-19 pandemic revealed other barriers.

In the U.K., People’s COVID Inquiry, run via the NHS campaign Keep Our NHS Public, heard back in March 2021 that the initial responses to COVID-19 infection in people of color were inadequate.

Lobby Anikola, of the COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, told the People’s COVID Inquiry — 57 minutes into the video — that “there were many inequalities that people were already aware of, and now these inequalities are costing the lives of people of color.”

“There is also the concern of how appropriate [and] how able the medical service are to diagnose and treat medical conditions in Black bodies,” says Anikola.

In his statement, he points out that when calling emergency helplines during the first wave of COVID-19, people were asked if they had “blue lips,” a symptom of lack of oxygen in the blood in white people, but one that is less obvious in people with darker skin, meaning that many remained at home when they needed to seek urgent medical treatment.

Pulse oximeters had also been shown to fail to pick up hypoxia in people with darker skin, as they had been designed for use on white people, a study published in BMJ showed.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global issue, and the inequities have not just been felt by people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds who live in the U.S. or Europe, but also by individuals living in low- and middle-income countries.

While the health systems of wealthy countries had been overwhelmed by the first wave of COVID-19, their wealth meant they were much better placed to design, develop and make vaccines to target the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Large-scale vaccine campaigns took place in the U.S. and Europe, but low- and middle-income countries were left behind.

In 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) set a target for 70% global vaccinationTrusted Source coverage by mid-2022. As of June 2022, only 58 of WHO’s 194 member states had achieved this, and just 37% of healthcare workers had received a complete course of primary vaccination in low-income countries.

“There was hoarding by the North American and Western European countries,” Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, told MNT.

“That was one issue. The second issue was there was an upstream science policy failure, providing too much emphasis on speed and innovation, and not enough downstream to be able to make vaccines locally in low and middle-income countries,” he noted.

The world had “paid heavily” for this mistake, as it opened the door for new virus variants to emerge, he argued.

“Delta arose out of an unvaccinated population [in] early 2021. And then Omicron — it emerged from an under-vaccinated population in Africa, later in 2021. And so it got into this mess that we’re in today. So, vaccine equity is not simply a question of equity, [it] is fundamental to pandemic control,” explained Dr. Hotez.

Not all was lost however, he said, as there is now an opportunity to ensure that vaccine equity is achieved for low- and middle-income countries for vaccines for emerging variants, he suggested.

He is not the only one to point to potential opportunities to improve the situation. While health inequities due to race, xenophobia, and colonialism are stark, some feel the recent focus on the issue has highlighted areas where improvements could be made.

Dr. Golestah said:

The Lancet series itself argues that if policy based on racist structures got us into the current situation, then appropriate, well-designed health policy could get us out of it, and eventually remove racial health inequities.

As Dr. Hotez added: “Remember, COVID-19 is our third major coronavirus pandemic of the 21st century, we’ve had SARS and MERS. And now COVID-19.” Other epidemics or pandemics may emerge soon, he believes.

In this context, “[w]hat we really need to address is equity, and not only to have equity but recognize that it’s essential to global public health preparedness,” said Dr. Hotez.

“I mean, often it’s framed purely as humanitarian grounds, which of course, is important in our motivations at our labs. But it’s not only a humanitarian gesture, it’s far more than that it’s front and center of pandemic preparedness.”

[drojohnma]

Critical-Thinking Techniques for Professionals in Emergency Medicine

People with urgent or life-threatening medical needs are treated by emergency medicine, a branch of medicine. A diverse patient population, a fast-paced work environment, and critical thinking skills are all highlighted. Emergency room doctors receive extensive training to treat a wide range of illnesses and wounds from all walks of life. They provide immediate care for patients and are frequently asked to refer cases to trauma surgeons when necessary.

To make wise clinical decisions, emergency medicine professionals must cultivate critical thinking abilities. This entails identifying ambiguity and bias, testing prior hypotheses, and evaluating data.

Critical thinking is an important skill for your career and the health of your patients, whether you're a doctor or a nurse. It assists you in coming to wise clinical decisions that are best for your patient and the desired results.

In emergency medicine, nurses frequently decide crucial matters pertaining to patient care. These choices can be anything from prescribing the right course of treatment for a client to diagnosing a disease.

Critical thinking is essential in emergency medicine to enhance patient outcomes and foster interprofessional communication. This way of thinking is also crucial for integrating fresh information into clinical practice.

A fast-paced work environment that requires constant movement and mental activity throughout the day is what emergency physicians must deal with. Emergency physicians must be able to communicate clearly with their coworkers and multidisciplinary teams in addition to giving patients life-saving care.

It can be hard to keep up with patients' needs and takes a lot of patience. However, if you put in the necessary effort and have the necessary skills, working in a fast-paced environment can be exciting and rewarding.

A direct observation study of 31 emergency department doctors was carried out to assess how they split their time between drug-related and unrelated tasks. The findings revealed that 17.8% (95% CI 16.8%, 19.3%) of physicians' time was spent on tasks involving drugs.

The difficulties that face medicine as a whole are reflected in the ED environment. Increased diversity is required in the medical field, especially among emergency physicians. Studies have shown that compared to their peers, women and students of color apply to emergency medicine residency programs at lower rates. However, the literature does not provide adequate documentation of the causes of this.

Working flexibly is a crucial skill for emergency physicians, especially in a profession where patients frequently show up unannounced or in an unexpected condition. EDs can respond quickly to emergencies, incidents involving multiple casualties, or critically ill patients with a range of needs thanks to their flexibility.

Additionally, EM doctors have excellent career portability because they are not bound to a particular patient panel or practice. They have easy access to medical facilities and EM clinics all over the world.

Cultural competence may be more important when providing quality care to a patient population that is becoming more diverse. Health care providers' interactions with these patients may be impacted by linguistic barriers, socioeconomic factors, religious beliefs, and cultural norms.

Numerous emergency medicine (EM) training programs encourage diversity and cultural sensitivity. These initiatives may include distributing educational materials on implicit bias and disparities in LGBTQ+ healthcare.

During rotations, residents are paired with faculty mentors to expose them to various cultures and ethnicities. Along with these activities, they take part in splinting, social medicine projects, and wilderness medical expeditions.

However, emergency medicine might not be the best choice for you if your lifestyle is dictated by frantic environments or a fast pace. Additionally, this may not be the best specialty for you if you are worried about how your shifts will affect your general wellbeing and family life.

In order to investigate the nature of workforce flexibility in a group of emergency physicians, nurse practitioners (NPs), and registered nurses, this study adopted a division of labor methodology (RNs). In order to determine the degree of multiskilling and role overlap, it measured task distribution. It also looked at the organizational factors and behavioral patterns that promote flexibility.

[yesterdayandkarma]

3. Going beyond binary approaches to gender and health to recognize gender and sexual diversity, or the concepts that gender identity exists on a continuum and that sex is not limited to male or female.

[healthy-living-tips]

Inclusive Approaches to Mental Health: Advancing Care for All

In recent years, there has been a significant shift in how society perceives and addresses mental health. Yet, despite progress, many individuals still face barriers to accessing adequate care. Inclusive approaches to mental health are crucial in ensuring that everyone, regardless of their background or identity, can receive the support they need. By recognizing and addressing the diverse needs of all individuals, we can advance mental health care for all.

Understanding the Scope of Mental Health

Mental health encompasses a broad spectrum of conditions that affect one's emotional, psychological, and social well-being. From anxiety and depression to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, mental health issues can manifest in various forms and severity levels. Additionally, factors such as socioeconomic status, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and cultural background can significantly influence an individual's mental health experiences and access to care. Access to specialized care centers such as the Alberta neurologic centre can also play a critical role in addressing complex mental health needs.

Breaking Down Stigma and Stereotypes

One of the most significant barriers to inclusive mental health care is the stigma and stereotypes that surround mental illness. Many people hesitate to seek help due to fear of judgment or discrimination. Furthermore, certain communities may face additional stigma due to cultural or religious beliefs that perceive mental health issues as taboo or shameful.

Challenging these stigmas and stereotypes through education, awareness campaigns, and open conversations is essential. By fostering an environment of acceptance and understanding, we can encourage individuals to seek help without fear of stigma.

Culturally Competent Care

Cultural competence is a crucial aspect of providing inclusive mental health care. Providers must understand their clients' unique cultural backgrounds and values to deliver effective treatment. This may involve offering services in multiple languages, incorporating culturally relevant therapies, and respecting traditional healing practices.

Moreover, diversifying the mental health workforce is essential for ensuring individuals from all backgrounds access culturally competent care. By recruiting and training professionals from diverse backgrounds, we can better meet the needs of underserved communities and reduce disparities in mental health outcomes.

Addressing Socioeconomic Barriers

Socioeconomic factors play a significant role in determining access to mental health care. Individuals with lower incomes or inadequate insurance coverage may struggle to afford treatment or face long wait times for public services. Additionally, those living in rural or remote areas may have limited access to mental health providers.

Policymakers must prioritize mental health funding and support initiatives that expand access to care for underserved populations. This may include increasing funding for community mental health centers, implementing telehealth services, and offering sliding-scale fees for low-income individuals.

Intersectionality in Mental Health

Intersectionality recognizes that individuals experience multiple forms of oppression and privilege simultaneously. For example, an LGBTQ+ person of colour may face unique challenges related to both their sexual orientation and racial identity. Considering these intersecting factors is essential when developing inclusive mental health interventions and support systems.

By adopting an intersectional approach, including collaboration with community organizations like the Alberta neurologic centre, we can better understand the complex needs of marginalized communities and tailor interventions to address their specific concerns. This may involve conducting outreach programs and advocating for equity and social justice policies.

Inclusive approaches to mental health are essential for advancing care for all individuals. By breaking down stigma, providing culturally competent care, addressing socioeconomic barriers, and recognizing intersectionality, we can create a mental health system that is accessible and inclusive for everyone. Through collective efforts from policymakers, healthcare providers, and communities, we can ensure that no one is left behind in the journey toward better mental health and well-being.