Am. Med week 14 replies<\/p>\n
Post VS<\/p>\n
The article, \u201cThe Syphilis Epidemic and its Relation to AIDS\u201d, explores similarities between syphilis and AIDS. Allan M. Brandt noted that, \u201cAIDS, like syphilis in the pasts, engenders powerful social conflicts about the meaning, nature, and risks of sexuality; the nature and role of the state in protecting and promoting public health; the significance of individual rights in regard to communal good; and the nature of doctor-patient relationship and social responsibility.\u201d (379) Brandt\u2019s remark about the \u201cnature of doctor-patient relationship\u201d (379) reminded me of the Verghese reading where he narrates his position as a doctor attending to an AIDS patient and meeting with his family. Doctor-patient relationships seems like a recurring theme throughout this class where it is critical for doctors to establish open and more humane relationships with their patients to realistically help them with their illnesses, rather than target them as a science experiment or someone who, in the stigma surrounding AIDS patients, are \u201csexually deviant\u201d or a drug addict who is \u201cunworthy\u201d of treatment and care.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I thought the Verghese reading provided a personal insight from the view of a physician and a family of a loved one who was diagnosed with AIDS. The Verghese reading demonstrated the fear of AIDS patients including doctors’ families where Verghese noted that his wife \u201cwas merely frightened, as any wife or mother would be, as so many were in the days where we understood so little about AIDS.\u201d (75) when she found out he would be treating an AIDS patient. Although it is important to gain a perspective from a patient, their families, and the medical workers’ perspectives, I think it is equally critical to gain a perspective from doctors or nurses’ families. This is especially important when we think about the COVID health workers who worked tirelessly every day and night while many had no knowledge of COVID and if their loved ones would be safe.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Chapter one of the Brier reading explored the varying responses and tensions within AIDS activists groups that resonated with the documentary in many cases where the documentary showed footage of differing AIDS activists groups butting heads over how to respond and act towards the government and how they should protest. Brier noted that Rovert Berowitz and Michael Callen \u00a0\u201cprovided readers with practical ideas for how men could have sex in new ways.\u201d (34) to help gay men to practice safe sex if they wanted to. This was a form of activism discussed in the documentary where where activists wrote pamphlets to educate gay people about new drugs and potential treatments for AIDS. The Brier reading additionally showed how the gay community fought for not only treatment and equality within the health community, but fair treatment in society as a whole. Brier shows how the responses from gay communities to the AIDS crisis represented a larger picture that focused on gay rights and the challenge of social norms, inequalities, and stereotypes that were placed on them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Chapter 5 of the Brier reading discussed many of the activists we saw in the documentary from last week. I appreciated this chapter because it provided me with a bit more insight and context of the individuals and the organizations, what they stood for, and how they protested for change. I found it particularly interesting when Brier noted that \u201cThey began by building a consensus for the protest among ACTUP New York members, providing them with an \u201cFDA Handbook,\u201d written by Jim Eigo and Mark Harrington, that detailed the role of the FDA in AIDS treatment.\u201d (166) This approach was interesting to me because ACT UP educated their members on how the\u00a0FDA functioned and why they were protesting the FDA in relation to their role in AIDS treatment and then after they educated their members they protested. The various ways of protests described in chapter 5 of the Brier reading reminded me of the documentary, especially when the activists threw their loved ones ashes who had died from AIDS on the Whtie House front lawn. This form of activism was one of the most personal, emotional protests that I have witnessed and it shows how actions speak louder than words.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On a side note, I really enjoyed this course and was surprised at the complexity of the history of medicine and disease. I loved hearing everyone\u2019s point of views and interpretations, especially this semester when everyone had very informative and sometimes differing views on some of the issues embedded within medical history. I hope everyone has a great and safe holiday break!<\/p>\n
Post RE<\/p>\n
AIDS activists extended ideas advanced by other social movements such as. While much of the focus in AIDS activism was centered around the gay community, and thus became in many ways an extension of the gay liberation movement, it also advanced the feminist movement, the fight against racism and inequality, poverty, and discriminatory healthcare.<\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I think that the chapter by Brier, “Drugs into Bodies, Bodies into Health Care The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power and the Struggle over How Best to Fight AIDS,” provides some of the best examples of how the fight against AIDS crossed movements and advanced other ideas. This chapter focused on ACTUP, as did the documentary\u00a0How to Survive a Plague,\u00a0which was one of the most prolific groups in the fight against AIDS. While ACTUP was initially organized to focus on ways to motivate the government and wider society to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic and also to actively work to research and treat the disease, it was not long before other, wider social issues, were recognized as contributors to the problem. I think that this is best born out in the examination of the creation of different committees within the organization that concentrated on different aspects of the epidemic. First, there was the Majority Action Committee, named so because they were meant to represent the majority of people with AIDS: People of Color. This group identifies one of the first issues that continues on from other social movements, the fight against racism, and the disparities that racism creates in healthcare, housing, and information. (Brier, 162) This committee recognized that the fight against AIDS was more than a fight for drugs and treatments or even a cure, to combat AIDS we would also have to fight racism, because the majority of AIDS cases were POC. The Womens’ Caucus was another committee within ACTUP. This committee recognized the need to advocate for women with AIDS and to include lesbians in the conversation about AIDS and the wider conversation about gay liberation. Initially comprised mostly of lesbians, a group that had largely been excluded from other women’s movements, the Women’s Causcus fought to change the definition of AIDS so that women could be properly diagnosed and have access to Social Security, something the male members of ACTUP had fought for and acheived, but had excluded women. Therefore, there was a distinctly feminist quality to aspects of the fight against AIDS. The next committee that highlighted other social movements was the Housing Committee. Initially, the goals of the Housing Committee were simple, to find housing for AIDS patients who would otherwise be homeless. This problem highlights more than just housing discrimination or shortages, it brings the greater issue of social and economic disparities. Regardless of whether a person has AIDS or not, if they do not have a home to live in, adequate food and water, and the ability to keep clean, they will be at much greater risk for serious illness. If the goal is to reduce infectious disease of any kind, including AIDS, these problems must also be addressed. Thus the fight against AIDS is also a fight against poverty. Finally, the committee that dominated the documentary, and seemed to steer much of the work that ACTUP did, was the Treatment and Data Committee. These were the people fighting for drug approval, for the drugs to be affordable, and for the people who were effected by AIDS to have a voice in the way it was being researched. This committee has implications for the movement around healthcare, and affordable medical treatments,as well as education. While in the latter years of the AIDS fight, when T&D had split from ACTUP and formed TAG, they began to work with pharmaceutical companies instead of against them, they advocated for the treatments to be affordable for patients, because a treatment was useless if the patient could not afford it. In the end, they found a way to get the drugs to the patients, and make pharma massive profits. However, outside of medication access, there is a bigger conversation about healthcare that grew along with anti-AIDS movement. For many AIDS patients they did not have health insurance, nor did they have Medicaid or Medicare, and thus diagnosis and treatment were often neglected or denied until the patient was critical. This neglect prompted AIDS advocates to push for healthcare reform, and begin a converstaion about universal healthcare in the US, something many are still fighting for. Lastly, this group was also focused on acquiring and disseminating knowldege and information about AIDS, treatments, trials, and ways to prevent being infected. They fought for transparency in the ways drugs were being developed and tested, as well as the direction of research into the disease itself. They used education about AIDS as a way to fight it by dispelling the fear and panic that accompanied it due to lack of knowledge. This is still something that needs to be improved when it comes to healthcare and medicine. While in todays world we can go online and Google our symptoms or diagnoses to gain knowledge about them, that has not always been the case. Even with that ability, most people lack the scientific or medical knowledge to properly utilize the information they find, and they often jump to the worst possible scenario. Medical professionals, not just clinicians but writers, pharmacists, etc., need to do a better job of explaining conditions and treatments in laymans terms that their patients can understand. I worked in guest service for many years, several at Magic Kingdom in DisneyWorld. Disney has acronyms for everything, rides, stores, costumes, schedule changes, you name it, theres an acronym for it. One of the main things that they used to reiterate to us regularly, was that when we were talking to guests we had to refrain from using industry “jargon,” or in our case acronyms. It would do no good for me to say, ” hey, I’m gonna get an ER and then go to WOD for a while and I’ll meet you at DTD when you’re getting bumped out.” Unless you have worked at Disney as well, you won’t know what I’m talking about. In the same way, when a medical professional is explaining an illness, treatment, or diagnosis to a patient, and they use nothing but Latin names and tell you the names of complex tests, or drugs, for most people thats gibberish, and therefore useless. Unless a patient is a medical professional themself, they will not understand big medical terms, medicine needs to be made intellectually accessible to non-medical people, something that ACTUP recognized early on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The fight against AIDS also helped to advance these movements in a general sense. Racism is still a huge issue in the US, however, the generations of people who were born in the 1980s and 1990s, and now into the 21st century, are some of the most diverse and progress has been made, even if there is still a long road ahead. Feminism has also advanced, women are on more equal footing now than we have ever been, even with setbacks such as the overturning of Roe, the progress cannot be denied either. There is still a long way to go for feminist activists, and recent events seem to be bringing women’s healthcare issues, at least, back into the national conversation. Universal healthcare, something that was a radical idea during the AIDS fight, is not so radical anymore, and the fight for affordable drugs has dominated much of the political discourse in recent years. Socioeconomic issues have remained in the public eye, and there are movements to resolve these issues, but little has changed. Finally, AIDS activism advanced the gay rights movement drastically. When the AIDS epidemic was finally under some semblance of control, there was a shift. Homosexuality became less of a taboo in society at large, and was even represented on television and in movies. The focus shifted from liberation and AIDS to marriage equality, which the 2015 Supreme Court decision upheld, and will likely soon be protected by legislation with the Respect For Marraige Act currently before Congress. In a general sense, I think that the fight against AIDS spurred a new era of advocacy, but not in the traditional way. While ACTUP used acts of civil disobedience and protests to make noise, and groups continue to do so, the manner in which activism was practiced changed in the 1990s. I was born in 1983, I don’t remember many instances of civil disobedience or mass protests, with the exception of the race riots, meriting mass media coverage. What I do remember is TLC singing about safe sex and wearing condoms as accessories, TV shows becoming more diverse and discussing big issues, women being represented in media as more than a housewife and being told we could be anything we wanted, activism became less in your face, and more represented on your screen. I think that this largely holds true today as well. Once again it has morphed as media has changed, and we still protest and march, but much more of it is happening online, through social media, and other channels.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Post RB<\/p>\n
I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, when Dr. Jennings brought up\u00a0Bellevue\u00a0as a point of discussion this week. The whole time I was reading and\/or viewing our assignments, I thought of Oshinsky’s chapter about the AIDS crisis. One main point he made was the differences in the AIDS unit at San Francisco General Hospital and treatment at Bellevue. The reason for that was that the San Francisco gay community was mostly (at least) middle class, while Bellevue treated ALL–as it was known to treat those who couldn’t afford it (Oshinsky, 268-9). It was obvious San Francisco could financially handle the crisis; the whole Unit was catering to the gay patients. Another contrast Oshinsky pointed out was most all of San Francisco’s patients were white, male, and gay. New York City’s AIDS patients had evolved from that and were including even heterosexuals, females, blacks, Hispanics, and children (269). The patients treatment was different. Bellevue patients stayed longer than the S F patients, plus had more readmissions.<\/p>\n
In Abraham Verghese’s\u00a0My Own Country\u00a0Verghese recounts the treatment of AIDS patient Gordon. In the setting of the rural Tennessee hospital, the author was touched by the few nurses (especially Elenor) who willingly made Gordon comfortable during his three week stay (84). The staff had not contact with AIDS patients at the time–or so he thought. Elenor explained to the doctor there had been other cases. After she recalled one story, Verghese asked why he didn’t know this man was an AIDS patient. She concluded the staff dwelt on the drug problem and sent him to a rehab, where he later died. The inference was AIDS patients were “unwanted” therefore labled with other problems (194-6). I enjoyed the whole story of Essie, Gordon, and their family, but I really had trouble believing a doctor would go to such lengths to help. To go and visit the whole family, the home, etc….if he did, maybe I need him for a doctor! Yet I believe through his story he showed how medical staff should treat all patients with empathy.<\/p>\n
In\u00a0Infectious Ideas, Jennifer Brier claimed that early activists used gay publications to get out their messages (14). She also recounts how gay doctors played a role in treating AIDS patients, but ones such as Dr. Robert Balan, helped form the National Coaltion of Gay Sexually Transmitted Disease Services. These groups addressed all STD’s in gay men. She also discussed ACT UP, (ch. 5) which I was introduced to in\u00a0How to Survive a Plague.\u00a0I was really surprised that many of these activists were not necessarily gay. These people claimed this was how to get the government’s attention. I have never tthought these kinds of activists as very convincing because they come across as ready to fight over any cause. This AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power worked to improve the treatment of people with AIDS by working to change legislation for public policies. She also mentions\u00a0Our Bodies, Ourselves,\u00a0comparing the fight to the battle of women’s rights.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Source 1<\/p>\n
This week\u2019s readings, once again, somehow coincided with our conversation in my History 102 course with Dr. Duman\u010di\u0107. The AIDS epidemic caused a huge push for rights in the LGBTQ+ community because it forced people to witness the discrimination against queer people within the medical community and, more broadly, the United States as a whole. Before the AIDS crisis, gay men had to find gay doctors to treat them because they could not safely see any other doctor. Gay men had to advocate for themselves to get sexual health measures, but they had groundwork from the various social movements that came before them.<\/p>\n
Feminism is an incredibly vital part of this story, however. A major argument from last discussion was that the personal is political is reiterated in this week\u2019s readings. Brier\u2019s book stated that \u201clesbians and gay men needed to see their collective health as a political problem\u201d and make this illness a political issue to be able to get the treatment they needed and deserved for themselves (Brier 2009, 12). This twisted the traditional phrasing of \u201cmaking the personal political\u201d but it relied on the already established feminist movement to do so. Similarly, feminism and gay liberation activists worked hand-in-hand, especially when you consider how many lesbians made the AIDS crisis their main focus. In the 1970s, albeit before the AIDS crisis, the Fenway Health clinic was founded in Boston, the same city that the BWHBC was created in (Brier 2009, 16). Though she never says the two are connected, her decision to include the BWHBC seemed to be a conscious connection to feminism and gay rights during the AIDS crisis.<\/p>\n
The the more significant movement that AIDS activists relied on was the gay liberation movement. However, activists disagreed on whether gay liberation as they knew it was a good or bad idea as the AIDS epidemic spread. Larry Kramer, for instance, stated he was \u201csick of guys who [thought] that all being gay means is sex in the first place (Brier 2009, 13). Others were not as ready to abandon the sexual rights they had fought for in Stonewall and other crucial gay liberation protests, and they believed that sex itself was healthy. What was unhealthy, after all, was the disease, not the act itself. In fact, some gay liberationists believed that sexual liberation required both \u201c healthful behavior and sexual pleasure\u201d (Brier 2009, 17). Once the disease was in full swing, these debates still continued, but the gay liberation movement gave way to platforms that overall helped keep queer people informed about the AIDS crisis. They used gay newspapers, community meetings, etc. to inform the public about how to prevent catching AIDS. Without the gay liberation movement, it is unlikely that the queer community would have had the spaces to communicate about AIDS as much as they did, even if they could not get outside support in the early years of the epidemic.<\/p>\n
Something unrelated that I thought was interesting, however, was how well Brandt captured what historians of medicine are trying to do now. He said \u201c For this reason, it seems that a more complex model of disease is required\u2026 a model sensitive to the varied biological, psychological, and social factors shaping the nature of disease\u201d (Brandt 1988, 380). That has been the goal of every author we have read this semester, and it was just awesome to me how well that fit into our final week.<\/p>\n
Source 2<\/p>\n
The fight against AIDs was not as simple as a battle against a disease\u2013clearly the fight against AIDs was made equally as hard because of the indifference shown by those at the levers of power. The social stigma and judgment passed onto those suffering prolonged the fight to the expense of so many lives. Similarly, syphilis faced social hurdles in its treatment. Brandt showed how tracking and treating syphilis was hindered by traditional notions about sexuality. It was argued at the beginning of the 20th century that if people just changed their behavior, the disease would not be spread. George H.W. Bush made the same argument in\u00a0How to Survive a Plague. He said \u201cit\u2019s one of the few diseases where behavior matters\u2026change your behavior.\u201d Of course, blaming people who do not follow traditional sexual expectations was not a serious effort to treat and eradicate a disease. Activist Peter Staley argued that \u201chuman nature dictates that they\u2019re going to go out there, they\u2019re going to have sex.\u201d I don\u2019t know of any other disease where a serious position taken by those with the power of the purse, dictating research funding and access to drugs, expect people to defy human nature as a leading measure.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Reminiscent of the reading about the Boston Women\u2019s Health Book Collective, ACT Up was an organization that took matters into their own hands. With the help of medical experts and scientists, members of ACT Up led the way toward discovering a treatment for AIDs. Like the BWHBC, ACT Up represented a ground swell of people who recognized that they must be their own advocates, raising awareness and educating through the dissemination of potentially lifesaving information to the masses. Led by mostly non-medical experts, both of these advocacy groups painstakingly became intimate with the science to advance care and treatment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Combined with\u00a0Bellevue, we have seen rather bleak conditions for people suffering from HIV\/AIDs. In\u00a0Bellevue\u00a0and the chapter from\u00a0My Own Country\u00a0we get a glimpse at how the fears surrounding HIV affected some health professionals’ willingness to do their jobs. The conflict between a health professional\u2019s professional commitments and the liberty to refuse to work with certain patients for fear of infection is complex.\u00a0 A nurse in\u00a0My Own Country\u00a0called AIDs the \u201clitmus test for nurses and physicians . . . identifying who would and who wouldn\u2019t\u201d (105). It is understandable that health workers had major fears considering the unknowns surrounding the virus\u2014but if a large enough number of professionals refuse to work with patients, then what? Another aspect of HIV\/AIDs\u2019 terrible reach was the sufferings of the family. The last several pages of Verghese\u2019s chapter recounted Gordon\u2019s life as the family was described hearing the news that he was likely HIV positive. There was shock, denial, shame, and a mix of many other emotions that rippled through the family, further soured by the pessimistic prognosis that was the result of his visible deterioration and labored breathing. His mother acted ignorant to how he likely contracted the virus and his father was in flat denial over the possibility. It is not totally clear if Gordon dismissed concerns over his health due to shame or the desire to not be a burden to his family, but AIDs patients must have felt a horrible sense of isolation in cases where families were not as supportive. Groups like ACT Up were important to create a network of people who could support each other, making the fight a little less difficult.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Source 3<\/p>\n
The readings for week fourteen and fifteen were an excellent conclusion to this course because of how the themes we\u2019ve explored all throughout the semester are interwoven within the discussion of the community and political responses to the AIDS crisis. In his article, Brandt describes the overlapping themes of syphilis and AIDS as both demonstrating, \u201cthe pervasive fear of contagion, concerns about casual transmission, the stigmatization of victims, and the conflicts between public health and civil liberties\u201d (379). His analysis was a full circle moment for me because of how it connected to some of our earlier readings regarding the social construction of medicine. He discusses this construction of medicine by arguing that syphilis \u201cwas seen as one dimension of a larger breakdown in values that emphasized the sanctity of the home, the domestic role of women, and the principle of strictly marital sexuality\u201d (Brandt, 376). Both syphilis and AIDS, along with other diseases that we have studied this semester, often took on deeper cultural and social meanings that were intertwined with social categories such as gender, race, and class.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the readings and film for this discussion board, I saw so many connections to other readings from this course. One of the aspects of\u00a0How to Survive a Plague\u00a0that stood out most to me was the collective, community-based efforts of care for those with AIDS. It reminded me specifically of the Boston Women\u2019s Health Collective readings we had in week thirteen. The video showcases how those with AIDS were required to become their own researchers, lobbyists, and pharmacists in order to take care of one another and their community. The film and chapter one of\u00a0Infectious Ideas\u00a0also reminded me of Adria Imada\u2019s book,\u00a0An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin\u00a0because of how they discuss the relationship between disease, interpersonal interactions, and community care. Brier argues that Ron Vachon believed, \u201cprevention would only be effective if an ethic of caring and a fraternal model of community was tied to sexual pleasure\u201d (25). Brandt highlights how the theories of casual transmission of syphilis, which was similar to public reactions of AIDS, reflected culturally-based worries about disease and health. Due to these fears, people with AIDS were villainized as threats to public health and safety. Although Imada\u2019s book focuses on leprosy, which is not as comparable of a disease to HIV\/AIDS, both leprosy and AIDS were socially-constructed diseases that relied on community care and relationships that ignored the constructed immorality of those with diseases. Brier concludes that Callen and Berowitz\u2019s use of specific language \u201cimplied a shared responsibility based not on morality but, rather, on a desire to care for other gay men\u201d (35-36). I was really interested in how community care was instrumental to activism surrounding AIDS, especially because of the shortcomings of political responses and public health. While some politicians pushed harmful homophobic narratives of immoral behavior that forced the responsibility of controlling AIDS to those impacted by the disease, activists took on communal responsibility to protect themselves when governmental and public health officials failed to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Am. Med week 14 replies Post VS The article, \u201cThe Syphilis Epidemic and its Relation to AIDS\u201d, explores similarities between syphilis and AIDS. Allan M. Brandt noted that, \u201cAIDS, like syphilis in the pasts, engenders powerful social conflicts about the meaning, nature, and risks of sexuality; the nature and role of the state in protecting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-106761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-paper-writing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}