Weekly Post

Last weeks discussion was quite interesting though I felt that there were certain aspects of discussion that I did not quite understand. There is a lot about the politics of health care that I will admit I do not know much about. And as the floor was opened up for a larger dicussion, it seemed as if the policts of health care was the main issue at hand. So that was a little bit disengaging for me. What did strike interest in me was our discussion of health care and insurance. We are fully aware of the issues of the health care system in the U.S., and it was intersting to hear about some of the facts, specifically about colon cancer. What was surprising to hear is that, I may be wrong in how I've interepreted this, but what I think the speaker was talking about in this regard was individuals diagnosed with colon caner with insurance who are able to pay for the additional testing do more harm in increasing the risk for futher complication than patients without this insurance. I'm not sure if this was the exact point that was made, but I do our speaker mentioning something about how unnecessary the additional treatment was for colon cancer, and how it possible has more adverse outcomes. Regardless, this was a pretty interesting talk and I'm glad we had the opportunity to attend.

March 3

Bottom line: I really learned quite a few interesting things from Dr. Otis Crawley's presentation. Granted, it was a little fatalistic in that his presentation focused a lot on the pitfalls of the system; but I think that this is an important way to start an informed debate on the issue. It was incredible to hear the different debates surrounding equitable provision of health care. Dr. Crawley made an interesting statement: that we need to consider "rational health care, not rationing health care". This concept was reinforced by a different point which he brought up: there is a difference between access to health care and quality of health care. What kind of information do underserved communities have access to and how does this affect the quality of the health care they receive? Additionally, the concept of "rationality" in distribution of access to health care was reinforced by a graph which Dr. Crawley presented. This graph was incredibly compelling because it essentially showed that a person with colon cancer (in the span of five years) is likely to live longer with stage two of the disease with insurance than a person with stage one of the disease without insurance. This is not only a presents a huge ethical problem, but also highlights the importance of rationality in the healthcare.

Another super interesting debate that we sort of continued amongst ourselves after the event includes the question of race and physiological distinctions/susceptibilities to certain disease. Many of people agreed that race in itself is a social construct which cannot be used to accurately characterize suceptibilities to disease. In terms of gathering demographic information about correlation with certain racial/ethnic groups and diseases, I can understand using racial categorizations (for statistical purposes). However, it seems slightly shady to me to claim that there is a causal pathway between race and disease.

Yeah.

Similar to other people's reflections on Dr. Brawley's talk, I was just surprised at how kitchen-level the discussion was. Thank goodness for the Stanford surgeon to our right that started what I thought of as the real-issues investigation. I'm sure Dr. Brawley is more than qualified and has addressed very difficult issues, but when he stated that reform will come, either now or when the system implodes on us, I was personally frustrated. The entire country knows the system is due to crash, this isn't news, so why reiterate the scare tactics to a well-educated Stanford audience. Shouldn't talks like these at Stanford be where solutions are investigated, scrutinized, and proposed? In addition, it was just plain annoying when he refused to answer a question just because the answer might be too politically charged. That's what people in Washington do, but politics should never restrain doctors from speaking the blatant truth, nor should it ever intimidate them. I must say that we are just students and perhaps naive regarding such things, but ideals must be preserved despite the political climate. I think it would be more beneficial both academically and socially if such talks were in the future specifically directed at providing solutions.