Inadequacies in media representations of medicine #eng112

"Grey's Anatomy," now in its sixth season on ABC, is one of the most watched prime-time television series in the country and chronicles the lives of five surgical interns and their attending and resident physicians. "House," which airs on Fox and is also in its sixth season, follows the medical maverick Dr. Gregory House and his trainees, as they diagnose and treat only the most difficult cases.

Informed consent was the most frequently observed bioethical issue. Of 49 total incidents, 43 percent involved "exemplary" consent discussions, while the remaining instances were "inadequate." In general, exemplary depictions portrayed "compassionate, knowledgeable physicians participating in a balanced discussion with a patient about possible treatment options."

Conversely, inadequate depictions were "marked by hurried and one-sided discussions, refusal by physicians to answer questions" and "even an entire lack of informed consent for risky procedures," the authors state.

via sciencedaily.com

 

“Headaches are an effective theatrical device for portraying dramatic, unpredictable pain and disability,” said Dr Vargas. “Movies exert a powerful influence on the public’s perceptions and understanding of the medical profession and medical conditions.”

Dr Vargas began his presentation with a well-known clip from the movie Kindergarten Cop. In this film, the main character, played by now-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is an undercover police officer assigned to teach a kindergarten class. While leading a class, he rubs his head, complaining of a headache. One student suggests it may be a tumor, and a number of other youngsters agree. “It’s not a tumor!” growls Gov Schwarzenegger’s character in response. While the clip set the tone for this light-hearted presentation, Dr Vargas pointed out that it also helps physicians understand why their patients may develop fears about their headaches.

via psychiatrictimes.com

These two readings are on the syllabus for Thursday, 9.16, but are no longer required. Instead, I'm posting snippets here.

Why a course blog and not a Facebook group? #eng112

Having fielded a couple individual emails posing this question already, I thought an actual blog entry might provide a better answer. This is a quick-and-dirty answer, though, so I encourage further discussion in the comments and in class tomorrow and/or Thursday.

1. I don't have a Facebook account. There are a host of reasons why (disillusionment, privacy, security, Zuckerberg).

2. Class Facebook groups have been tried (and failed) in the past. Again, a host of reasons why (bad implementation, creepy treehouse, student disengagement). 

3. In my view, college-level courses should involve some level of new challenges. If everyone's already on Facebook, where's the challenge and learning?

This need not be the last word on it, though. I welcome any/all comments here and, if need be, we can discuss it in even more detail face-to-face.

poignant passages, 9.14 #eng112

No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly as a blogger’s are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
via theatlantic.com

 

Kill your word-processor

Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, "correcting" your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don't write their software with Word. They use a text-editor, like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since they're at the core of all other software) and they have almost no distracting features — but they do have powerful search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and can't transmit a virus.

via locusmag.com

 

There's no doubt that social-media networks are fantastic communication machines. They allow people to feel connected to a virtual community, make new friends and keep old ones, learn things they didn't know. They encourage people to write more (that can't be bad) and write well and concisely (which is hard, trust us). They are a new form of entertainment (and marketing) that can occupy people for hours in any given day.

"Great blogging is great writing, and it turns out great Twittering is great writing — it's the haiku form of blogging," says Debbie Weil, a consultant on social media and author of The Corporate Blogging Book.

But the art of the status update is not much of an art form for millions of people on Facebook, where users can post details of what they're doing for all their friends to see, or on Twitter, where people post tweets about what they're doing that potentially every user can see.

via usatoday.com

 

I fail to see any clear distinction between someone's boring Twitter feed – considered only semi-literate and very much bad – and someone else's equally boring, paper-based diary – considered both pro-humanist and unquestionably good.
Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It's a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.
via bldgblog.blogspot.com

 

on students' course expectations #eng112

Before anything else happened in Week 1, I asked all students enrolled in ENG 112, sections 06 and 07, to share their expectations for the course. I asked that they do this because I think this is one of the goals of Week 1, i.e., to not so much lay down ground rules as to make known our needs and desires in terms of learning. Students come to college with their own expectations; professors have expectations, too, as do the colleges and universities themselves. So, there's a kind of balancing act to be executed in the classroom. By sharing these expectations early on, though, I like to think that we'll all be better off, more mindful of each other and what we want to do together in the time we have.

From 11206:
They expect assistance in understanding their own thoughts, in finding the right words. They expect me to be honest in my assessment of their performance. They expect to develop better awareness of potential audiences, to be confident enough to write without using a spellchecker. They want to produce interesting material that has applications to other/future college courses. They want to be challenged, to be inspired to write. They don't want to be bored. 

From 11207:
They want to learn different forms, kinds and techniques of writing, to develop better argumentation and research skills. They expect me to be fair in my assessment of their performance. They want to learn better time management, to improve their diction and reading comprehension. They want help in brainstorming topics for writing. They want assignments of reasonable length (3-5 pages). They expect an amount of fun and engagement. 

These are, of course, not all the expectations students had, only those I was able to scribble down furiously in my Moleskine. If I missed any important ones, I trust students to offer further expectations in the comments.