My initial essential question was, Why is it that some people have almost unlimited medical care when others have none? Although this question still applies to my research, I have mainly focused in on inequalities and biases and how they lead to different levels of care. I think that I would my focus a little bit and ask, What factors contribute to medical inequalities biases?
As I have been doing research on current and past medical inequalities, I became frusatrated with the philosophical dilemma of whether we can solve any problems in our world at all. Medicine is seemingly and specific field with its own problems to work out. However, I have began to realize that it is so deeply interconnected with other societal issues (other biases such as race, class, policy, etc), it can never be fully fixed unless we can work out and understand all other societal issues. This is not exactly an easy undertaking. And then I began to realize if medicine is like this, aren’t all problems we have in the world interconnected? I have began to feel discouraged that no matter how much we work to correct things, we can never fix any issues that we have to their entirety.
On Senior Project Evening, I think that I want my audience to take away from my project that everything in our society is connected. Health care is present in everything that we do. It is impossible to fully understand the reason for medical inequalities in our world without fully understanding the roots and reasons for inequalities in America. For example, unconscious biases that may be created from stereotypes that we’ve picked up in the media, or in the news, may lead to altered levels of care that patients receive. However, on the flip side these biased short cuts our brains naturally make are not just a danger in medicine, they are present in everything that we do. Health is present in our daily lives. Depending on where we live, we have different conditions that contribute to our health. Whether your school offers a gym program, whether you have safe parks to play in, healthy foods accessible, transportation to attend doctors appointments, these all lead to preventable health conditions. Life and healthcare are so interconnected that we can look our American history through the lens of medicine. In analyzing medical narratives in different times periods, I was able to gain a deeper understanding of different societal attitudes than just reading about what was happening politically at that time in a textbook.
For the Senior Project Evening, I think that I am going to stick with my plan of having an interactive website, but have an emphasis on interconnectedness. I have not decided whether this will be in the format of a sort of mindmap, or whether all of the ideas will come together at the end, but I want to emphasize visually that they are all interconnected.