Expat healthcare

Integrating faith and health. Source: Pexels. How can the gap between medicine and faith be more widely and rapidly bridged without falling into the silos of medical dogma and denominational competition? Are there tools that both faith-based and health care providers can implement now, even if there is not an environment of explicit faith-health collaboration? Here are four suggestions that any provider—in either community—can use. 1. Creating universal faith-health action tools Mandy Cohen, North Carolina secretary of health, told a story at a 2018 workshop called “Faith- Health Collaboration to Improve Population Health,” about not thinking to ask a patient who was losing weight if she was getting enough to eat during a medical visit, and how food security and other social determinants have come to be understood to be as vital to good health as medical attention. Communities of faith often address food insecurity and may address this directly but not link … [Read more...] about How to Incorporate Faith into our Healthcare System

Source: Wikicommons Open Dialogue was developed in Western Lapland in the 1980s. It involves a consistent family/social network approach to care, in which the primary treatment is carried out through meetings involving the patient together with his or her family members and extended social network. Open Dialogue emerged out of a decade-long, organic process, while clinicians (including Jaakko Seikkula and Markku Sutela) searched for the best treatment for acute mental illness and, in particular, psychosis. Many of the changes they made along the way were reactions to encountering ambiguity and uncertainty. They decided to free themselves from searching for a non-existent truth, concentrating instead on curiosity and improvisation. Linked to this, they incorporated the recognition that language shapes our reality, and that one’s language, and thought, is dependent on seeing the world through a personal "lens." The main aim of … [Read more...] about Open Dialogue: A New Approach to Mental Healthcare

A former colleague of mine, a psychiatric nurse, was working alongside a psychiatrist who would often be insistent about his intention to change a patient’s medication regimen before they had an opportunity to see the patient together. She recalled that on one such occasion, she boldly interrupted the psychiatrist as he reported his clinical perspective and intentions. “No, doctor,” she urged. “Just because he’s had an increase in psychotic symptoms does not mean we need to increase his risperidone. He’s been on meth all week. We need to prioritize getting him off of the drugs he’s been using before we start changing his meds!” The psychiatrist hadn’t seen the bigger picture. He had been operating with a kind of clinical tunnel vision out of habit, and her boldness to voice her perspective broadened his, ultimately increasing the quality of the care for the patient. The doctor, for his part, was responsive and did not … [Read more...] about Collaboration Is Vital to Effective Mental Health Treatment

In this post I describe the divergent perspectives of the dominant biomedical model of mental health care used in industrialized countries, and the increasing trend in the use of so-called complementary and alternative (CAM) approaches. I argue that integrative mental health care offers a ‘middle-ground’ approach based on each unique individual’s symptoms and preferences. The divergent perspectives of Western medicine and CAM In the U.S. and many other countries, the principle role of psychiatrists and family physicians is to prescribe and manage medications addressing a range of medical and mental health problems. The majority of non-pharmacologic modalities are regarded as complementary and alternative (CAM) therapies and are frequently dismissed by conventionally trained physicians before an objective appraisal of research evidence is undertaken. Along the same lines, CAM practitioners may actively discourage their patients from using pharmaceuticals and … [Read more...] about Conventional Medicine and CAM Have Different Perspectives

Source: RikkisREfuge Other, CC 2.0 William MacAskill is a tenured Oxford professor and serial social entrepreneur. He’s spent the last six years developing a concept he calls effective altruism, which he lays out in his new book, Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You Can Make a Difference. I spoke with him today. MN: Let’s work from the concrete. How would you evaluate the following charity choice: Fund the Society for Neuroscience to give a grant every year for the most promising early-stage professor studying the biological basis of reasoning, with the goal of improving humankind’s reasoning skills? WM: I like funding innovation because it has big ripple effect. Innovation has led to most improvement in the world. I also like your idea because economic research shows that increasing IQ yields big economic benefit to a country. On the other hand, it’s risky because it’s a difficult problem to make progress on, and probably not that … [Read more...] about Effective Altruism