History of healthcare is not considered to be a key part when it comes to American Medicine. Most of us question why this topic should even be considered crucial to the study of medicine. I can speak from my own experience that going into the class I had doubts about whether this topic is something that will be useful to my learning experience at Harvard Summer School. Having only taken two sessions of the class I can strongly comprehend that this is a topic that speaks to our present healthcare system. I believe that in order to be fully aware of our current healthcare system we need to first look in the past.

Class discussions started out with why more involvement of the general public is needed in these topics. The reason why we need discussions of the past is that it's an important step to ensure that healthcare today benefits the mass and not private corporations that push their own agenda. Big pharma and private corporations spend huge resources to ensure that improvement in today’s healthcare doesn't lessen their profit in any shape or form. There are clear examples of privately funded research that abuse and bend results to meet the satisfaction of these corporations. One example we discussed in class was the Tobacco industry. In the 1920s general public started to become increasingly worried about the adverse effect that tobacco has on the human body. The tobacco industry saw this as a danger to their successful and growing business. They took it upon themselves to start private research in order to prove that smoking has no negative effect on the human body. Surprisingly they were able to convince physicians and the general public through advertisements that smoking didn’t cause any lung disease and the present cases reported at that time was treated to be individual circumstances. This is one of many examples as to why understanding the agenda of corporations can prevent us from making decisions that haunt us later in the future.

During our second session, we had an important discussion about inequality that exists in the American healthcare system. Our Medicare still has a long way to go before it can provide quality healthcare. There are plenty of examples that show the inequality in the American healthcare system. One such example took place after the invention and discovery of dialysis in 1943. Until 1962 outpatients were not treated with repeated dialysis. As dialysis proved to be life-saving and crucial to one’s life with kidney diseases, medical centers opened throughout the country allowing the affluent class to fully benefit from the new treatment available. The ones who were denied treatment due to the cost of each dialysis had to accept the fact that death was knocking at their door. This inequality in our healthcare is still present as our political leaders side with corporations that constantly take our medical rights away from us. It’s our responsibility to be aware of the healthcare system so everyone can be served with equality in mind.

Even though we might not directly affiliate culture with medicine but the social environment plays a huge role in the health care system. One of the readings in our session was from Kay Redfield Jamison who suffered from manic depression and refused to take lithium as a medicine for her mental illness. The major reason as to why she decided to not take lithium was the social stigma that mental health patients suffer every day. Even today mental health most of the time is not considered to be in the same spectrum as physical health. There has always been this stigma around medication for mental health. This book talks about her experience as a patient and as a psychiatrist herself. After going through 10 years of treatment Jamison could now see her own patients live the life she followed for so long and the suffering she went through. The book really gives the reader an important perspective and irony in the stigmatization of medication for mental health.

I want to end with an open discussion question: How come private research attain so much power to make something harmful slip through the eyes of healthcare professionals and continue to drive their own agenda?

Additional resources for more info:

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323538.php

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC197776/pdf/mlab00190-0069.pdf

http://www.processhistory.org/chapin-healthcare/

https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/us-health-care-non-system-1908-2008/2008-05