MCL Blog
Welcome to the blog of the medical cultures lab (MCL), a community of scholars who work to understand the culture of medicine and advance health equity.
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MCL member Krista Harrison first attended to hospice as a care model when her grandmother reached the end of her life. Her grandmother had what Harrison now recognizes as quintessentially good and bad experiences with hospice – the first too early and marked by overpromised…
In seventh grade English, Ms. Wescott drilled into her Diamond Junior High School students the golden rule of effective writing: show don’t tell.Showing culture is tricky. Culture includes values, beliefs, and practices shared by a group. It exists in informal communities, such…
In many traditions, qualitative data analysis occurs over a period of months or years, much of it after engagement with research participants has concluded. Often, researcher(s) conduct their analytic work without further participant input, but some embrace the practice of…
Being raised in more than one culture gives a unique vantage point. Na’amah Razon, a MD family physician and PhD medical anthropologist, split her childhood between Israel and the United States. The experience formed her worldview. “Growing up in both cultures, I was always…
Epilepsy is a condition that has had an outsized role in social life. In some societies, individuals with epilepsy are ostracized. In others they are revered as spiritually enlightened. In the United States, epilepsy affects approximately 3 million adults, 1/3 of whom cannot…
Primary care providers (PCP) are overwhelmed. There are not enough to meet patient demand, and they do not have time to attend to the needs of their large patient panels. These challenges are particularly acute when providers care for patients whose language or culture differs…
Liz Dzeng, MD, MPH, PhD, remembers sitting in her post-graduate sociology courses at the University of Cambridge wondering how to participate in the conversations around her. Medical school and residency left her feeling deeply unfulfilled. She was on the verge of quitting the…
Medicine and healing create powerful social relationships for doctors and patients. These relationships become a focus for scientists and the lay public as well as in politics and the arts. At its best, qualitative research on medical culture can bridge these diverse…
"I think primary care is where the crux of dementia care begins…I think that primary care providers should be able to identify Alzheimer's disease at the very least and provide Alzheimer's care for patients, because there are just not enough specialists out there to provide…
It is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.Culture? No. This is Obi Wan Kenobi’s description of The Force, the energy that allows Jedi to see the future, levitate machinery, and manipulate the weak-minded.…