I'm pretty sure that despite Obama's lofty goals with health care, there will continue to be problems that plague the way our system works, and the way the American people react to it.
For instance, this article about co-payments with health insurance. It makes complete sense that people will reduce the number of trips that they make to the doctor if their copay is too large, causing their well-being to snowball into more serious conditions and leading to large and unmanageable hospital bills.
I do not understand why people cannot comprehend the importance of education's impact upon healthcare. The two are inherently intertwined. Too much of self-care has been left to families, and only the most severe medical threats are taught in schools. Drugs, AIDS, and sexual consequences are usually stressed in health education, if a school is well-funded enough to have such a program, but there is an overwhelming negligence toward health maintenance and truly caring for oneself. This, my friends, is a problem. It is all related. By depreciating the value of health to the benefit of "more important" school subjects (read: subjects that will be present in state tests), health and education about illnesses, up to and including mental illnesses, become forgotten or forsaken. There is so much of an emphasis upon rushing, upon competition, in American society, that health falls to the wayside, and Americans then pay for it, in volumes and multitudes.
Here is an article about an educational radio show in Spanish that is currently broadcast in Rhode Island on Wednesday mornings at 9. This is the sort of program that I think would be effective-- it reaches not only those who can read, and can read in English, but it also allows for interaction between patients and doctors on important topics that can be embarrasing to raise with one's physician in person. I hope that this program fosters others that can become even more successful and use media that are easily accessible to a large number of uninformed, hard-working, and treasured citizens of the United States.
Take care.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
ImMEDIATE Justice, NOW!
Today I attended my first Rhode Island National Organization for Women meeting. It was absolutely amazing. This organization does exactly what I want to do one day. It promotes equality for women, reproductive rights, ending violence towards women, supporting gay and lesbian rights, and stopping discrimination. It works with legislators to create effective and meaningful laws to help further these goals, and lobbies for them. I was really impressed with the cohesion of the group, and how receptive they were to new ideas. For instance, I brought up the ImMEDIAte Justice project, started by the Women's Creative Collective in L.A. It reaches out to inner-city girls and teenagers, asking them about their personal experiences with sexual education, and addresses the large gap between what is presented by their school, their family, and their friends. I have been working with this nonprofit since the summertime, and was so proud of the video that they created as a result of long hours of hard work. The women at RI NOW were immediately on board with potentially screening the video in the future. It was great.
I expect to become more involved in RI NOW, especially because they will be having lobbyist training in the next few weeks, and because the state V-Day events will be happening in March. I coordinated the spoken word response to The Vagina Monologues during Brown's V-Day last year, and it was an amazing event. I am super excited.
Here are some links you can enjoy:
I expect to become more involved in RI NOW, especially because they will be having lobbyist training in the next few weeks, and because the state V-Day events will be happening in March. I coordinated the spoken word response to The Vagina Monologues during Brown's V-Day last year, and it was an amazing event. I am super excited.
Here are some links you can enjoy:
- ImMEDIATE Justice (scroll to the bottom to watch the "My Message, My Body" series)
- National Organization for Women Main Site
- Rhode Island National Organization for Women (the pages are less busy-looking than the National site)
- V-Day
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Hello!
Hi, friends!
This is my third attempt to keep a blog. This is also my first special interest-based blog, so I will have far more incentive to keep it up. I wanted to give you some background on my interests, and how they have changed significantly over my undergraduate career.
I am very interested in women's reproductive health care and working on the policy regarding women's rights. I am taking the LSAT this June so that I can actually do this. By knowing how the law works, I will be able to incite change within it. I have an extensive Cognitive Science background through classes taken at Brown University since Spring of 2007. During the last year, I have become increasingly aware of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and other Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) practices. With limited meditation training from a converted Zen Buddhist, involvement with self-soothing exercises in the context of women's support groups, and taking classes in a women's program at Butler Hospital, I have realized the vast importance that this kind of therapy can have on individuals, even when they are under minor amounts of stress or suffering. This kind of self-mindfulness is not commonly taught to us in classrooms, is not widely practiced at the workplace, and is rarely passed on to family members outside of specific religions or certain intellectual contexts. It is often quite hard to start this conversation with important people in one's life, and I intend to help from a distance if I can.
This blog will serve as a means of presenting this kind of information to the public through articles, my commentary, and hopefully, eventually, your input. For those individuals with illnesses like depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or bipolarity, just to name a few, it can be difficult to motivate oneself to achieve goals, even simple ones like personal hygiene or performing household chores. I want to make this blog as easily accessible as I can, and to provide links with useful information and current events or opinions. I also want to stress that self-awareness also involves an acceptance of the immediate state of being and working in the present, which is a means of reassuring oneself that the only moment to deal with is right now.
In addition to presenting useful techniques, I will post links as to political developments and international efforts, as well. There will also probably be some posts as to my own personal involvement in both women's healthcare and MBCT. And possibly some LSAT frustration/law school updates.
As promised, here are a few articles to start you off with:
Take care.
This is my third attempt to keep a blog. This is also my first special interest-based blog, so I will have far more incentive to keep it up. I wanted to give you some background on my interests, and how they have changed significantly over my undergraduate career.
I am very interested in women's reproductive health care and working on the policy regarding women's rights. I am taking the LSAT this June so that I can actually do this. By knowing how the law works, I will be able to incite change within it. I have an extensive Cognitive Science background through classes taken at Brown University since Spring of 2007. During the last year, I have become increasingly aware of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and other Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) practices. With limited meditation training from a converted Zen Buddhist, involvement with self-soothing exercises in the context of women's support groups, and taking classes in a women's program at Butler Hospital, I have realized the vast importance that this kind of therapy can have on individuals, even when they are under minor amounts of stress or suffering. This kind of self-mindfulness is not commonly taught to us in classrooms, is not widely practiced at the workplace, and is rarely passed on to family members outside of specific religions or certain intellectual contexts. It is often quite hard to start this conversation with important people in one's life, and I intend to help from a distance if I can.
This blog will serve as a means of presenting this kind of information to the public through articles, my commentary, and hopefully, eventually, your input. For those individuals with illnesses like depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or bipolarity, just to name a few, it can be difficult to motivate oneself to achieve goals, even simple ones like personal hygiene or performing household chores. I want to make this blog as easily accessible as I can, and to provide links with useful information and current events or opinions. I also want to stress that self-awareness also involves an acceptance of the immediate state of being and working in the present, which is a means of reassuring oneself that the only moment to deal with is right now.
In addition to presenting useful techniques, I will post links as to political developments and international efforts, as well. There will also probably be some posts as to my own personal involvement in both women's healthcare and MBCT. And possibly some LSAT frustration/law school updates.
As promised, here are a few articles to start you off with:
Take care.
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