Social Medicine On Air

Dear Social Medicine On Air community!

We are incredibly excited to share with you our new project, Hope is a Talent, a podcast exploring the intersection of health and Palestine.

Our first three episodes can all be found here: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/hope-is-a-talent

We have more interviews and work lined up and are excited to share it with you. We also have NOT stopped working on SMOA content, and are currently working on a new episode to release separate from this Palestine series -- excited to get it out there.

As always, we love to hear from folks. If you have ideas, suggestions, interview recommendations or ANYTHING at all, please email us at [email protected].

With so much gratitude,

Nadine, Brendan, and Raghav

This is the companion piece to the first episode of our new series, Hope is a Talent. This is the unedited audio journal shared to us from our colleague in northern Gaza, Amro Hamadda between the months of November 2023 through March 2024. He is an inspiration to us, and his voice is a guide.

We are unendingly grateful for him taking the time to record these, record them in English, somehow figure out how to upload them to the cloud, and get them to us while trying to survive and provide for his family.

Thank you Amro.

Welcome to a new series we are working on -- Hope is a Talent -- in which we examine the terrifying and bloody shoreline that has formed between healthcare and Palestine.

This is the edited and editorialized episode from the beautiful and compelling audio diaries shared to us from Amro Hamadda, a medical student who is currently living and surviving in Northern Gaza.

We will also be uploading the unedited version of his audio and STRONGLY encourage you to listen to Amro's beautiful and precious voice. He is an inspiration to all of us in this field.

Our music comes from Samah Mustafa's album BALLOOR; please check out her beautiful and mesmerizing work on BandCamp: https://samahmustafa.bandcamp.com/

Thank you for joining us. Feel free to send us any thoughts or suggestions at [email protected].

Claudio Schuftan, MD joins us today to discuss how human rights problems today have solutions, but priorities are determined by politics. It includes a review of Salvador Allende and Latin American social medicine history, the People's Health Movement and International People's Health University, corporate capture of the World Health Organization, how decisions actually get made at the international level of health, the role of civil society actors, the right to health and how it is implemented, the role of economists and economics in maintaining hegemony, cultural relativism and human rights, the tension between the local and the global, mass mobilizations, the class background of medical trainees, popular participation in health, his own story of exile, and how to think and act globally and locally. 

Dr. Schuftan is a freelance public health consultant in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and an ex-adjunct associate professor in the Department of International Health at the Tulane School of Public Health in New Orleans, USA. He is a Chilean national and received his MD and pediatrics degree in his native country. Since 1975, he has been working on nutrition, primary health care and human rights issues in more than 50 countries the world over. From 1988-1995 he worked in Kenya. Since 1995, he lives in Vietnam and consults worldwide. He started working on human rights issues in the late 1990s and is the author of a fortnightly column, the Human Rights Reader. Most importantly, he is one of the founding members of the People’s Health Movement.

Recommended Resources: 

Isabel Chen and Jamar Slocum join us to discuss the history of American medical education and how its evolution has maintained injustice. They speak about prestige, research dollars, medical school rankings, race, admissions, wealth and power, health disparities, and the long shadow of the 1910 Flexner Report that laid the foundation of the current system. They also share how justice-informed movements like the Beyond Flexner Alliance are attempting to rattle the paradigm and recenter care, love, and justice as the ‘social mission’ of medicine.

Beyond Flexner Alliance (BFA) is a national movement, focused on health equity and training health professionals as agents of more equitable health care. This movement takes us beyond centuries-old conventions in health professions education to train providers prepared to build a system that is not only better, but fairer. The Beyond Flexner Alliance aims to promote social mission in health professions education by networking learners, teachers, community leaders, health policy makers and their organizations to advance equity in education, research, service, policy, and practice.

Beyond Flexner Conference 2022 (March 28-30, 2022), Phoenix AZ: https://flexnerconference.org/

Isabel Chen MD MPH is a family medicine resident and Chief of Social Mission & Advocacy at the  Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center. She is a staunch advocate  for social justice through the lens of health and medicine. She performs medical evaluations for asylum seekers in Southern California and is implementing a social determinants of health curriculum and patien  screening tool for Kaiser Permanente. She founded the Keep Safe Initiative, a grassroots organization that develops panic  alarms for sex-trade workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and co-founded The Reading Bear Society, a citywide early education that promotes inner-city health and literacy. She has servedon multiple boards including at Yale, UNESCO, UBC, APHA, CAFP, and STFM. 

Jamar Slocum MD MBA MPH is a  clinical assistant professor of medicine at the George Washington University (GW), where he practices hospital medicine and serves as faculty  for the Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity and Beyond Flexner Alliance.  During the course of his career, he has combined his skills and experience in clinical medicine and public health to build a healthcare system that is based on equity and prevention. He is a former board member of the Tennessee Health Campaign, one of the leading non-profit advocacy  organizations working to ensure affordable and high quality health care for all Tennesseans. Jamar completed his residency training in internal  medicine at Brown University in Providence, RI and fellowship training in general preventive medicine at the Bloomberg School of Public Health  at Johns Hopkins.

Recommended Resources:

SMOA Survey: bit.ly/SMOAsurvey

In what ways do our personal biases seep into our conversations with others? How does the structure of our language impact the reception of the information we are trying to share? In the era of digital medicine and health misinformation, how can we ensure we are communicating effectively with our patients? Anne Marie Liebel attacks questions like these in today’s episode of SMOA.

Dr. Liebel is the president of Health Communication Partners LLC, the host of the “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication” podcast series, and the administrator of HealthCommunicationPartners.com. She is writing a book about health literacy from a critical social perspective.

To learn more, check out:

What Counts as Literacy in Health Literacy: Applying the Autonomous and Ideological Models of Literacy

https://doi.org/10.21623/1.8.2.7

SMOA Survey: bit.ly/SMOAsurvey

Raj Patel and Rupa Marya join on this episode to draw the links between physical inflammation, injustice, decolonizing medicine, and the relationship between human and non-human flourishing. They discuss environmental racism, political economy and capitalism, the way that inflammation modulates social and biological health, reductive Enlightenment science, the need for decolonized care, and what deep healing looks like. Their new book is Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (2021).

Raj Patel is an author, film-maker, activist, and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. He has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of  Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO,  and protested against them around the world. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and The Value of Nothing, as well as co-author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. He co-directed the documentary The Ants & The Grasshopper.

Rupa Marya is a physician, activist, artist and writer who is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, the founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, and the founder and executive director of the Deep Medicine Circle,  a worker-directed nonprofit committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, learning and restoration. In addition to her work in medicine and writing, Rupa is also the composer and front-woman for Rupa and the April Fishes.

Animation Video (3:18) for Inflamed: bit.ly/3B4Zp6y

Video (28:28): Health and Justice: The Path of Liberation through Medicine (Rupa Marya): bit.ly/3a0xXLe

Synopses of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2021):

(Disclaimer: at the request of the podcast, two free pre-print copies of the book were supplied by FSG in preparation for this episode)

Link to SMOA listener survey: bit.ly/SMOAsurvey

For the very first time (!), we have the ENTIRE SMOA team here to address the question: “Are you exempt from social justice work when you’re off the clock?”

This week’s episode is dedicated to Nath Clarke and their legacy of activism. In honor of Nath’s work, all donations to this GoFundMe will go to Southern Solidarity, a black, queer-led grassroots organization that delivers food, medical resources, and basic needs directly to people experiencing homelessness in downtown New Orleans. Please consider donating if you can.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/celebrating-nath-clarkes-legacy-of-activism

Content warning: today's episode discusses domestic violence.

We also appreciate your patience with this episode as we know it is a few weeks behind our usual schedule! Thank you all for your support.

Short SMOA listener story: bit.ly/smoasurvey

In this episode, Anna Mullany discusses the interrelationship between domestic abuse, capitalism and political economy, patriarchy, and the teaching of social medicine. She discusses the history of the anti-domestic violence movement, the violence of the state, the rise of the carceral state, and the 'social problem apparatus.' She also shares stories from students learning about structural violence and social medicine in the classroom. In combining the micro and macro, she points a way towards emancipation for all. 

Anna Mullany is  a 4th year doctoral student at the School of Public Health and Health  Sciences at the University of MA Amherst. The focus of her doctoral  work is on rural intimate partner violence and social services. Taking a political economic perspective, she looks at how the structural determinants of health determine people's wellbeing and daily lives within capitalism. She is committed to investigating how we create a truly equitable world in which health for all is a reality. She teaches courses on "Health Communication" and "Population Health and  Imperialism" to undergraduates in the Public Health Department at UMass Amherst. Additionally, she is on faculty with the Spark Teacher Education Institute in Brattleboro, VT. Prior to her doctoral studies  she worked for 6 years at the Women’s Freedom Center in Brattleboro, VT – a crisis center responding to intimate partner violence. Anna  also serves as a one of the hosts of Indigo Radio, a weekly radio show on the Brattleboro Community Radio Station WVEW, broadcasts of which focus on connecting local and global issues.

Recommended Resources:

Link to SMOA listener survey: bit.ly/SMOAsurvey

We're joined today by the incredible Agnes Binagwaho, who speaks with us about gender equity and religion before, during, and after the colonial era, the positive power of institutions like the University of Global Health Equity, the importance of teaching leadership and implementation science, and the importance of good systems in care for the most vulnerable. She talks about demystifying healthcare systems, explaining how Rwanda has seen some of the fastest declines in mortality in human history, the importance of human rights, and the importance of trust, accountability, and community (including community health workers). "Tell the truth!"

Agnes Binagwaho MD, M(Ped), PhD is the Vice Chancellor of the University of Global Health Equity, the former Minister of Health of Rwanda and former Professor of Global Health Equity at UGHE. She also is a trained pediatrician, Senior Lecture at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a member of the US National Academy of Medicine and the African Academy of Sciences, and was Co-Chair of the UN task force on the Millennium Development Goals Project for HIV/AIDS and Access to Essential Medicines (among many, many other positions). 

Resources related to this episode: