Imagine a bank that accepts not money, but human saliva. This is a biobank– a type of biorepository or ‘library’ that collects and stores human biological samples and their associated data for use in current or future research. Biobanks can…
Maternal mortality, or death that occurs during pregnancy or shortly after, is used by the World Health Organization as an indicator of how healthy one country is compared to others. A common misconception is that maternal mortality is a public health…
While preparing for major surgery a few years ago, my surgeon, learning that I was a graduate student in English, responded, “Women love their novels!” (Which seemed like a great time to tell him that my sub-specialty was actually medical…
To say that transgender people face large amounts of discrimination in American society and globally would be an understatement. However, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), there is a trend of improving favorability toward transgender people in the United…
As always, he American Healthcare system is always changing. This is an update of some of the policy changes that have occurred in healthcare in the past month and what they mean for you. As we all may know, the…
According to anthropologist Phillips Stevens, the definition of “cult” changed in the 1970s, after Charles Manson’s commune committed a multitude of murders. The definition developed negative, satanic connotations as the perceived danger of cults started to spread throughout the United…
At the end of the 19th century, medicine had evolved into a highly respected, scientific endeavor. The standard of medicine was marked by the ‘whiteness’ of physicians’ white coats, representing the purity of medicine.[1] In 1993, the Arnold P. Gold…