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- All Subjects: COVID-19
- All Subjects: Creative Project
- All Subjects: medicine
- Creators: School of Molecular Sciences
- Status: Published
Hinduism is one of the oldest religions in the world and one of the most practiced today. It is full of fantastical myths and heroic legends, as well as undercurrents of feminism contrasted with misogyny and patriarchy. Hindu myths are contradictory as stories have evolved over time and have been retold with millions of differing perspectives.
In my thesis, I portrayed the 22 archetypes of the Major Arcana of the tarot through the lens of Hindu mythology as well as the broader pan-Indian culture. I include ancient stories and references to modern social issues. I visually communicated the connections between characters of Hindu mythology and the archetypes of the tarot with 22 watercolor paintings. This project was an opportunity to explore both the tarot through Hinduism, vice-versa. It allowed for the development of a deeper connection with spirituality and religion, along with a greater understanding of visual communication.
Though schizophrenia was categorized as a mental illness over 100 years ago, there is a plethora of knowledge that continues to perplex the scientific and medical community alike. This tragic mental disorder affects approximately 1% of the general population, and many of these individuals are homeless if left untreated. Each schizophrenia patient has a different set of symptoms, so all of these patients experience a variety of positive and negative symptoms. Negative symptoms are called so as they are in absence, and some examples include apathy, anhedonia, lack of motivation, reduced social drive, and reduced cognitive functioning. Positive behavior, on the other hand, is a change in behavior or thoughts such as visual or auditory hallucinations, delusions, confused thoughts, disorganized speech, and trouble concentrating. Because schizophrenia patients do not share the exact same set of symptoms, research in schizophrenia requires a tremendous amount of medical resources. Over the last few years, new studies have started in the field of schizophrenia involving proteomics, or the study of proteins and their function. This new frontier gives doctors and scientists alike a new opportunity to improve the quality of life of schizophrenia patients by providing a potential method through which patients would receive individualized treatment based on their specific symptoms.
Language has a critical role as a social determinant of health and a source of healthcare disparities. Rhetorical devices are ubiquitous in medicine and are often used to persuade or inform care team members. Rhetorical devices help a healthcare team acknowledge and interpret narratives. For example, metaphors are frequently used as rhetorical devices by patients to describe cancer, including winning or losing a battle, surviving a fight, war, potentially implying that the patient feels helpless like a pawn fighting in a struggle directed by the physician, thus reducing patient autonomy and agency. However, this occidental approach is flawed because it excessively focuses on the individual's agency and marginalizes external factors, such as cultural beliefs and social support (Sontag, 1989). Although there is a large body of research about how the rhetoric of medicine affects patients in the United States, there is a lack of such research about how patient experiences' rhetoric can help increase the understanding of Latino populations' unique social determinants. This creative project aims to analyze the rhetorical differences in the description of disease amongst Latino and American communities, translating to creating an educational module for a Spanish for biomedical sciences class. The objective is to increase future healthcare professionals' ability to understand how the composition of descriptions and medical rhetoric in different mediums of humanities can serve as critical tools to analyze social determinants in Latino healthcare delivery.