The social determinants of health (SDOH) represent factors that impact the health and effectiveness/compliance of a treatment plan for a patient. The SDOH include such factors as economic stability, education, home and community context, access to healthcare, neighborhood and built environment, and personal behavior. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent of collection and integration of SDOH into clinical practice, and the usefulness of this information in medical decision making. Following a thorough literature review, an online survey was deployed to physicians and administrators around the country, with the aim of answering the following questions: 1) Do provider practices collect information on a patient's social determinants of health? 2) If yes, how is that information being used, if at all? 3) If not, what is preventing them from doing so? 4) Do the answers to questions 1-3 differ based on the type of payment model (Fee-for-Service or Capitation) to which the practice is subject? The results of the study suggest that fee-for-service payment environments present less incentive to use a patient's SDOH in medical decision making.

This thesis focuses on Bram Stoker’s 1897 British novel 'Dracula' and its association of medical technology with a myriad of Victorian British societal anxieties, facilitating an examination of current and historical fears about medical intervention and medical innovation. Dracula’s parallel yet opposite portrayals of blood transfusion and vampirism allow fears of medical technology to be exaggerated and explored within the realm of the supernatural. In Dracula and today, the desire to restore the health of ourselves and our loved ones is accompanied by fears that medical treatment will cause harm; will reshape our conceptualization of death and thus our relationship with death; and, as new technologies with unestablished consequences are employed, that medical intervention may in fact erode our basic identity and humanity.

The nineteenth-century invention of smallpox vaccination in Great Britain has been well studied for its significance in the history of medicine as well as the ways in which it exposes Victorian anxieties regarding British nationalism, rural and urban class struggles, the behaviors of women, and animal contamination. Yet inoculation against smallpox by variolation, vaccination’s predecessor and a well-established Chinese medical technique that was spread from east to west to Great Britain, remains largely understudied in modern scholarly literature. In the early 1700s, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, credited with bringing smallpox variolation to Great Britain, wrote first about the practice in the Turkish city of Adrianople and describes variolation as a “useful invention,” yet laments that, unlike the Turkish women who variolate only those in their “small neighborhoods,” British doctors would be able to “destroy this [disease] swiftly” worldwide should they adopt variolation. Examined through the lens of Edward Said’s Orientalism, techno-Orientalism, and medical Orientalism and contextualized by a comparison to British attitudes toward nineteenth century vaccination, eighteenth century smallpox variolation’s introduction to Britain from the non-British “Orient” represents an instance of reversed Orientalism, in which a technologically deficient British “Occident” must “Orientalize” itself to import the superior medical technology of variolation into Britain. In a scramble to retain technological superiority over the Chinese Orient, Britain manufactures a sense of total difference between an imagined British version of variolation and a real, non-British version of variolation. This imagination of total difference is maintained through characterizations of the non-British variolation as ancient, unsafe, and practiced by illegitimate practitioners, while the imagined British variolation is characterized as safe, heroic, and practiced by legitimate British medical doctors. The Occident’s instance of medical technological inferiority brought about by the importation of variolation from the Orient, which I propose represents an eighteenth-century instance of what I call medical techno-Orientalism, represents an expression of British anxiety over a medical technologically superior Orient—anxieties which express themselves as retaliatory attacks on the Orient and variolation as it is practiced in the Orient—and as an expression of British desire to maintain medical technological superiority over the Orient.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, pre-health individuals around the world encountered a range of challenges. Research and internship opportunities were cancelled, clinical experience was unreachable, and prerequisites became more demanding in a remote setting. I myself was working in a research lab in Switzerland when the pandemic was declared, resulting in my career-altering internship to be cut short six months. My life-long friend, Alejandra, had the same experience and reached out to me with an extraordinary idea to unite and empower pre-health individuals on a national level. With my skills in event planning combined with her vision, we built the National Pre-Health Conference (NPHC): a 3-day virtual event for pre-health individuals to explore medical careers and learn how to pursue their professional goals, particularly during these uncertain times. We held our inaugural conference with the theme A Future in Medicine in 2020 with over 1000 attendees from around the country. In 2021, we held our second-annual conference with the theme Unity in Healthcare with over 1000 attendees as well. In addition to planning the second-annual NPHC, I employed pre-event and post-event surveys to assess the confidence level of attendees before and after the conference in healthcare experience, research experience, standardized testing, community service, academics, essay writing, and completing graduate/professionals school applications. We found that NPHC improved the confidence level of attendees in all categories. Overall, understanding how NPHC benefits pre-health students will help our team improve for future conferences.

Salud Empoderada is a bilingual English-Spanish blog with the goals of providing pre-medical advice, exposure to careers in medicine through interviews with leaders in medicine and science, and resources to support and encourage Latino pre-medical college students at Arizona State University. This information is provided in the forms of blog posts and infographics. Salud Empoderada was created as a way to address the lack of representation of Latino medical students enrolled in U.S. medical schools and Latino physicians in the U.S. Therefore, Salud Empoderada targets Latino students in the first stage of their journeys to becoming a doctor, pre-medical students, to help inspire and guide them to pursue their dreams despite the challenges they may face, including struggles with mental health, socioeconomic status, access to Latino mentors in medicine and science, health disparities, gender, DACA status, attacks on affirmative action, and the MCAT exam. Furthermore, Salud Empoderada encompasses my trip with Barrett, The Honors College to Costa Rica to share insight on life in Costa Rica and the Indigenous tribes residing there. Sharing this experience with Latino pre-medical students may provide them further exposure to other cultures, the heterogeneity within Latin America, the importance of cultural competence in medicine and the possibilities that global health and Spanish studies offer to become well-rounded and holistic future physicians.

A significant amount of prior research has been conducted to investigate type 2 diabetes, the most prevalent form afflicting over 90% of diabetic individuals [6]. Yet, gestational diabetes is an understudied form of diabetes that is thought to share various attributes with type 2 diabetes. It was the aim of this project to investigate a proposed mechanism of the disease, the contra-insulin effect, through a cell-culture experiment. To address the question of whether glycemic and hormonal conditions of cell-culture media affect Hs 795.Pl morphology, cellular growth, and glucose uptake, immunocytochemistry (ICC) and a glucose uptake assay was performed. It was hypothesized that higher the presence of hormones, specifically lactogen, in cell culture media will exacerbate the contra-insulin effect, decreasing the glucose uptake of the Hs 795.Pl cells and inducing abhorrent cell morphology. Qualitatively, estradiol and cortisol had a severe impact on cellular morphology indicative of stress and death. As for glucose uptake, it was decreased when the hormones were isolated compared to all together with estradiol thought to be majorly inhibitory to insulin’s proper functioning. It was concluded that cell morphology, growth, and glucose uptake were detrimentally impacted by the gestational hormones, especially those of cortisol and estrogen.

This thesis explores the ethical implications of using facial recognition artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in medicine, with a focus on both the opportunities and challenges presented by the use of this technology in the diagnosis and treatment of rare genetic disorders. We highlight the positive outcomes of using AI in medicine, such as accuracy and efficiency in diagnosing rare genetic disorders, while also examining the ethical concerns including bias, misdiagnosis, the issues it may cause within patient-clinician relationships, misuses outside of medicine, and privacy. This paper draws on the opinions of medical providers and other professionals outside of medicine, which finds that while many are excited about the potential of AI to improve medicine, concerns remain about the ethical implications of these technologies. We discuss current legislation controlling the use of AI in healthcare and its ambiguity. Overall, this thesis highlights the need for further research and public discourse to address the ethical implications of using facial recognition and AI technologies in medicine, while also providing recommendations for its future use in medicine.

The debate around genetic engineering has permeated society for decades. A crucial aspect of this debate is the containment of genetically engineered organisms. This project outlines the three types of biocontainment and the conclusions drawn about each in the form of policy briefs. These briefs utilize case studies to sketch an overview of the current biocontainment paradigm in the United States. In addition, there is a brief discussing the major conclusions drawn from the case studies, as well as a brief containing useful definitions.