Tag: complementary and alternative medicine

Acupuncture: Susan’s Story – University Hospitals

This minute and a half long youtube video from University Hospitals Connor Integrative Health Network tells Susan’s story, who had severe back pain from a bulging disc that severely limited her mobility. After her regular physical therapy only provided limited relief, she decided to seek out a more holistic treatment and use acupuncture along with her regular treatment. Susan, and her naturopath Lina Sbrocco, explain how acupuncture has allowed Susan to return to her daily life activities by greatly decreasing her pain. The video shows what the treatment looks like in order to demystify acupuncture, but also frames it as a last resort, and complementary to biomedicine rather than as an alternative.

Using this video in class provides a practical example of a short narrative that could stimulate discussions on complementary and alternative medicine and holistic health, as well as how medical facilities advertise using patient testimonials. The video advertises acupuncture as something that University Hospitals offers, and uses Susan’s success story to encourage patients to use their medical services.

Music Therapy in Larry’s Life

This five minute video from AMTA music therapy shares Larry’s story, a musician, teacher, father, and husband who lost many functions following a seizure. The video contains an interview with his wife, and board certified music therapist Moreen Bosch, to show how music has helped Larry regain his self-confidence and joy in music. This video could be used to examine the role of arts, specifically music therapy, in the healing process.

Worlds Apart

Worlds Apart is a documentary split into four 10-15 minute sections that each focus on a different cross-cultural health experience. We delve into a Muslim man’s journey with stomach cancer when he turned down chemotherapy due to interference with daily prayer. We follow his daughter communicating with the doctor to see if there are any ways that both could be achieved. It also tells the story of a Lao woman with a hole in her heart who can receive surgery to fix it, but whose mother and grandmother are concerned that the scar will inhibit her Buddhist reincarnation. We then see a Black man waiting for a kidney transplant who searches for a nephrologist he can trust and speaks out on the disparity in waiting times for transplants between white and Black patients. Lastly, there is the story of when a Puerto Rican woman with diabetes, hypertension, asthma and depression turns to home remedies after her mother’s death, which she believes was caused by taking too much prescription medication.

This documentary showcases narratives that illuminate the limits of Western medicine and expand our ideas of how the American medical system can grow to be more inclusive, equitable, and sensitive. From the intersection between medicine and religion to institutional racism to the clash between types of medicating, Worlds Apart is an excellent resource to learn about a variety of cross-cultural healthcare topics in a person-centered manner. It would fit into more sociological classes like cultural anthropology or a world medicine class, but it could also be useful in a training course for pre-med or med students to broaden their ideas of how to individualize healthcare. It could be shown in class to prompt a discussion or assigned as homework along with a written reflection or essay assignment. View the “Facilitator’s Guide” in the Teaching Materials tab to find more specific ways to integrate it into a course. This documentary is not open access, but it can be viewed on WorldCat, which many institutions have access to.

Worlds Apart Facilitator’s Guide

This is a thorough facilitator’s guide on how to facilitate class discussions on the cross-cultural healthcare documentary Worlds Apart (a detailed summary can be found in the Search for Stories tab). In brief, Worlds Apart is a documentary split into four 10-15 minute sections that each focus on a different cross-cultural health experience, including a Muslim man’s journey with stomach cancer, a Lao woman with a hole in her heart, a Black man waiting for a kidney transplant, and a Puerto Rican woman with diabetes, hypertension, asthma and depression. This documentary showcases narratives that illuminate the limits of Western medicine and expand our ideas of how the American medical system can grow to be more inclusive, equitable, and sensitive.

The facilitator’s guide provides background on the filmmakers and their intentions. It includes suggestions for facilitators such as setting ground rules for discussion and asking students to jot down notes during the documentary. The four-part narrative-driven documentary is summarized, and then each section is broken down in great detail, so even someone who did not watch the film could understand the exact circumstances of each family and individual being featured. After each synopsis we also receive medical background information and a variety of discussion questions specifically tailored to different issues discussed in the stories. Each section has a separate “focus” also outlined, ranging from language barriers to explanatory modules to informed consent to racial/ethnic healthcare disparities to non-adherence to medications. This guide was created “to give health care professionals an engaging experience through which to explore ideas about cross-cultural issues in health care and to learn from the actual experiences of both patients and clinicians,” but could also easily be adapted to a university classroom setting to guide student discussions. The guide does not include any assignments, but any of the issues headlining the discussion topics could work well as research essay prompts.