Last term, I participated in a couple interesting discussion panels related to my future in medicine that aren’t part of my normal routine. I attended a bioethics committee meeting at Huntington Hospital and I also led a PALAC discussion about developing research and social perception of neurological diseases.
Dr. Kohlhase, who previously visited Caltech to talk about physician paternalism and patient autonomy (read about that here), invited me and other Caltech students to attend Huntington Hospital bioethics committee meetings. This committee meets monthly to discuss hospital policies and difficult case studies regarding medical ethics, and they invite a couple community members to the meetings to contribute a non-professional perspective. I think this opportunity to participate is awesome because it allows students to contribute to a very real decision-making process that helps them gain insight to ethical dilemmas which influence practicing medicine. I am not allowed to talk about what was discussed during the meeting for privacy reasons, but I learned quite a bit from it. I am trying to develop a permanent connection between Caltech students and the Huntington Hospital bioethics committee so that other students can continue to attend and learn from these meetings after I graduate!
PALAC is an organization composed of Pasadena community members, mostly retired, who meet regularly to discuss news articles. PALAC had asked the Caltech Y some years ago if they could get students to help lead the discussions, and so the Caltech-PALAC connection was developed. For my discussion, I picked an old article from the New York Times that I find really interesting titled “Can you call a 9-year old a psychopath?” The article outlines the story of a 9-year old boy named Michael whose extremely hostile and manipulative behavior puts him in a rare group of children described as “callous-unemotional.” A few psychologists are studying callous-unemotional, or C.U. children who “exhibit a distinctive lack of affect, remorse or empathy” because their parents do not know how to handle their child’s behavior and because they are potentially at risk for becoming psychopaths as adults. This is a sensitive issue because claiming that a child is at risk for becoming psychopathic has negative consequences. During the PALAC discussion, we talked about how society treats people with neurological or psychological diseases (compared to other physiological diseases) and how that affects medical progress. It was interesting to hear varying opinions from people with different backgrounds, which gave me the opportunity to think more deeply about my own stance on the topic.
I enjoyed these two panels because I got to discuss interesting topics with community members from outside of Caltech. Although ethical issues are less scientific than I am used to, I think they are important because of how deeply they can affect people and the general field of medicine. Until next time!
-Laura
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