15/52

Well I missed a couple of weeks. Sad day. Things got a bit busy there for a bit. Had the dissertation defense (passed!!). Did some edits (done!!). Went to Holland, MI to see stuff and try to make some connections (success, I think!).

Here is a picture of the kid flying back from Holland (not bad for a tablet...) - he got his own seat! That is always nice.

crazy week

This has been a crazy week.  First full draft of the dissertation is due today.  At the start of the week I hadn't had an intro or conclusion yet.  Still don't have a full conclusions.  Sara has been on service.  Oliver got his first stomach bug, complete with puking, and was home from daycare for a day and a half.  But here is a pic for the week...

Also, here is a funny video of Oliver standing up on his own (with some help balancing). I love his little grunts.

Re-integrative medial interactions

The dream of reason did not take power into account.     - Paul Starr

Something I have been thinking a lot about lately (besides the fact that we are about to have a kid) in working on the dissertation is the place that power and authority plays in our interactions with other people.  We all have what Peter Berger call 'typification schemes' that allow us to quickly process, make sense of, and project our experiences of reality.  We get used to understanding certain actions of others as meaning something always - hugs show affection, yelling communicates heightened emotions, etc.  We use these cognitive tools to make sense of everything we experience and 'assign' meaning to it; we make sense of it.  We then assume that other people generally assign the same meaning to shared experiences, and on this basis are we able to have generally predictable interactions with other people. 

Sometimes, however, we are unable to make sense of some experiences.  When this happens we seek the help of someone we think can help.  This is what a physician is, essentially - a professional whose job it is to make sense of the experiences of others and ameliorate those experiences, assuming they are adverse ("so what do I have doc...").  Another dude, Talcott Parsons, once wrote about how illness is essentially the result of any given person shifting their self-perception to that of an 'ill' person.  This makes sense if you think about it - two people could both have a cold, and one asserts that they are 'fine' and goes to work while the other asserts that they are 'sick' and stays home from work.  One has shifted their identity while the other did not. 

Parsons asserted that one of the jobs of a physician is to re-integrate 'ill' people back into society as 'normal' people. 

What happens when a patient does not listen to their doctor though?  For example, someone may have trouble breathing but refuse the advise of their physician to stop smoking.  Starr, the dude who said the quote at the start, would say this is an instance where the physician has not successfully asserted their authority over the patient.  He thinks that one of the jobs of the doctor is to asses the nature of reality, which in this instance is the patient's experiences and needs.  The physician needs to interpret those experiences and the needs of the patient and literally create the conditions under which the patient thinks their advice is appropriate. 

This is where the interaction between a patient and a physician gets interesting though.  What if the patient is religious and makes sense of their world and experiences through a lens tinted by an engaged God?  The patient has a 'broken' identity when they are ill, and they are in need of being brought back to a state of 'normalcy'.  This requires that their physician successfully interprets and assigns meaning to their reality, but very often in a medical setting this meaning invoked by the physician does not include religious beliefs.  So we have a professional whose job it is to bring a state of normalcy back to a religious patient, but that 'normalcy' and meaning introduced by the physician is devoid of religious beliefs and meaning. 

Is it really possible for a religious person to be 're-integrated' with who they are in a setting that implicitly rejects religion?  Often this just leaves a bit more work for the patient to do on their own time, but recent changes in medical practice have gravitated more towards understanding patients in a wider sense than just a broken machine that needs to be oiled.  This is likely a good thing, but just as before, the interpretive work of the physician is a big challenge.  Cheers to you doctors who fully dive into the work you do.  Short cuts are easier, but they don't always get you to the same place or even where you wanted to go. 

Professional socialization, status and service

I thought about making this more than one post, but figured few might read this anyways so length probably doesn't matter, ha.  Also thought it was about time a post like this gets put up.  Cheers. 

I think that one of the biggest challenges in life is figuring out how we can pull ourselves out of our own insular daily lives that have very little, if any, impact on those outside of our direct circles of interaction.  How do we make our 'mark'?  This problem (maybe) is more challenging with professions that require a lot of training that is then repaid with more money and prestige   Like de Botton says, we will always struggle with status anxiety, and those with more status both have more to gain (a bigger continuum) and more to lose (higher ledge from which to fall).

One way to avoid the preoccupation with status attainment is to pair life with service - to intentionally and regularly expand our circle of interaction to include those different than ourselves and in need of something.  I used to (may still... jury is out) think that some professions have a much easier time solving this status/service issue than others.  Physicians are an easy example.  The work that they do is directly tied to serving other people.  Academics are also an easy example for the opposite reason - there is almost no connection at all between the work we do and serving other people, typically.  So the solution to insular status anxiety for academics makes it much harder to bridge passions, training and knowledge with helping others.  It almost forces academics to bifurcate their lives into profession and service which does not really fix the problem of connecting with other people because how can one connect with others when they are in that very attempt disconnecting with their self?

But it occurred to me over this past week as I have been thinking through part of the dissertation that this may be overly simplistic.  All professions have beliefs and values that are socialized into the professionals to different degrees.  For physicians, one of the strongest beliefs/values in that socialization process is that of valuing scientific thought and processes which naturally is linked with detaching people from the diseases and health problems that they have.  This detachment is at odds, in a sense, to empathetic and compassionate care for the person coming to see the physician.  It also tends to be at odds with the religious beliefs of the physician because the one puts compassion and empathy at the front and the other devalues and at times even ignores compassion because machines and science have no need for empathy -  even getting in the way at times.

So, like the academic struggling to connect their skills and passions with service to others, the physician in serving others struggles to connect two different socializations, two different modes of thinking and feeling, that contribute to how they think and feel - professional detachment and religious compassion.  Some feel the tension more than others.  Some ignore the tension and bifurcate their lives.  Others uncritically (I don't mean this in a negative sense) accept both professional and religious socializations as they are and the tension never comes to the surface - similar to Gould's non-overlapping magisteria.  

I think that many people struggle with some of this stuff when they think about what they want to do and accomplish in life.  How can my life make a difference?  How can I help people best?  Pretty much any profession has processes of socialization in place and these will also relate to these struggles in different ways.  At what point will one's religious beliefs overpower their professional socialization (if we can think of them in those terms)?  How can they happily work with one another?  Should they?

Dissertate

This week I heard back from some peeps at the U. of Chicago that they are going to let me use a data set that they have.  Kind of big news.  As in, I can now start working on the dissertation big news.  Only downside is they have already published a lot off of it, but I think I can make something work out of it.  

So, now I am all excited to really dive in on the reading and what not.  I was holding off a bit because it would be sad to do all the reading and never have data to run stuff with.  Thus the study couch for the night.  Sara is working, so it is just me and the beautiful coffee porter reading about physicians, beliefs, decision making and everything that will solve the world's problems.  Cheers.