Com Arts 317 Exam 2 Study Guide

University of Wisconsin Madison

Narrative Medicine

Clinical practice enriched by understanding and utilizing patient stories.

Graphic Medicine

An interdisciplinary field exploring the connection between comics and health, illness, and medical education. New field in the health humanities.

Moral Injury

In traumatic circumstances, people may perpetrate, fail to prevent, or witness events that contradict deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. Moral injury is the distressing psychological, behavioral, social and sometimes spiritual aftermath of these circumstances.

Social Media Platform Affordances

Features and limitations of social media platforms that influence user behavior and content sharing. Markers of authority (lab coat, scrubs, setting). Allows for creators to speak directly to their audiences.

Gutters

The space between panels in comics representing time and action filled in by the reader.

Emanata

Symbols near a character's head in comics representing feelings, thoughts, or states of mind.

Confirmation Bias

Tendency to favor information that confirms existing beliefs and reject contradictory facts.

Disability Models

Moral, medical, social, identity

Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs)

A utilitarian approach to health economics. Inherently privileges people with good health and devalues the lives of people with disabilities (based on the beliefs of non-disabled outsiders”

Tuskegee Study

Unethical study where Black men with syphilis were denied treatment to observe the natural progression of the disease.

Placebo Effect

Patients' response to inert treatments due to psychological factors rather than the treatment itself.

Meaning Response

Physiological or psychological effects of the meaning attributed to a treatment in healthcare. Ex: pill color, branding of pills, number of pills. Meaning response is particularly strong for pain, sleep, psych conditions and immune/ endocrine disorders. Not everyone experiences the meaning response.

Enhancement

Improving human function beyond what is necessary for health, raising ethical questions about fairness and autonomy.

Frontline Stress

Working under severe stress. Concerning outlook for healthcare workers. Approx 20% of healthcare workers have depression, anxiety and PTSD.

Ethical issues in pandemic nursing

Fairness in resource allocation. Personal safety vs professional integrity. Re-narrated job description.

Ethical issues with healthcare workers online

Is dancing and lip-syncing a waste of pandemic resources. Nurse staff fired after posting with newborn baby, nurse placed on leave after revealing on tik tok she does not wear a mask at work. What’s ok to post and what’s not?

Icons

Images designed to actually resemble their subjects.

Closure

Observing the parts but perceiving the whole

Grawlixes

Typographical symbols like #$@! used to represent feelings, or states of mind or thoughts

Motion Lines

Show action, force, sound, speed or direction

The rhetorical situation

Rhetorical discourse is called into existence by an exigent situation capable of being modified discursively by an audience with the potential to mediate change. Shaped by exigence, audience and constraints.

Exigence

An imperfection marked by urgency (+ capable of being modified discursively).

Ex:

1. Chased by a hungry alligator

2. Touching a hot stove

3. Not enough people are voting

Audience

The rhetorical audience is capable of being moved: in attitude, in action, in knowledge

Constraints

Give shape to the message. Audiences can be moved, there are “heavy” and “light” audiences. Culture, language, expertise, timeliness - what else is going on?

Best practices for vaccine communication

1. pro vaccine communication is often ineffective and some well-intentioned efforts may backfire

2. Know your audience and tailor your message accordingly

3. Anticipate cognitive shortcuts such as confirmation bias

4. Tell stories - use narratives to engage your audience

5. Build trust and use credible communicators

6. Connect with people’s values

7. Remind people why we vaccinate

8. Be careful when using fear and shame based appeals

Fear of Contamination

“All true Americans must help to stop our governmental policy of poisoning the blood of babies” - Arguments like this use a strong sense of individual right sand links it to skepticism about the bacteriological approach to disease.

Fear of the irreparable

An irreparable consequence operates as a limit or boundary, that once crossed, cannot be recovered or undone, and therefore functions as a powerful source of fear, for example with vaccine hesitancy.

Quantity based vaccine arguments

Strength by numbers, durable, represent consensus, resist exceptions.

Quality based vaccine arguments

Find uniqueness, exceptions, outliers, the rare, and the exceptional and place value on them. Ex: the rare chance of hospitalization or death from disease AND the rare chance of side effects from vaccines.

Bodily Autonomy

The right to decide what happens to your own body

Disability rights movement

Built on organizing and civil disobedience strategies from the civil rights, LGBTQ and women’s rights movements. Focusing on the access to buildings, employment, education and opportunities for those with disabilities.

Moral Disability Model

Disability is a reflection of one’s character. Disability is a curse or punishment or disability is a gift providing special compensatory abilities (ex: the blind seer)

Medical Disability Model

Disability is located in an individuals’ body and the “problem” of disability is solved by modifying that body

Social Model of disability

Disability is produced by environments, policies, and ways of thinking that assume and/or require typical bodies. The “problem” of disability is solved by modifying environments, policies, attitudes. Ex: in a deaf community, deafness is not disabling, wheelchairs are not disabling until one encounters stairs or a curb.

Identity Model of Disability

Deaf culture, autistic communities, etc.. Shared stigma and exclusion creates a shared political identity

Supercrip/ Heroic overcomer

A disabled person used as an inspirational example for non-disabled people. “Inspiration porn”

Singer/ Johnson Debate

Johnson is a disability rights activist, Singer is a philosopher and bioethicist. Singer and “personhood”, personhood is defined by ability, not birth and person is not a descriptive label, but carries a moral standing. Every person had a right to life, a newborn baby nor a fish are a person so the wrongness of killing such beings is not as great as the wrongness of killing a person. Johnson challenges Singer’s belief of being able to eliminate a disabled baby while they are still in the womb. Singer wrote Johnson’s eulogy after her passing.

Quality of life

Usually measured through personal ratings of satisfaction in various life domains

Triage Guidelines

Direct how medical resources are distributed under conditions of scarcity. QALYs are used when determining these.

Aspects of scientific writing that contributed to dehumanization

Encouraging readers to dissociate themselves from the men (subjects). Reducing men to environments where disease takes place as objects that are acted upon.

Performative Speech

A sentence or speech that does something

Guatemala Syphilis Study

Deliberately infected patients

Features of Official Apologies

1. demonstrate recognition of the error

2. assumption of responsibility

3. moral distancing

Hypochondria

Patients are persuaded they are sick based on faulty evidence

Medical Student Syndrome

When medical students learn about new diseases and then are convinced they have them.

Harnessing the meaning response in a clinic

1. Speak positively (yet truthfully) about the therapy being prescribed

2. Provide encouragement and education to empower the individual to take positive action

3. develop relationships of trust, compassion and empathy

4. provide reassurance

5. Learn about the individual’s unique outlook, values, past experience and belief system

6. help the patient explore their own health-related value system

Ethical Critiques of enhancement

Is it fair? Can become compulsory. Unequal access reproduces social inequalities. Enhancement is a symptom of a competitive society. Enhancement reproduces dominant assumptions about what bodies / minds should be like. Lack of autonomy.

Sandel’s argument against enhancement

Enhancement reflect “hyperagency”. The real problem about genetic enhancement of a future child is not a lack of agency but perhaps too much agency? “Threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will.