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Another vote for women’s
health research
Former New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro came to Yale in September with a message about the importance of the political process to women’s health. “In the past, some diseases were not very interesting to those who funded research because they only affected women. That’s changing now,” said Ferraro, the first woman nominated for vice president by a major party when she ran with Democrat Walter Mondale in 1984. She was the keynote speaker at “Conference 2000: Factoring in Gender,” sponsored by Women’s Health Research at Yale, a day-long event that attracted more than 200 people to New Haven’s Lawn Club for lectures and presentations by Yale investigators. Noting that women make up more than half the population—and they vote—Ferraro said, “We are different biologically. Policies that don’t take this into account are not only unacceptable, they’re undemocratic.”
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Bridging cultural divides
in medicine
“Reality,” says writer Anne Fadiman, “not only looks different to different people. It is different.” Her acclaimed first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, describes the linguistic and cultural gulf that separated a family of Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia from the physicians treating the family’s epileptic infant daughter in California’s Central Valley.
Caregivers, she said, need to understand the cultures of their patients. “Cross-cultural medicine,” she said in an address to the first-year class at the medical school on Sept. 1, “should be integrated into every course. It shouldn’t be taught just in the first term or the first year. It is fine then, but you will need it more in the fourth year when the assaults on your empathy need to be fought more aggressively.”
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A toolbox for drug abuse treatment
Drug abuse has been linked to 72 risk factors, including individual, family and societal issues, according to Alan I. Leshner, Ph.D., director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Yet most drug abusers, he said, fall into one of two categories. Some use drugs as a novelty. Others “self-medicate” to normalize a troubled emotional state. “We have paid far too little attention to the distinction between them in treatment strategies,” said Leshner, the keynote speaker in September at a symposium, “Innovations in Drug Abuse Treatment: From Research to Practice,” sponsored by the School of Medicine and the Department of Psychiatry, which is participating in two national studies on tobacco and drug abuse. “Treatment has to be tailored to individual needs,” Leshner said. “There is no ‘one size fits all.’”
At the symposium he unveiled the NIDA Clinical Toolbox: Science-Based Materials for Drug Abuse Counselors, a collection of therapy resources. “It is a toolbox that might be used by practitioners to take the science we have supported and make it usable in ongoing treatment,” Leshner said.
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AIDS in Africa: treating the “untreatable”
“We cannot let a disease for which a treatment exists mow down millions and leave a continent of orphans,” said writer Mark Schoofs, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his coverage of aids in Africa published in the Village Voice. Without treatment, he said, Africa faces a plague of “biblical proportions.” In sub-Saharan Africa, where 24.5 million people are living with aids, the disease threatens to wipe out 10 percent of the population and make orphans of between 10 and 15 percent of the continent’s children.
In his keynote address at “AIDS in Africa,” a day-long discussion on Sept. 21 sponsored by the School of Public Health at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life, Schoofs called for a new social contract. “In a sane, compassionate world, drug companies could sell their drugs for a profit in rich countries and at cost in poor countries,” said Schoofs, a 1985 Yale College graduate.
The goals of treatment may have to step back from the norm in developed countries, he said, and be as modest as buying parents five more years of life. “We cannot let the perfect suck the life out of the good,” he said. “There already is a different standard of care in Africa. It’s called no care.”
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