Month: July 2024

Categories
Music

Healing through Harmony

 

Earlier this year, I founded a club named Healing through Harmony. The members are all musicians from my high school, and we put on concerts for the community. I founded this club for two reasons: I wanted to bring a little joy into the daily lives of the community, and because I know how hard it is for high schoolers to find volunteer opportunities they enjoy. By taking their passion, I can provide a volunteering experiencing they love, thus making the concert better for everyone. As we grow bigger, I am looking into turning the club into a non-profit. I want to donate money to charities dedicated towards healthcare. This page will showcase pictures and a brief description of our performances!

Retirement Home

We volunteered at Brentwood Assisted Living and put on a solo showcase, while explaining our instruments and how we got into music!

Children's Hospital

We volunteered at Memorial Children’s hospital, where, fortunately, not many children had been admitted. Therefore, we played for passing visitors and any patient well enough to listen in! Unfortunately, we were not able to get photos, but the atrium was beautiful!

Categories
Anthropology

The Basics of Medical Anthropology

When writing about the general four subfields of anthropology, I came across medical anthropology. This is a very interesting subset of, surprisingly, cultural anthropology. When I first read about it, I immediately thought that a field of anthropology involving medicine would go under biological anthropology, but as I learned more, it started to make more sense. According to the American Anthropological Association, medical anthropology is a field that aims to “better understand those factors which influence health and well being (broadly defined), the experience and distribution of illness, the prevention and treatment of sickness, healing processes, the social relations of therapy management, and the cultural importance and utilization of pluralistic medical systems”. Reading this gave me a bit of a headache, and it really didn’t help in my understanding. So I did some more research, and I am going to break it down for you.

Definition

Medical anthropology does not look at the scientific causes of diseases. Instead, medicine is viewed from a cultural light. These anthropologists are trying to figure out how disease is distributed and what factors influence that distribution by drawing upon the 4 subfields of anthropology. From a cultural perspective, they can view how different cultures respond to disease, and why some cultures have a higher risk of certain diseases. They can also view societal reactions to disease. A very recent example would be COVID 19. The USA struggled to get its citizens to comply with mask mandates and vaccines, while Asian countries, accustomed to wearing masks when feeling ill, responded better to those guidelines. Eastern and Western culture emphasizes very different things. Western culture promotes individuality, and Eastern cultures focus on family and community. This led to a lot of arguments about individual rights being violated in the US, whereas more people were compliant in the East, looking at face masks not as a destructor of individuality but as a tool to protect the community. Looking at these cultural trends is a way that medical anthropologists can predict disease response and outcome. Another topic that medical anthropologists focus on is how treatments of different diseases differ between societies, races, and cultures. This is a topic that I will be focusing heavily on in later blogs, specifically how Eastern vs Western cultures differ in their treatment styles, and how they go about treating diseases, mainly arthritis. So, to sum it all up, medical anthropology looks at how culture and society affect disease, whether it be treatment, distribution, knowledge, or risk.

In the Field

Medical anthropologists use ethnography to do research about different diseases. This means that they will travel to the part of the world they are conducting research on and stay there for a period of time to do research. They conduct interviews, see the healthcare system there themselves, and live with the community there to understand life from their perspective. This immersive technique helps medical anthropologists learn the culture and view how disease fits into that culture. An interesting part of medical anthropology that is not widely used in other fields of anthropology is that when the fieldwork is done, medical anthropologists actually use that information to implement that solution into those communities. It is a field that actively changes lives and improves the world.

An Example Case

I am subscribed to the Medical Anthropology Quarterly journal, which publishes new cases and book reviews. I want to share with you a short summary of one of those cases. The article is called Handle with Care: Rethinking the Rights versus Culture Dichotomy in Cancer Disclosure in India. It is written by Cecilia Coale Van Hollen, a medical anthropologist who lived in India, doing ethnographic research about how a cancer diagnosis is disclosed to patients in Southern India.. 

 

She discovered that many doctors don’t tell their patients about a cancer diagnosis, instead letting their family disclose the news whenever they feel it would be apt. This goes against the rights established in the West enabling an adult to make decisions for themselves about their health and treatment. She interviewed various women about their experiences wherein a cancer diagnosis had been withheld from them. Some of the women said that they didn’t mind at all, and it showed that their family cared about them and didn’t want them to stress over a diagnosis. The rest were upset, not because they wanted to make decisions about their health, but because they felt it showed a lack of care for them as humans. Hollen’s research showed a lack of empathy for these patients from the doctors treating them. By not telling these women their diagnoses, they left them in the dark, wondering what was going on. Hollen researched more about this divide by interviewing several women and sitting in on meetings in the hospital to see what the conditions were like. She observed that the women staying in the hospital would compare notes and symptoms to figure out their illness and help other people through their treatment because there was no professional guidance available to them. It was a great example of a community forming through a shared bond, but one that formed from the wrong reasons. 

 

I really enjoyed reading this article, and I recommend anyone interested in medical anthropology to subscribe to this journal. The link to the article is below:

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/maq.12406

Next Steps

As I mentioned earlier, I will begin to interview physicians from the East to learn more about differences in treatment of diseases like arthritis between cultures. After learning about medical anthropology, the combination of culture with a hint of science has intrigued me. I am excited to go down this rabbit hole and learn more!

Categories
Music

Music and Me

Music is the biggest part of my life right now. Ever since I remember, I have been taking piano lessons. In fact, I have probably been playing piano for ⅔ of my life. Slowly, this transitioned into me picking up a couple different instruments, joining the band and the orchestra, and completely immersing myself in musical extracurriculars. So, before I blog about anything else music related, I think it would be apt to detail how I fell in love with it, what music means to me, and the skills I have acquired because of it.

 

Culture and Music

As an Indian-American, music, especially Bollywood music, has been a prevalent aspect in my life. My dad plays sitar, and my mom sings classical music. Every night before bed, when I was younger, they would sing me to sleep. We sing prayers every night before bed, and there is always music playing somewhere in the house. Because of this immersion, even before I started playing, I loved listening to Bollywood music. Even now, as I drive to school, I pull up a playlist made years ago filled with my favorite Bollywood songs. As I’ve grown, I have slowly begun to expand my musical knowledge, but my culture marks the roots of my fondness of music. Every year, for Mother’s Day, I play my mom a Bollywood song she loves on piano and oboe, and it feels like I am connecting with my family better through music.

Piano

My parents put me in piano at a very young age. They are both fond of music, so they wanted me to learn how to play an instrument. I did other things, like taekwondo and swimming, but those slowly fell away, while piano remained. I used to hate practicing, and I would goof off and never commit. I didn’t get better, and my teacher would lament that I could improve quite a bit  if I just put in more effort. My mom began to set a schedule for me, in which I would wake up every morning and practice before school. Now as I enter my senior year of high school, it has gotten more difficult to practice regularly, but all those years of strict scheduling taught me a few important skills. I learned how to commit to something and stay focused. Without this skill, I would have no drive towards my goals. Creating a long term schedule to achieve a goal has put me through 4 years of high school, helped me stay on track with my grades, while also leaving me time to enjoy myself. Piano was also the first time I got to experience creating something. Whenever I got stressed or emotional, I could go over to the piano and play something beautiful. It was an endorphin rush, and that’s where my love started. 

Oboe

I started playing oboe for the beginning band in sixth grade. I wanted to play something loud and jazzy, like a saxophone or trumpet, but my band director assigned me to oboe. I’d never heard of the instrument before, and it didn’t seem cool at all. As the year progressed, I somehow sounded worse than when I started. I only had one volume: loud. Plus, I sounded like a chorus of angry ducks, honking away at the world. My director made me sign up for private lessons to improve my playing. I tried a few different lesson teachers until one finally stuck in seventh grade. My lesson teacher has  taught me everything I know, and she is the reason oboe is my favorite instrument now. I’ve only been playing it for 7 years, but I know that I will continue for the rest of my life. My oboe is my prized possession; my one thing to save in case of a fire. Playing oboe has taught me passion. Playing it brings me true, unadulterated joy, and that is why I join so many musical extracurriculars. The different bands and orchestras I sign up for may fill up my schedule, but it also gives me a chance to play as much as possible. Having a hobby that gives me this much happiness makes my long days go by smoothly. It has taught me that finding something to love can brighten every aspect of your life. 

Percussion

After learning oboe and piano, I was pretty done with new instruments. Two was enough to focus on, but that plan hit a small roadblock. I wanted to join the marching band, but oboes were not allowed. I had to pick a new instrument, so I went to the percussion section. I already could play piano, so I assumed that I would be put on the synthesizer. Instead, I got assigned to the vibraphone, forcing me to learn another instrument. I joined winter percussion so I could get better, and eventually I earned a spot on the marimba line. However, getting to that point was tough. I didn’t know anyone in the percussion section, and as a shy freshman, making friends was tough. Joining percussion forced me to come out of my shell and meet new people. The friends I made that year are some of my best friends today, and winter percussion is one of my favorite musical seasons. I get to play an instrument that I don’t play regularly, and I get to spend time with my close friends. If I had not joined percussion, I wouldn’t have had the push I needed to get involved and branch out.

The Future

As I start thinking about college and what I want to do for the rest of my life, music is always a part of it. I want to minor in music in college, partly so I can continue playing in ensembles throughout college. No matter what I end up doing for a career, I want to join a local orchestra or band wherever I end up. Music brings me happiness, and it is permanently entwined into who I am.