In Sickness and in Health
story: Kayla Schmidt | photos: ND Humanities Council
Think back to your last doctor’s appointment. You’re weighed in, temperature taken, blood pressure noted, and if a diagnosis is made, dosages of medication are calculated and meted out. Medical care often consists of an endless list of numbers--all of our biological functions put into charts. Unfortunately, humans are notoriously complicated both in our bodies and our minds. We love making sense of things. Those in the medical field are asked to fulfill a difficult task: help us quantify big concepts. What is illness? What makes a person healthy? Who defines what normal looks like? Mental health often suffers the same incalculability. Self-
help book sections are full of titles like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Doctor’s appointments often begin with the question “On a scale of 1-10 how much pain are you in today?” We can’t quite do the same for happiness. Quantifying the body takes a new approach with this year’s GameChanger Ideas Festival. Featuring several speakers who straddle the realm of health and humanities, the daylong event seeks to provide context for the 2018 theme, “The Pursuit of Health and Happiness.” Andrew Solomon, a clinical psychologist, interviewed a wide range of families for his book Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.
He finds that while there is support in numbers for those who raise children with autism, deafness, dwarfism, schizophrenia, and more, each case is often it’s own stand-alone story. We can categorize, but we can never fully define an individual’s experience. Dhruv Khullar, a physician, is concerned with our healthcare system’s trade-off of efficiency over empathy. In a data-driven world, it’s the charts and reports that staff are asked to focus on, rather than the people they are healing. Our doctors and nurses are often fatigued themselves. Scores of medical establishments across the country are embracing art and literature classes specifically designed for medical staff. A new approach known as