Personal reflection

Steeven Toor
March 15th

This weeks twitter discussion was split into two questions as there were two
seminars this week as well, where one was focused on ehealth and the other
was focused on syndemics. After reviewing the literature and the readings
assigned, I perceive syndemics as something that occurs when there is a
cluster of health-related problems where several factors might be interacting
synergistically and collectively contribute to the overall burden of disease.
The first question wanted 591 students to proved an example of a successful
strategy or intervention that addressed a syndemic health issue in either
Canada or the United States. There was an immediate realization amongst
not only myself but my peers that several of the examples were quite
similar, especially when it came to HIV and syndemics. A couple responses
tot his was that the first syndemic was for HIV and its a clearer example,
perhaps due to the social and cultural factors which impact how its
addressed in different cultures. I think this ties in to our core competency of
cultural competency and it would be neat to look into specific examples of
how HIV was handled across different cultures. The last thought provoking
idea brought about was brought out in the last tweet in this thread of
discussion and it wasnt answered, but the question was why syndemics
might not be as popular in other health areas. This was actually a pretty
intriguing question and it really made me think why we might not see
syndemics being as prevalent for perhaps a health condition such as
measles. I think it might be due to the notion that was previously mentioned,
that the research that reveals diseases to being socially and culturally rooted
might have more popularity with syndemics. For example, we know that
coronary heart disease is co-associated with several other diseases and can
be due to a variety of factors that range from social and environmental to
biological. Therefore, you might be more inclined to examine factors such as
physical activity, or diet or perhaps socioeconomic status that when combine
together might increase coronary heart disease. Also, while there were
several tweets that focused on HIV I found it interesting that my personal
tweet for the week was focused on suicide behaviour in Canadian gay and
bisexual men. I remember reading through this article and realizing that
similar to our CHD example, examples such as suicide can also be found to
be syndemic. The social factors of gender identity and sexual orientation is
making an impact on suicide rates and the study found that gay and bisexual
Canadian men were at an increased risk of suicide. I thought that this topic
was very closely related to core competency of equity and social
determinants of health. This was because some of the syndemic issues being
examined were being impacted by social and economic factors such as
gender and socio-economic status. Furthermore, this reminded me of the
global heath principle of responsiveness to causes of inequities. The
second twitter question was focused on providing examples of ongoing or
established ehealth interventions that address one or more SDOH in a low-
income country. This twitter discussion was actually quite insightful for me
personally and I will go into detail about this in my personal objectives, but
several of the examples provided here by my peers helped inform my
personal objective leaning. I had my personal tweet that focused on creating
technology that is cheap and accessible so that lower income families can
have access to it. Along these line there were couple examples such as
medic mobile and mHealth that attempted to use technology to respond to
emergency situations and provide information to those who might not be
receiving adequate healthcare. The other examples of ehealth were focused
on medical records and administration related technology that streamlined
administrative work so that records and data was used more effectively. I
recognized that this was what ehealth is really referring too, the electronic
and communication processes for healthcare practices. However, even with
my personal learning objectives I was more focused on the individual and
intimate level of technology use. Not so much focused on making the system
more efficient, but on actually providing the individual with technology that
gives them the means and capabilities to access some sort of healthcare. I
think this really ties in with the core competency of equity and social
determinants of health (SDOH) and specifically the SDOH of accessibility.