Re-humanizing Medical Treatment

By: Naomi Sharman

Observation, the long-standing basis of science, seems to be taking a backseat in today's medical community -- a change that is harming patients.

I was misdiagnosed in one of the best
hospitals in the country

I came home from a Christian proselyting mission to the East Coast when I could no longer walk well and had a collection of other severe symptoms.

I thought I was dying.

Before I came home, I was hospitalized in a Johns Hopkins satellite hospital. I was tested for multiple sclerosis, a brain tumor, and Lyme disease. After ruling out multiple sclerosis with the final MRI, the doctor started talking to me as if I were a kindergartner: "Can you come in for bi-weekly visits with a psychiatrist?" I could tell from her tone of voice that she wondered if a nut-job would know the meaning of bi-weekly.

Five Theses on Re-humanizing Medical Research

Sleeping sickness isn't on our research agenda
because most victims are too poor to pay

In this age of the booming information economy, we face new challenges to human progress. As seen in previous eras, the "invisible hand" described by Adam Smith as guiding the economy can be interrupted by certain expressions of self interest, such as monopolies and trusts.


A problem that the medical research community faces is an overemphasis on profit and an under-emphasis on people. Though medicine can never fully be dehumanized, we have seen repeated compelling examples of when medical research has been stalled, derailed, or falsified to meet business agendas.


In light of this ongoing conflict to bring the care for humans back into healthcare research, I would like to present five theses for your consideration.

Hot Spots in Immunology Revisited

A cancer patient receiving immunotherapy

In this blog post, I'd like to take a closer look at the three issues I originally presented in my previous blog post. In an attempt to make the issues more accessible to those outside of the scientific community, I'd like to briefly discuss historical connections to these issues and how communication affects these issues.

1. Balancing Efficacy and Side Effects in Cancer Immunotherapy 

Hot Spots in Immunology

• Vaccination
  Due to a falsified study published by an unscrupulous doctor, vaccination has become the public scapegoat for Autism. A huge amount of research has been done to verify this connection. Each new study has found the original claim of vaccines causing Autism to be false, but the public belief still exists. Many parents have gone to great lengths to prevent the vaccination of their children. The nation has recently been suffering from outbreaks of Measles, a virus that can be easily be kept out of the population when the majority of citizens are vaccinated. The reported cases and death toll of this outbreak are climbing fast. https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/13/health/measles-update-cdc-800-cases/index.html

• Balancing Potency and Side Effects in Cancer

The Instant Gratification Cliff

We live in a day where instant gratification has become more "the norm" than ever before. Are we missing out on a bigger and better way of living?



"The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained in sudden flight but, they while their companions slept, they were toiling upwards in the night" (Longfellow, Good Poems for Hard Times). The core values of determination, hard work, and stick-to-it-iveness are responsible for the creation of most (if not all) of the modern comforts we enjoy and for the abundance of valuable knowledge. Unfortunately, some of our most useful creations have the potential to train us to exclusively pursue instant gratification and leave stick-to-it-iveness and determination behind in the dust.

This week, I had the unique opportunity to experience life without a cellphone after mine unexpectedly retired itself. I won't lie, life without a cellphone is logistically difficult for a college student, but being without a phone has taught me an important lesson: my cellphone may have been using me as much as I was using it.