ABSTRACT
The national festival of CORONAREVAYAT (Corona Narrative) took place in the Iran Medical Council during the first peak of Covid-19 and lasted about a year, from April 26, 2020 to March 17, 2021. The festival was designed to provide a platform for networking between artists and health professionals, and to promote documentation in the field of public health. Weakness in epidemic documentation has deep roots in Iran. Thus, CORONAREVAYAT was conducted in the context of the public participation paradigm to increase the social sensitivity regarding documentation in the health sphere, through running a media campaign. Registration of 1022 works in the festival, publication of 10 volumes of books containing the selected works, attracting the professional support of 28 national organizations and the financial support of a private sector, participating in 3 international film festivals and 1 international painting festival, introducing some less-known concepts (e.g., health humanities and narrative medicine) to the public, and networking between artists and therapists can be considered as the most valuable achievements of CORONAREVAYAT, which outweigh its weaknesses (especially organizational bureaucratization). The predominance of image over text can be observed in scrutinizing the works registered in the festival, and can be attributed both to the ease of preparing image-based works with modern digital tools (especially cellphones) and to the greater desire of social media users to share photos and videos compared to text and articles. The least participation was observed in the research section of the festival, in this regard it can be stated that it seems that some concepts (e.g., research) have become so academically entrenched that academics are reluctant to engage in a public media campaign. The ambiguity in the definition of applied research and the negligence of universities in the field of science communication add to the complexity of this issue. © 2022, Vesnu Publications. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Media is an opportunity for health professionals;however, it is not free of threats. Fixing the threats requires professional systematization through developing practical guidelines, which brings us to the goal this study was designed to achieve. The study was conducted qualitatively through literature review, semi-structured interviews, and a focus group discussion with health and media experts, as a result of which 486 codes were extracted and classified into 4 groups. The first group was addressed to media professionals and contained 126 codes in 5 categories: seeking and reporting the truth, harm minimization, integrity, independence, and respect for the rights of others. The second and third groups were addressed to health professionals, the former (150 codes) dealing with formal media, and the latter (190 codes) dealing with cyberspace. These groups were both categorized into 6 categories: scientific demeanor, beneficence, harm minimization, and respect for the rights of others. The fourth group was addressed to the public audience and contained 20 codes categorized into 2 categories: ethics of belief, and ethics of (re-)publishing. Since the study was conducted during the pandemic/infodemic, the proposed codes can help reduce possible conflicts in similar future situations.
ABSTRACT
The Olympiad for Medical Sciences Students has been held in the field of medical humanities for several years in Iran. This year, with the outbreak of the corona pandemic, the question arose as to whether this student competition could be adapted to this new and complex situation. This article will explain the joint efforts of the scientific committee and biomedical students to address this challenge. The main question we had to answer was whether the medical humanities have anything to say in the face of the corona pandemic. The danger we felt was that as the corona pandemic crisis deepened, the biomedical narrative would fill the entire discourse, and this would ultimately lead to the ineffectiveness of corona interventions and policies. This paper shows how these questions were addressed through an action research that the scientific committee, as an interdisciplinary team, and several groups of medical students have worked on together. The result showed that criticism of classical medical humanities, return to the roots of interdisciplinarity, attention to the role of technology, and the crucial role of biopolitics are the neglected aspects of the Covid 19 pandemic. © 2021, Vesnu Publications. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic based on medical philosophy. A critical examination of the Corona crisis uncovers that in order to understand and explain the unpreparedness of the health systems, we need a new conceptual framework. This helps us to look at this phenomenon in a new way, address new problems, and come up with creative solutions. Our proposal is that "health lag" is a concept that could help frame and explain this unpreparedness and unreadiness. The term "health lag" refers to the failure of health systems to keep up with clinical medicine. In other words, health issues in most situations fall behind clinical medicine, leading to social, cultural, and economic problems. In the first step to define health lag, we have to explain the distinction between clinical medicine and health and address the role of individual health, public health, and epidemic in this dichotomy. Thereafter, the reasons behind health lag will be analyzed in three levels: theoretical, practical, and institutional. In the third step, we will point out the most important consequences of health lag: the medicalization of health, the inconsistency of biopolitics, inadequate ethical frameworks, and public sphere vulnerabilities. Finally, we try to come up with a set of recommendations based on this philosophical-conceptual analysis.
ABSTRACT
SARS-CoV-2 is a deadly virus that has affected human life since late 2019. Between all the countries that have reported the cases of patients with SARS-CoV-2 disease (COVID-19), the United States of America has the highest number of infected people and mortality rate. Since different states in the USA reported different numbers of patients and also death cases, analyzing the difference of SARS-CoV-2 between these states has great importance. Since the generated RNA walk from the SARS-CoV-2 genome includes complex random fluctuations that also contain information, in this study, we employ the complexity and information theories to investigate the variations of SARS-CoV-2 genome between different states in the USA for the first time. The results of our analysis showed that the fractal dimension and Shannon entropy of genome walk significantly change between different states. Based on these results, we can conclude that the SARS-CoV-2 genomic structure significantly changes between different states, which is resulted from the virus evolution. Therefore, developing a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 is very challenging since it should be able to fight various structures of the virus in different states. © 2020
ABSTRACT
Health is enigmatic in nature, in the sense that people pay attention to it when they have lost it. This enigmatic nature of health is the context for expressing health-related paradoxes. The paradoxes of digitalization, isolation, and prevention that have become prominent in the COVID 19 pandemic are elaborated in this article. The digitalization paradox demonstrates that we have procrastinated in digitalizing daily life, but have the digital tools to communicate with others and share information in quarantine. The isolation paradox means that "social distancing" is required to prevent infection, but loneliness can make us sick. The "paradox of prevention” arises when reducing the risk of persons in medium-risk to low-risk groups has a greater impact on the overall risk in the population than only reducing the risk of persons in high-risk groups. All three paradoxes reflect the complexity and uncertainty of circumstances in a pandemic and the need for medical humanities. © 2020, Vesnu Publications. All rights reserved.