24 What I Know About Health Humanities

Health Humanities is a study that focuses on the health of an individual by considering facts such as ethics, cultural belief, education, history, art, social determinants of health, which brings them to understand that person and brings a different way of healing that is not considered in the world of medical humanities.

From the article titled The Almost Right Word: The Move From Medical To Health Humanities, I have learned the difference between the ways of knowing that Social Science uses compared to Health Humanities. Thanks to this article, I have learned that Health Humanities came to play a very important role accompanying medical humanities. In medical humanities, healthcare providers, doctors, physicians, only consider the fact of the disease that they are facing, but do not look at the big picture of how all aspects of the patient’s life is having an impact on his healing. As medicine was advancing, more complex situations started arising. For example in the cases of organ transplants, ethics had to be considered. Health Humanities came into play by helping us answer these hard questions. For example: now that medicine has a way of helping for almost all kinds of diseases, should everyone be saved? Who should be given a specific type of care and in what circumstance? At what time do we know that it is ethical to call it quits and remove medical assistance to a patient? Health Humanities looks at the life of every individual and gives them rights when it comes to receiving care. Health Humanities combines the study of ethics, history, art, everything that makes up the identity of the person; and in these same ways, it utilizes these resources to bring awareness. Health Humanities will use fiction, novels, poetry, movies, books to help us understand people’s experiences, testimonies, when it comes to health care where in the medical humanities world, the social science way of knowing would be using surveys, experiments, statistics, data of any forms that will generalize a situation to bring awareness about it.

I have learned a lot after watching a Ted talk “How Do We Heal Medicine?” Certain problems arose in the medical field as medicine was getting more expensive as the years went by. In 1937, doctors could not really save patients because they were not advanced at all in medicine; But today, there are so many different specialties that it is overwhelming to even choose one. In this day and age, a more expensive care does not necessarily mean that it is the best care. The less expensive, the better sometimes.