Tagged With "Long-term impacts"

How can linguistic anthropology help illuminate the connections between dietetics, fatphobia, and racism? Recently, a Twitter user wrote: “There is a fat politics movement. Come on in. The water’s fine.” Linguistic anthropology needs to “come on in,” as it were, to the fat politics movement. Specifically, we need to harness our analytical insights into the co-constitution of language, the body, and social differences to understand how people in this “fat-talk nation” produce and contest...

Syndemic Theory (ST) provides a framework to examine mutually enhancing diseases/health issues under conditions of social inequality and inequity. ST has been used in multiple disciplines to address interacting infectious diseases, noncommunicable diseases, and mental health conditions. The theory has been critiqued for its inability to measure disease interactions and their individual and combined health outcomes. This article reviews literature that strongly suggests a syndemic between...

We all know what stress feels like physically — though the symptoms vary by person. Some people experience shakiness or a racing heart, while others develop muscle tension, headaches or stomach aches. But what we might not realize is that our physiological responses to life’s stresses and strains can have deeper, less obvious, repercussions for just about every organ and system in the body. “I think people really underestimate just how big the effects are,” said Janice Kiecolt-Glaser,...

When Dr Bessel van der Kolk published The Body Keeps the Score in 2014, it was a huge hit with yoga people. That is not a euphemism for “rich, underoccupied people”, it is just people who do yoga. Certain physical activities do something weird to your brain: ancient memories resurface, often with new feelings or perspectives attached; you start treating yourself with more compassion. It doesn’t make sense until you read Van der Kolk. After that, nothing has ever made more sense. His thesis...

Successful health equity strategies must be inclusive, and focus on all marginalized and minoritized persons and their communities. Any lesser view will continue to yield a faulty health equity equation.

The brain doesn’t fully develop until about the age of 25. This fact is sometimes quite surprising and eye opening to most adults. It can also be somewhat overwhelming for new parents and professionals who are interacting with babies and young children every day, to contemplate. It is essential to realize however, that the greatest time of development occurs in the years prior to kindergarten. And even more critical to understand is that by age three 85 percent of the core structures of the...

Christina Bethell, Ph.D, MBA, MPH, founder of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI), principal author of the groundbreaking study on positive childhood experiences, and creator of the free Well Visit Planner, among other innovations. Two internationally-respected leaders and innovators in complementary aspects of early relational health and childhood and maternal health equity recently launched a partnership they believe will benefit everyone from newborn babies and...