Author: UBC Abbotsford-Mission Family Practice Residency Program

“There is a growing body of evidence on the efficacy of VR for empathy. Fernanda Herrera just published a large-scale, longitudinal set of studies. People who went through ‘Becoming Homeless’ in immersive VR were more likely to sign a petition supporting affordable housing compared to control conditions. Moreover, effectiveness of VR outpaced controls even when looking two months after the experience.” Interview with Jeremy Bailenson, Director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

In the midst of conducting research on the topic of simulation and empathy, I came across Stanford University’s Becoming Homeless: A Human Experience. This immersive virtual reality experience engages the participant in better understanding some of the challenges and choices one is confronted with when addressing unemployment, eviction, and finding a safe shelter. What moved me most were the narratives and voices of my surrounding bus riders.

For those who don’t have a VR headset, watch the video posted above to get a sense of “Becoming Homeless” via desktop.

To learn more, listen to the podcast ‘Becoming Homeless’: Stanford’s Empathy Experiment in Embodied Perspective-Taking and check out Building long-term empathy: A large-scale comparison of traditional and virtual reality perspective-taking (2018) by Fernanda Herrera, Jeremy Bailenson, Erika Weisz, Elise Ogle, & Jamil Zaki.

Warm regards,

Jacqueline

#StanfordUniversity #VirtualHumanInteractionLab #BecomingHomeless #BuildingEmpathyAndAdvocacy

“It’s not survival of the fittest, but survival of the nurtured.” 

Attachment Researcher, Dr. Louis Cozolino

Have you taken a peek at the UBC FoM’s This Changed My Practice Series on “The Myth of the ‘Manipulative Personality Disorder’: Taking the Blame Out of the Illness” (May 8, 2019) by Dr. Joanna Cheek? Many pearls embedded in that piece about targeting specific symptoms, exploring the patient’s psychosocial story, focusing on collaborative problem solving, setting healthy boundaries, as well as seeking to understand your own emotional reaction as a clinician. “Not only is compassion and empathy central to providing effective care for the patient (Gilbert, 2010), it is also central to the well-being of the doctor.” Learn more here.

#UBCFacultyOfMedicine #ThisChangedMyPractice #Nurture #RethinkingDarwin

“Confidence is recognized as one of the most influential factors to affect performance. Individual, leader, and team confidence play essential roles in achieving success and the absence of confidence has been connected with failure. While confidence is not a substitute for competency, it creates trusting relationships, empowerment, and resiliency to persevere when challenges arise.
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Our study revealed that organizations with higher confidence performed higher than organizations with lower confidence. In every organization, the workforce rated the experience lower than patients; however, hospitals with higher degrees of confidence in the patient experience had better performance outcomes for the patient experience.
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There are four sources recognized as creating efficacy and confidence that we can cultivate to develop patient experience competencies: personal accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion of encouragement, and psychological states of positive expectancy.
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For healthcare leaders to be successful in the present and future it is not a matter of hope to deliver a better experience but cultivating competencies and building demonstrable confidence in the quality of the patient experience provided.”

“It’s not clear exactly why outdoor excursions have such a positive mental effect. Yet, in a 2015 study, researchers compared the brain activity of healthy people after they walked for 90 minutes in either a natural setting or an urban one. They found that those who did a nature walk had lower activity in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region that is active during rumination — defined as repetitive thoughts that focus on negative emotions.
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‘Anything from 20 to 30 minutes, three days a week, to regular three-day weekends in the woods is helpful,’ says Dr. Strauss. ‘The point is to make your interactions a part of your normal lifestyle.'”

Read more on Get Back to Nature: Research Suggests That Mood Disorders Can Be Lifted by Spending More Time Outdoors (July 2018) via Harvard’s Men’s Health Watch.

Images of Cheakamus Centre (2019) via Jacqueline Ashby.

#GetBackToNature #EnjoyTheOutdoors

Great interactive piece on how our dietary habits impact our environment! Their four key takeaways:

“Modern agriculture inevitably contributes to climate change, but some foods have a bigger impact than others. Beef, lamb and cheese tend to do the most climate damage. Pork, chicken, and eggs are in the middle. Plants of all kinds typically have the lowest impact.

What you eat matters a lot more than whether it’s local or organic, or what kind of bag you use to carry it home from the store.

You don’t have to give up meat altogether to make a difference. Even smaller shifts, like eating less meat and more plants, or switching from beef to chicken, can reduce your climate footprint.

One simple way to cut your food-related emissions is to waste less. Buying what you need and actually eating it–instead of tossing it out—means that the energy used to produce your food has been spent efficiently.”

Access Canada’s Food Guide for healthy recipes and learn more about how to transform the hospital meal for sustainability.

#FoodAndClimateChange

Always remember, your focus determines your reality.

Qui-Gon Jinn

From our Site to yours! #MayThe4thBeWithYou

And to our UBC Residents taking the #LMCCPartDeux

You got this!

Jacqueline

CHES recently distributed a collection of medical education article abstracts to members! “We thank Dr. Gisèle Bourgeois-Law who created these summaries for the education community at the Island Medical Program. While these articles have a medical education focus, we are using this opportunity to explore the value of such an initiative to our larger CHES community. Article themes include topics such as: feedback and mindfulness, those by local/BC educators, those relevant to a distributed medical program, and those with new ideas. Our aim is to include a variety of quantitative and qualitative research articles, review articles, and concept articles, some of which contain an interesting editorial or commentary. This summary is not meant to be comprehensive, nor to include everything of potential interest.

If you would like to nominate an article for future inclusion or have any questions, please email us at ches.communications@ubc.ca.”

#UBC #CHES #MedicalEducation

Given the health risks associated with consuming your placenta, and the absence of detectable benefits, we strongly recommend women do not, and instead look to other mental wellness resources.

Dr. Jehannine Austin, Professor in UBC Faculty of Medicine

“The study, published online today in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada, is the largest so far to look at the effects of eating one’s placenta—a practice known as placentophagy. Researchers used data from a 10-year genetic study involving 138 women with a history of mood disorders and compared data on outcomes between those who had eaten their placenta and those who had not.
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Eating one’s placenta following childbirth is a growing trend, with many celebrities claiming that the practice provided them with health benefits, including preventing postpartum depression. However, previous studies have shown that consuming human placenta poses risks for mothers and their babies, including viral and bacterial infections.
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This study’s data provides no support for the idea that postpartum placentophagy improves mood, energy, lactation, or plasma vitamin B₁₂ levels in women with a history of mood disorders.”

#UBCFacultyOfMedicine #Placentophagy