The author is making the point that we are too caught up in the numbers and facts of medicine, and we need to go back to the narrative. The details that come with a patient's history and social actions contribute a great deal to outcome and treatment. The author supports this with several examples of cases he has had or heard of and how they changed his view of a treatment.
The program is divided into three sub-programs: Radiation Disaster Medicine, Radioactivity Environmental Protection, and Radioactivity Social Recovery. The Radiation Disaster Medicine course is a four year PhD program, for those who already have professional degrees (medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, etc.) and master’s degrees (medical physics). The Radioactivity Environmental Protection course is a five year program for students who have completed a bachelors or masters in a related field. The Radioactivity Social Recovery course is a five year program for students with a bachelors or master’s. The curriculum is broken down into common subjects, specialized subjects, fieldwork, and internships.
The author mainly draws from experience in organizational theory & disaster social issues as well as citing many specialists in the nuclear world as well as those who have hands on experience in disaster response.
The points I followed up on to get a better understanding of disaster aftermaths, especially ones involving nuclear technology were: 1) Fukushima 2) Three Mile Island and 3) more research into the Chernobyl incident through other articles.
“More than 20 years ago, social scientists Harry Otway and Brian Wayne cautioned that accident prevention (safer designs, better operator training, etc. , but even more so emergency planning, faced significant economic and managerial hurdles.”(p199)
“Nuclear accidents have tended to trigger organizational reform with regard to nuclear emergency response, but not on an international level. In considering this problematic ground, where might we start to develop a global approach to nuclear disaster mitigation?”(p200)
“The specific kinds of highly specialized knowledge involved with operation nuclear reactors however may not be accessible to broad public debate to the same degree as, for example, evacuation policies. But in the interest of sustainable, socially legitimate solutions, arguably decisions about even the technical responses to disasters should not be left to scientists and engineers alone, whether they are based within the nuclear industry, a regulatory bod, or a nongovernmental organization.”(p196)
“For all its undeniable flaws, the nuclear industry worked for several decades- in Japan and elsewhere. That is also the truly frightening realization after Fukushima: this disaster was not ‘waiting to happen’, but occurred in a system that had been functioning reasonable well for quite some time.”(p198)
“…The Way Forward is embedded in a technocratic rationality that seeks an effective ‘technical fix’ for reducing the risk of a nuclear disaster to manageable proportions. That misses the less tangible social expertise and improvisational skills inevitable involved in any successful disaster response.” (p206)
The IAEA finds cooperation between the industry, member countries, and the IAEA to be particularly challenging.
Dr. Byron Good is a professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard University. “Dr. Good’s present work focuses on research and mental health services development in Asian societies, particularly Indonesia. He has been a frequent visiting professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Gadjah Mada University, in Jogyakarta, Indonesia. He has conducted research with colleagues there on the early phases of psychotic illness for more than 10 years, and is co-director of the International Pilot Study of the Onset of Psychosis (IPSOS)” (Harvard bio).
The American Red Cross uses the gold-standard products for most of its research and service. For disaster response, the ARC utilizes the good-will of its volunteers to address needs such as shelter, food, and health services. On the local level, chapters of the ARC have disaster action teams that respond to smaller emergencies and provide transition services to the victims of such emergencies. They also have a larger wokforce of volunteers to pull from and use for support services.
The study was funded by the CDC which is a government organization of the United States of America.
The majority of citations are attributed to MSF and other humanitarian organizations. This incite frames the viewpoint from which this article was made.