July 13, 2007

Challenges of Rural Health, a Medical Magnet School and False Memories among Topics Covered This Week on Sound Medicine

INDIANAPOLIS — This weekend (July 14 and 15) Sound Medicine bioethicist Eric Meslin, Ph.D., talks with experts about the use of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to analyze the genes of a fetus to detect anomalies in select embryos. Susannah Baruch, J.D., director of reproductive genetics at the Genetic and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University, and Tim Caulfield, LLM, chair of the Health Law and Policy group at the University of Alberta, join Meslin in a discussion of the frequency of this practice, and the ethical controversy surrounding it.

False memory creation, or recovered memory, occurs when an individual recalls a memory which oftentimes never happened. Susan Clancy, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Harvard University, discusses her research which looks at recovered memory among people who report they’ve experienced alien abductions.

Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus has become difficult to manage. Once contained primarily to hospitals and nursing homes, the infection now is appearing in prisons and public housing. Robert Daum, M.D., section chief of pediatric infectious diseases and professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago, talks about the infection and why it has become a problem.

Crispus Attucks Medical Magnet High School in Indianapolis exposes its students to careers in the medical sciences. Sound Medicine reporter Sandy Roob explores how the school prepares its students to enter such fields.

Government funded, rural health clinics face a shortage of physicians and a lack of knowledge among patients about basic healthcare. Sound Medicine reporter Jeremy Shere examines these challenges as well as the positive aspects of healthcare in a rural community.

Sound Medicine host Barbara Lewis discovered the devastating combination of poverty and AIDS/HIV, especially for women, during her trip to Kenya. She looks at how the Academic Model for the Prevention and Treatment of HIV (AMPATH) program helps women break the cycle and stigma of AIDS/HIV and poverty.

Archived editions of Sound Medicine as well as other helpful information can be found at http://www.soundmedicine.iu.edu.

Sound Medicine is underwritten by the Lilly Clinic, Clarian Health, and IU Medical Group; Jeremy Shere’s "Check-Up" is underwritten by IUPUI.

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Media Contact:

Pamela Su Perry
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