Human emotions are complex, but we’re often guilty of oversimplifying them. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a well-meaning but misguided “Don’t worry, be happy” or “Try not to worry”, you’ll understand.
Because when we talk and think about happiness as a general outlook, we tend to sort people into two camps: “glass half full” and “glass half empty”. For a long time, even psychologists have considered personalities as one or the other, but as new research has found, this may not be the case.
According to University of California Berkeley researchers, it’s actually possible to actually learn new ways to activate your feelings of engagement in a positive experience. Put simply: it’s technically possible to teach yourself to be happier.
According to the researchers, people’s ability to get the most out of positive experiences can indeed be strengthened through training. This means learning to savour positive experiences in order to experience them in a heightened way.
As Psychology Today explains, the idea behind the model is that by learning to engage in a positive experience, you develop a greater sense of resilience and self-worth. “These feelings help to create an “upward spiral” in which good times build on themselves, further enhancing your happiness,” it explains.
“Even when ‘external supports and familiar activities are less available’, such as those restrictions in effect during the Covid-19 pandemic, you ‘are left internally with whatever psychological resources’ you’ve managed to acquire.”
This can be done physically, by doing it, or mentally, by conjuring it up, such as thinking about someone who cares about you.
2. Enrich the experience through these sub-steps
Then, the research suggests, the key is to enrich the experience by making it as long-lasting as possible, and keeping it active in your consciousness.
“Focus on multiple aspects of the experience, including its meaning, your perceptions and sensations, the way it feels and taking action. Increase the novelty of the experience so that it sticks out more in your mind and heighten the personal relevance of the experience by delving into your feelings about it.”
Then, the experience can be intensified through “up-regulating” your emotions, or reliving the parts that feel good.
3. Absorb the experience
This involves making a deliberate effort to internalize it so that it feels like a part of you.
“Turn attention inward to your emotional state and highlight the reward value of the experience.” For example, after a night out with friends, spend some time reflecting on how socializing made you feel, what particular parts you enjoyed and what you gained from the experience.
4. Link positive and negative material
Of course, there are plenty of experiences in our lives that we might struggle to attach positive meaning to, from a parking ticket to experiencing grief and loss.
“Focus on something positive even while you’re aware of negative material in the background,” suggest the researchers. “For example, become more involved in the film you’re watching while still noticing that your dread of the coming work day continues to persist. The positive should ultimately drown out the negative in this step.”
How to Become Happier In Your Own Life
It goes without saying that no research, this included, is a magic bullet to improving wellbeing, tackling depression and helping balance our emotions in such difficult times. But it does offer the possibility of being able to learn new ways of experiencing the good times in your life.
“Fulfilment may not come naturally to you, but by letting the enjoyable experiences change you at a deeper level, those good times can become both more frequent and more long-lasting,” Psychology Today explains.
So whether you’re gearing up for New Year’s Eve celebrations, practising some much-needed self-care or planning some time off from the chaos of the world, maybe one thing we can all resolve to do is to stop and smell the roses from time to time?
While COVID-19’s effects on the lungs and respiratory system are well known, there is growing research suggesting that the virus is also affecting the heart, with potentially lasting effects.
In a presentation at the annual meeting of the Biophysical Society, an international biophysics scientific group, Dr. Andrew Marks, chair of the department of physiology at Columbia University, and his colleagues reported on changes in the heart tissue of COVID-19 patients who had died from the disease, some of whom also had a history of heart conditions.
The team conducted autopsy analyses and found a range of abnormalities, particularly in the way heart cells regulate calcium. All muscles, including those in the heart, rely on calcium to contract. Muscle cells store calcium and open special channels inside of cells to release it when needed. In some conditions such as heart failure, the channel remains open in a desperate attempt to help the heart muscle contract more actively.
The leaking of calcium ultimately depletes the calcium stores, weakening the muscle in the end. “We found evidence, in the hearts of COVID-19 patients, abnormalities in the way calcium is handled,” says Marks. In fact, when it came to their calcium systems, the heart tissue of these 10 people who had died of COVID-19 looked very similar to that of people with heart failure.
Marks plans to further explore the heart changes that SARS-CoV-2 might cause by studying how the infection affects the hearts of mice and hamsters. He intends to measure changes in immune cells as well as any alterations in heart function in the animals both while they are infected and after they have recovered in order to document any lingering effects.
“The data we present show that there are dramatic changes in the heart,” Marks says. “The precise cause and long term consequences of those need to be studied more.” Previous studies have revealed a link between COVID-19 infections and heart-related problems. A large 2022 analysis of patients in the VA system—some of whom had recovered from COVID-19 and others who had never been diagnosed—showed those who had had COVID-19 had higher rates of a number of heart-related risks, including irregular heartbeats heart attack and stroke.
Dr. Susan Cheng, chair of women’s cardiovascular health and population science at Cedars-Sinai, is studying whether there are any associations between rates of heart attacks and surges of COVID-19 infections, in order to better understand how the virus might be affecting the heart.
There is also early evidence showing that people with hypertension may be at higher risk of heart events when they get COVID-19. What connects the viral infection to the heart isn’t known yet, but the body’s immune system is likely a major contributor.
“It’s been well documented that with SARS-CoV-2, the body responds with an inflammatory response that involves activating the immune system in a very dramatic way,” says Marks. “In the heart, it looks like the same inflammatory process is activating pathways that could be detrimental to heart function.” But more research needs to clarify that process, says Dr. Mariell Jessup, chief science and medical officer at the American Heart Association.
“If the assumption is that the infection causes inflammation, and the assumption is that the inflammation is precipitating more cardiovascular events, then how is it doing that?” It’s also possible that viruses can infect and adversely affect heart cells. “We’re still at the tip of the iceberg with respect to understanding how COVID-19 affects health,” says Cheng.
Marks is hoping to get some of those answers with the animal experiments he plans to conduct. “We hope to optimize the animal model to best reflect what we think is going on in patients,” he says. “We want to study at a very, very detailed level what happens in the heart when the virus infects an animal.”
Ultimately, that knowledge will help to better treat people who might be at higher risk of heart-related problems from COVID-19, which could in turn reduce hospitalizations and deaths from the disease. Marks has already developed a potential drug that can address the leaking calcium if that proves to be a problem with COVID-19; he is ready and eager to test it if his animal studies justify the experiments.
Until more definitive studies clarify how the COVID-19 virus is affecting the heart, Jessup says she would advise her patients to “control the things we know how to control,” such as the risk factors that might put them at higher risk of heart disease to begin with, such as obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.
And with more data emerging, if people are getting repeat COVID-19 infections, it’s also probably worth seeing their doctor to get their heart disease risk factors checked as well. “We spend a lot of time telling people they should get vaccinated,” she says. “For people who have had COVID-19, we should also be making sure they know their heart numbers and make sure they know blood pressure. “We know how to prevent heart disease, so let’s do the things we know how to do.”
The legacy of a more widespread acceptance of remote working practices initially triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic represents an undoubted boon for employees with disabilities.
In fact, research published late last year by the Economic Innovation Group suggested a clear correlation between increased trends towards remote working and people with disabilities being 3.5% more likely to be employed in Q2 2022 than pre-pandemic.
Many of the potential factors driving this are self-evident.Working from home naturally strips away a number of important access barriers associated with regular office-based employment.
These can include having to navigate to work using inaccessible public transportation systems, which can be physically and psychologically draining — whilst the office building itself may not be wholly accessible and optimized for employees with disabilities.
That’s not to mention the human factors that come into play once somebody is through the door. These might involve discriminatory attitudes from management and co-workers which, in physical shared workspaces in particular, play out against the intensified interpersonal backdrops commonly associated with office politics.
This might go some of the way to explaining why, in research recently published in the U.K. by Instant Offices (a world-leading provider of procured office space), only 55% of disabled workers said that they believe they receive recognition from management in contrast to 67% of non-disabled employees.
Another surprising statistic to emerge from the research was that, while 26% of respondents with disabilities said that their mental health improved as a result of working from home, a further 30% reported that it had declined.
Additionally, 34% of respondents complained of lacking the proper office equipment at home and 9% said that they struggled to use online meeting platforms. Perhaps, most tellingly, 60% of respondents said that, when working from home, they missed social interactions with co-workers.
This is noteworthy as it’s important to remember that people with disabilities are far more likely to face social isolation than their non-disabled peers. This isn’t as simple as just being physically present and surrounded by others.
Communicating and working directly alongside other people can, over a sustained period, at least for the open-minded, go a tremendous way to breaking down certain negative perceptions and stereotypes associated with disability.
Not only, through in-person office work, can employees with disabilities demonstrate their on-the-job talents more directly, but their simple humanity too – be that over a quick catch-up on last night’s ball game or poking fun along with everyone else at corporate idiosyncrasies.
Of course, working from home carries with it clear efficiencies, particularly in relation to types of work that require less collaborative interaction. For this reason, 40% of respondents said that they experience less fatigue when working from home.
Nonetheless, important aspects of human contact can be lost and the only instance in which this is an outright advantage is when it applies to a work environment that is already toxic.
Best of both worlds
Given these nuances, employers should not rush to rash assumptions in believing that they are doing staff with disabilities a favor by offering them work patterns involving 100% remote work.
Instead, employees with disabilities need to be included in the post-pandemic trend towards hybrid working – presenting staff members with the opportunity of enjoying the best of both worlds.
It may well be that employees with disabilities lean in to remote working more than their non-disabled colleagues but they should be enabled to play an active role in determining how their working week is divided up between home and office.
Moreover, the modern trend towards remote working should never be used as an excuse to make office spaces less physically accessible and welcoming to employees of all backgrounds.
The more open, robust and flexible hybrid work arrangements are – the more the workforce as a whole can benefit in the long run.
“Religious Attitudes toward the Disabled (2015)”. infidels.org. The Secular Web. Archived from the original on May 4, 2020. Retrieved April 30, 2020.Brown, Robin (1994). Florida’s First People: 12,000 Years of Human History. p. 25. ISBN1-56164-032-8.Milanich, Jerald T. (1994). Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida. p. 75. ISBN0-8130-1273-2.Kağnici, Gökhan (December 28, 2018). “
Immune responses to viruses like SARS-CoV-2 may affect mental health, and vice versa. Doctors are uncovering exactly how. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, one of the biggest questions was: Why do some people get so much sicker than others? It’s a question that has forced researchers to confront some deep mysteries of the human body, and come to conclusions that have startled them.
By the fall of 2020, psychiatrists were reporting that among the many groups who were high risk, people with psychiatric disorders, broadly, seemed to be getting more severe forms of Covid-19 at a higher rate. Katlyn Nemani, an NYU neuropsychiatrist, decided to dig deeper, asking: Just how much more at risk, and which conditions?
In January, she and a group of colleagues published a study of 7,348 Covid-19 patients in New York. One finding was stark: People with a schizophrenia spectrum diagnosis faced more than two and a half times the average person’s risk of dying from Covid-19, even after controlling for the many other factors that affect Covid-19 outcomes, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, smoking, obesity, and demographic factors — age, sex, and race.
“That was a pretty shocking finding,” Nemani says. The patients all were hospitalized in the same medical system, in the same region, which implies they weren’t receiving radically different treatments, she says. In sum, it all suggests that the risk was closely linked to the mental illness itself and not to some other variable.
Since then, more studies have come out — as well as meta–studies pooling the conclusions of those studies — showing worse Covid-19 outcomes among people with diagnosed mental health disorders including depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
Some of this isn’t surprising; a lot of people with mental health issues experience a general increased risk of poor health outcomes. But the pandemic started to shine a brighter light on why, bolstering a hypothesis that’s been accruing evidence in recent years.
It appears that something in the body, something biological associated with these disorders, may be at play. “That suggests there’s a physiologic vulnerability there in these folks,” said Charles Raison, a psychiatrist and researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
It’s not necessarily that people with schizophrenia or mood disorders are more likely to become infected with Covid-19. Rather, once they are infected, “the outcomes are worse,” Nemani says. Depending on the study and the severity of the mental health diagnosis, people with these conditions are, roughly, between 1.5 and 2 times more likely to die of Covid-19 than average, after adjusting for other risk factors (unadjusted risk is even higher).
The level of increased risk, Nemani says, is “on par with what we’re seeing for other well-established risk factors like heart disease and diabetes.” What’s happening? Why would mental illness make someone more vulnerable to a respiratory disease? Psychiatrists who study these mental illnesses say the culprit might lie in a connection between mental health and the immune system.
They’re finding that mental health stressors could leave people more at risk for infection, and, most provocatively, they suspect that responses in the immune system might even contribute to some mental health issues.There’s a lot that’s unknown here. But the pandemic is giving researchers a new window into these questions. And the research “might teach us something about how to protect these people from infection going forward,” Nemani says.
How the immune system can impact mental health
In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its list of underlying conditions that put people at higher risk for severe Covid-19, adding mood disorders — like depression and bipolar disorder — and schizophrenia spectrum diagnoses, a group that accounts for around 34 million Americans. It was a recognition of the growing evidence published by Nemani and colleagues across medicine, and prioritizes this group for vaccines and booster shots.
Roger McIntyre, a psychiatrist at the University of Toronto, is one of the co-authors of one of two systematic review studies that the CDC cited in its change. (Nemani is a co-author on the second.) To him, it’s no surprise that mental illness imparts an infection risk. “A thread that has been woven through many of these disorders is immune or inflammatory dysregulation,” McIntyre says.
That is, problems with the immune system tend to coincide with mental health issues. And problems with the immune system can lead people to have worse outcomes when it comes to SARS-CoV 2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
“Most of the time in medicine, it’s hard to have one singular explanation for anything,” he cautions. That’s especially true here in the discussion of why people with certain mental health issues might be more at risk for severe disease. People living with mental illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression tend to have shorter-than-average life spans and worse health overall….Continue reading
Medical data is supposed to be confidential. But social media is threatening the privacy and dignity of patients. For years, Martin Jugenburg—a Toronto-based plastic and reconstructive surgeon who goes by Dr. 6ix on social media—shared dozens of before-and-after photos and videos on Instagram of the altered bodies that had passed through his hands. There were tummy tucks, Brazilian butt lifts, and breast augmentations, all of them sorted into a kind of virtual assembly line for his thousands of followers to see.
But many of the women he featured in his posts—sometimes depicted post-op and sedated, their genitals and breasts blurred out—hadn’t consented to having their images circulated, according to an ongoing class action lawsuit, and some were only alerted of their presence online due to an investigation by CBC journalists. Unbeknownst to his patients and followers, investigators later found that Jugenburg was using a covert network of cameras in his clinic to perform a rigorous feat of surveillance, documenting thousands surgical procedures.
Women who realized he had posted images of them told investigators they felt violated; they were upset, embarrassed, and distressed. Dr. 6ix’s loose approach to respecting patient privacy on social media is hardly unusual in the world of “med Twitter” and “MedTok,” or medical TikTok. On Twitter, orthopedic surgeons complain about chronic pain “crazies,” nurses mock women who choose to give birth without an epidural, and doctors complain about “liars,” “Googlers,” and patients with conditions they are struggling to diagnose.
TikTok is worse. In a post by someone with the username Nurse Johnn, whose derogatory skits about dementia patients he claims are fiction, the nurse mockingly dances in blue-green scrubs on a hospital bed, imitating someone under his care. One nurse filmed themselves holding the hand of a patient they said was dying of COVID-19. There is a video of someone in what appears to be a psychiatric crisis and another of a patient having their toenails cut. A Miami-based doctor posted about how he “walks in the footsteps of giants” in reference to porn star Johnny Sins, who impersonates a doctor having sex with his patients.
To scroll through many medical social media accounts is to wade into a virtual subculture where patients have become fodder for derision, their privacy and dignity regularly violated. But since there isn’t really any oversight of this virtual world, patients must bear the repercussions.
Medical professionals spilling these traumatic, “hilarious” stories about their patients can lead to people not going to the doctor, says Shayna Hermann, a graduate student at the University of North Texas who studies criminology. This means the underlying health issue can “get worse and worse,” she adds—often with dire consequences.
The concealment of a patient’s medical information is an ancient custom, for such knowledge is a “holy secret,” according to the Hippocratic Oath. Medical students still refer to a doctrine of “doing no harm” that is based on the Hippocratic oath, and harm, to Hippocrates, included the dissemination of information shared between a patient and their doctor. Otherwise, trust in medicine could be undermined, disrupting treatment and diagnosis. Medicine is about acting but also about not acting.
The Enlightenment enshrined patient confidentiality as one of the formative values of the modern biomedical model. Ideals cherished under liberalism, like the individual’s right to autonomy over their body, would be impossible to respect without the guarantee that their medical records remained private. Those ideas would persist throughout the twentieth century. In 1948, the World Medical Association, an international body that now represents 115 medical associations worldwide, produced the Declaration of Geneva for the purposes of unifying an international standard for medical practice.
The document reads: “I will respect the secrets that are confided in me, even after the patient has died.” Today, a patient’s right to privacy has been legally protected in both Canada and the United States. If it is violated, doctors can be sanctioned and even lose their medical licence, temporarily or permanently. Despite this basis for the preservation of confidentiality, the growing presence of practitioners on social media presents a risk for breaches.
Physicians, like many of us, have used platforms like Twitter and Instagram since their inception, with 90 percent reporting they used social media to find information related to their patients and practice in 2017, according to a report by market analyst Research2Guidance. Today, lists of the top twenty-five “medical influencers” include accounts of family physicians and doctors who have been endorsed by celebrities and have millions of followers. And, at times, their posts contain jokes involving patient information.
A 2020 study by Wasim Ahmed of Newcastle University, which analyzed 348 tweets about living patients, found that nearly 47 percent contained details that would likely make patients identifiable to themselves. In some ways, packaging patient information for public consumption is in line with lesser-known traditions of the medical world. The history of medicine is also a history of performance; health care workers have advanced their careers through the exhibition of less powerful people for hundreds of years.
Despite the progress made around patient confidentiality during the Enlightenment, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it wasn’t uncommon for both students and the public to pay an entry fee to witness dissections that took place as part of medical education in Europe. Many people viewed the practice as necessary for scientific advancement, but physicians used, almost universally, bodies of the poorest subjects, stealing cadavers from graves without consent and then displaying them for the public.
In the era before anesthetic was widely used, surgeons would operate on conscious patients before an audience of, at times, 700 to 800 onlookers. In an article for JSTOR Daily, Rebecca Rego Barry wrote that surgeons “seemed to revel in the showmanship aspect of their work,” receiving applause at the moment they entered what one medical college called the “pit.” It was this performative aspect of medicine—perpetrated by practitioners and revered by observers—that helped usher in the era of the celebrity doctor.
Of course, the conditions health care professionals train and work in have always encouraged physicians to establish public influence. Canadian hospitals and medical schools reward and publicly promote their most prestigious students, researchers, and clinicians; competition for esteem and funding from donors encourages already-high-achieving people to differentiate themselves and build lucrative research reputations. But television fundamentally changed the way we think about doctors, commodifying the act of giving medical care so that it could be sold as entertainment on a mass scale.
Just look at celebrities like Dr. Drew and Dr. Oz or shows like Dr. 90210 and Botched. Every week, viewers tune in to watch the assessment, diagnosis and treatment of patients, despite the criticisms these shows have received for exploitative practices. Reality shows like ABC’s NY Med used footage from actual emergency rooms and operating theatres, sometimes filming surgeries without consent from patients.
Joel M. Geiderman, an LA emergency physician, told Emergency Medicine News that he knows people who consented to being filmed while stressed and in the emergency department, then regretted the publicization of their medical treatment in the media. So, while the disclosure of medical secrets to the public is not particularly new, technology has made it much easier.
There is certainly a place for doctors online. Medical misinformation and vaccine hesitancy need to be confronted, especially in the era of COVID-19, and many clinicians have made invaluable contributions to online discussions about medical racism, homophobia, ableism, and misogyny. A number of physicians use social media to help patients with conditions underrepresented in medical literature self-advocate. Others advise oppressed patients on how to ensure they’re getting the best care possible and answer pressing questions about the pandemic.
But growing distrust in the medical establishment, which the violation of patient confidentiality encourages, must be reckoned with just as seriously. According to a recent survey by NORC at the University of Chicago, since the start of COVID, 32 percent of respondents decreased their trust in the health care system. This distrust is often particularly present in Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ communities, which have been subjected to medical exploitation, experimentation, and harm for centuries.
Research shows suspicion of pharmaceutical companies continues to drive vaccine hesitancy. “COVID put physicians in the forefront of the cultural mainstream,” says Stephanie Lee, a hematologist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. “Everyone was looking to physicians for guidance on what was happening.” She adds that, for many physicians, there was a feedback loop of wanting more attention and likes on social media.
While she believes health care practitioners generally have good intentions, “when the well runs dry of content on COVID, people wanted to mine their professional lives to maintain their status. COVID accelerated what was already an issue.” The targets of these posts are, overwhelmingly, the oppressed. Faithful to the history of medical theatre, women with mental illness and patients who are geriatric, disabled, fat, impoverished, or perceived as uneducated are subjected to the majority of ridicule.
And it’s not uncommon for patients in similar situations to see these posts. Reacting to discussions of trans healthcare by physicians on Twitter, one person tweeted, “My lived experience/identity has been distilled to a saccharine and self-serving Aesop[’s fable].” Another nurse, who posted that she knew when patients were faking symptoms, inspired a #PatientsAreNotFaking hashtag used by thousands of people.
“Whenever I see nurses and doctors on TikTok . . . disparaging their patients . . . it makes it hard, for not just me but a lot of people, to be vulnerable to their doctors,” says the University of North Texas’s Hermann. She adds that patients who grew up in poverty, like herself, already distrust health care professionals, and social media has the potential to make it worse. Patients have already expressed a variety of concerns in the comments sections of these platforms:
“TikTok singlehandedly made me not seek medical care recently,” wrote one user; another posted about their anxieties around having emergency surgery, writing, “I was literally fearful of my nurses having their phones on them and videoing me while I’m vulnerable.” With no real oversight in place to monitor online behaviour, it’s clear that the regulations around patient confidentiality must evolve to capture these new concerns.
The Canadian Medical Association does have a data-stewardship policy that covers patient privacy, but it only mentions the sharing of patient details over email—nothing about social media. The issue has been addressed in the College of the Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario’s new set of guidelines for the use of social media by physicians, which includes the recommendation that doctors “exercise caution when posting information online that relates to an actual patient” and asks them to “bear in mind that an unnamed patient may still be identified through a range of their information such as a description of their clinical condition.”
These are, however, just guidelines, and they are still violated constantly online. Both Hermann and Lee think that social media use should be addressed in medical curricula; hospitals and medical boards already have disciplinary mechanisms in place for violations of patient confidentiality, which should be implemented when health care practitioners post derogatory content online with the same consistency that they are when practitioners are careless with physical copies of patient data.
Directives, they added, should take into account that comments deriding or ridiculing sick people in general can be as harmful to the public’s relationship with the medical system as individual violations of patient confidentiality. Lee believes that, when done correctly, patient narratives shared on social media can have a constructive and positive function. “There’s an opportunity to do a lot of good,” she says. “
But physicians need to take stock of how this is really helping our patients. Is there really a net material benefit to patients by posting this? Is there an alternative way that preserves the patient’s dignity better, maintains their anonymity better?” Asking for consent to post about a patient online is complicated, however. The power differential between patients and doctors, in most cases, is enormous.
It is difficult to imagine conditions in which patients wouldn’t potentially feel coerced into agreeing to let their physician share their information on a public social media account. “Hospital fundraising campaigns share patient information all the time, but the big difference is the patients’ stories are shared after the acute issue has been resolved,” says Lee, adding that, often, those narratives are shared in the patient’s own words, sometimes written in partnership with their former health care providers. “You have to empower the patient to be part of the process, to be part of sharing their story,” she says.
In 2021, following his disciplinary hearing at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, Martin Jugenburg was suspended from his job for six months. At some point, he removed all the patient content predating November 2019 from his Instagram account. The committee wrote that there was a “troubling pattern of Dr. Jugenburg pursuing his own interests . . . in publicity and in cultivating a strong social media presence, at the expense of the privacy of his patients.” His “seeming indifference to these issues was appalling and is deserving of significant sanction,” the committee added.
Jugenburg has since resumed his career at the Toronto Cosmetic Surgery Institute and has publicly vowed to fight attempts made by patients to seek financial compensation for the damages done. His Instagram account is still public, and he has begun posting new post-op images of his patients—presumably with permission this time. It’s almost business as usual.
For patients, the situation remains unchanged. Questions about the function of social media in medicine have yet to be posed with seriousness, and solutions have not been identified or implemented. Meanwhile, influencer-doctors continue to practise the tradition of performance, prolonging a hidden history of sickness as spectacle.
“It’s really easy to detach empathy when you’re doing a TikTok. It’s really easy for those viewers to not see that person as a person,” says Hermann. “[But] I think, now, it’s coming to a head.”
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According to the researchers, people’s ability to get the most out of positive experiences can indeed be strengthened through training. This means learning to savour positive experiences in order to experience them in a heightened way.
