Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to M Kay.
We describe four cases of ocular trauma incurred while playing women's lacrosse without eye protection. Women's lacrosse is potentially hazardous because, unlike men's lacrosse, helmets and face masks are not required. These ocular injuries could have been prevented with the use of protective eyewear.
This longitudinal study of older Anglo and Mexican-American widows provides data on coping strategies and coping effectiveness as measured by perceived physical and psychological health. Previous health levels were the best predictors of later physical and psychological symptoms. Contrary to expectations, both ethnic groups preferred nonconfrontational strategies for widowhood problems, with the Mexican Americans using more confrontational strategies. Ways of coping with problems during the first months of widowhood had significant long-term effects upon the widow's health. The most effective coping methods over the first year involved combinations of independent action and emotional release. Over a longer period, more effective strategies included being able to ignore problems, accept the situation, and release tensions, or to actively seek advice about general problems. Contradictory findings over the two time periods for those Mexican Americans using independent action and emotional release strategies appear to be related to cultural patterns of familial support after a death occurs.
One hundred widows participating in experimental research entitled Efficacy of Support Groups for Mexican American Widows were studied to learn how they express the loss of their husbands. Mourning practices, acknowledged symptoms of dysphoria, and somatic reactions were studied to learn if the syndrome of nervios subsumes their reaction to bereavement. In addition, their responses to instruments designed to measure depression, the Spanish version of the Beck Depression Inventory and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, were examined for correlation with nervios and relationships to Mexican American acculturation. Nervios seems to be a manifestation of dysphoria rather than a specific syndrome for these women.
Current approaches to assessing the health-related functions of social support are based on a theoretical frame of reference regarding the taxonomic structure of social networks. Nearly all previous work addresses the issue of social network taxonomies from an etic (i.e. objective, outside) rather than emic (i.e. subjective) perspective. Because of this, we intensively studied 5 unmarried adolescent mothers over the year following the delivery of their firstborn infants, utilizing ethnographic methods to elicit detailed portrayals of their personal, subjective taxonomies of social network support. Ranked in order of successful adaptation to parenthood, the young women with the best outcomes displayed a richer, more differentiated view of their social networks' taxonomic structure and regarded individual network members as more diverse in their capacity to provide broad, multi-faceted support. A common element among all subjects was the tendency to discriminate among categories of network members according to the stability and continuity perceived in individual relationships.
The etiology of monocular ischemia influences the clinical manifestation and long-term neurologic and visual prognosis. During a 10-year period, 140 patients with monocular visual symptoms were evaluated and assigned to a carotid bifurcation occlusive disease group (group I) or a primary ocular disease group (group II) on the basis of angiographic findings and ophthalmologic evaluation. Patients with symptoms secondary to emboli from the carotid bifurcation tended to have a shorter duration of blindness and a lower incidence of permanent blindness initially and during follow-up. The presence of Hollenhorst plaques or retinal artery occlusion did not have any discriminatory diagnostic value since the incidence was similar in both patient groups. Since both primary eye disease and carotid bifurcation occlusive disease can be initially seen as monocular ischemia, carotid angiography and ophthalmologic consultation are necessary to select those patients who will benefit from carotid endarterectomy.
Northwestern New Spain experienced not only a territorial and a spiritual conquest, but a medical conquest. This medical conquest came from a tradition, established after the conquest of central New Spain, that had fused classical medicine of the Old World with medicine of indigenous groups, in the writings of European doctors and scientists as well as graduates of Mexican colleges. The medical conquest of Sonora was accomplished by laymen, explorers and missionaries who carried the theory of healing resulting from these syncretic processes into the northern lands, adding new materials that they learned from indigenous peoples there. When the Indians were ill with epidemic disease or injuries, they were cared for by missionaries brought up on European domestic medicine. The theory of illness and its cure held by the lay healers became predominantly that of the conquest culture. The conquerers', missionaries' and colonists' interpretations of native plant, animal and mineral remedies that they learned from northwestern native medicine were colored by their own concepts of disease and healing, resulting in an epistemology which continues to guide lay or domestic medicine not only in Sonora but also in the rest of the American Mexican west today.
The purpose of this paper is to report the current status of hot/cold principles in the ethnotherapeutics of women of southwestern U.S.A., northwestern Mexico. The paper presents a secondary data analysis from three studies, including a data bank of Women's Ethnotherapeutic Agents derived from literature searches, interviews of women in research of Mexican American Grandmothers as Health Care Advisors, and research in the historical roots of the ethnotherapeutic agents used in contemporary domestic medicine. This report presents women's home remedies, what these remedies are believed to do, and the sources of this domestic therapy knowledge. It concentrates on persistence and change in one aspect of the theoretical base of these remedies, their humoral complexional classification. In the analysis of data from these studies, continuation of aspects of the hot/cold theory is demonstrated. It is suggested that the persistence is tacit, with the lack of articulated knowledge of humoral theory today stemming from the content of contemporary remedy books. Instead of arguing either diffusion or independent invention, commonly held ethnophysiological concepts are offered as a possible explanation for the persistence of hot and cold therapy practices.
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The lexicon of illness terms used by Mexican American women is affected by the practice of speaking both Spanish and English and by the coexistence of several health systems. When there is changning participation in various health systems, with increasing interference and code switching, linguistic evidence for these changes may be found. In some cases an English disease name is borrowed. In others, a cognate is coined from an English disease name. Some terms, now no longer useful, are dropped. Finally, some Spanish disease names which do not have equivalents in English or in scientific medical theory may be retained, but there is a shift in the meaning of the words themselves. The direction of the shift is towards semantic correspondence with the concepts of scientific medicine. In these ways the medical lexicon is changed, with the changes reflecting a new medical culture.
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