The field of healing architecture is not quite burgeoning, but it has continued its steady growth since its first mention in 1977. In a review published by The Center for Health Design, the goal of healing architecture is said to be designing spaces that “evoke a sense of cohesion of the mind, body, and spirit … [and] support healing intention and foster healing relationships.” Features of these healing environments include outdoor communal spaces, indoor foliage, managing pleasant aromas, and an overall focus on human needs and emotions.  These designs aim to create an environment that can support social relationships, alleviate emotional distress, increase accessibility with daily tasks, and generally provide a sense of control and coherence for the individual. 

This mainstream interest in moving toward “human-centered” architecture is vastly different from the way healthcare facilities we’ve known have long operated. It is complicated by the place architecture has held in Canadian history as a tool for colonialism. Most of Canada’s colonial history has involved settlers imposing buildings in Indigenous communities, with little care for a community’s own needs or desires. As Indigenous architect Harriet Burdett-Moulton described in an interview with The Site of such an anecdote: “[the Indigenous community] did not feel that the buildings belonged to them. Southern construction crews were coming […] putting up the buildings and leaving. No one took ownership; not the government, not the designers, not the builders, and not the users.” It is well-documented too that Indigenous people suffer worse health than non-Indigenous peoples as a direct result of the residential school system, status system, systemic inequity in access to healthcare, and many other socioeconomic determinants that have reinforced this cycle. Just at the beginning of this month, the country was enraged by the medical racism endured by Atikamekw woman Joyce Echaquan and Atikamekw man Georges-Hervé Awashish, which cost both of their lives. These health inequities continue to be the most alarming and enduring of Canadian public health issues. 

Indigenous architecture, which has only begun to enjoy mainstream visibility and engagement in the last decade, is described by Métis curator David Fortin in an interview with Azure: “a built creation can be part of cultural interconnectedness and sacredness starts to ‘get at the core.’ But […] also about the institutions and the thinking that have created barriers to that concept.” Indigenous perspectives have already been considered during the construction of medical facilities such as the Meno Ya Win Health Centre in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, which fulfill many of the same goals that mainstream healing architecture has advocated for. The future of healing architecture is doubly promising for local application, and may push forward the conversation on how we can divorce the healthcare system from the innate inequities of Western medicine.

It’s still important to mention the limitations that have impeded implementation of these healing spaces. Most pertinent is the fact that it is not the external environment itself that heals, but rather the social and emotional support it fosters. It’s for this reason that evidence-based health design is shaky at its best, and unreliable at its worst – there is no empirical way to measure wellbeing, how a person responds to an environment, or the tangible effects produced by said environment. While there have been strides made in proving the benefits of healing architecture, and qualitative evidence to support it, the absence of a quantitative conclusion is part of the reason why its implementation has remained sparse.

Nevertheless, the sustained interest in healing architecture speaks volumes to what still needs to be addressed in current healthcare designs. If Charles Jenks thought buildings were conceived “gigantic metaphor[s] that proclaim their own function,” then the healthcare facilities many of us have frequented can only call to mind cold machines. In a field that already has its hands full, we can’t hold our hats yet, but I am optimistic that there is a brighter future for how we collectively view health, and how we engage in a dialogue that Indigenous architects are capable of leading.

The post Healing by Design appeared first on The McGill Daily.

It’s a simplistic scenario, but the pandemic has shown us a promising glimpse into the future of telemedicine. Defined as “the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications to improve a patient’s clinical health status,” it was for many decades an ingenious pipe dream embroiled with administrative obstacles. Now, it has come of age in an era where social distancing and preventive safety is imperative, expanding beyond the landline into the digital world of email, text, and video-calling – but its implications remain up in the air.

It was for many decades an ingenious pipe dream embroiled with administrative obstacles. Now, it has come of age in an era where social distancing and preventive safety is imperative.

The move toward telemedicine, whose earliest conception was in a Lancet article from 1879, faced significant backlash and lethargy up until this year, despite its appearance as a natural progression in healthcare delivery. In an age where groceries, schooling, and finances can be managed from home, why did primary care remain largely unchanged? Physicians have long challenged the safety and level of care using telemedicine provides; in South Korea, it was even banned until this year. Combined with systemic issues like poor compensation for teleconsultations and lack of support for health technology infrastructure, telemedicine didn’t stand a chance to go mainstream – that is, without a catalyst. While the popularity of the practice was steadily growing, with reports of the number of clinical telehealth sessions growing by 120% between 2010 and 2014, it was still largely reserved for patients living in remote, rural communities.

It was in March 2020 when telemedicine became a necessity rather than a revisionary task, and major efforts began to streamline and sophisticate the practice. In Quebec alone, the RAMQ reported more than 1.5 million teleconsultations billed by general practitioners in the province since the start of the pandemic, an ironic conclusion to previous worries of declining virtual care use. And, unsurprisingly, many prefer it. But we can’t quite rejoice in the newfound convenience of telemedicine just yet.

With the complete lack of virtual health technology prior to COVID-19, physicians have scrambled to consult with patients, settling on platforms like FaceTime, Zoom, GoToMeeting and other giants notorious for personal data mining. The increasing popularity of private companies like Bonjour Santé, which allow you to book virtual medical appointments and offer to alert you on new openings (for a fee), introduces another health inequity to a provincial and national system that already severely lacks family physicians and boasts outrageous wait times to receive care. Most notable is the trajectory medicine has taken toward corporatization, an already growing trend within Canadian healthcare models that’s only accelerated since the rise of telemedicine. What regulations are in place for monitoring private corporations’ conflicts of interest, or preventing telemedicine providers from partnering with pharmacies and transportation services? And there is the argument that going virtual risks a reduction in quality of care, which has already made waves in decreasing the amount of medical imaging, chemotherapy, specimen testing, and surgery seen in hospitals. Telemedicine will not age gracefully without eventually allowing us a closer look at its regulatory policies.

Telemedicine will not age gracefully without eventually allowing us a closer look at its regulatory policies.

However, the future of telemedicine is still bright. Perhaps with the move toward virtual care, we can finally tackle our other goals for the healthcare system: treating mental health conditions with the same attention as physical conditions; reaching remote and disabled people, continuing to improve medicine’s accessibility; and refining the process of long-term chronic illness management. While in-person medical care will likely never be obsolete, the telehealth phenomenon has renewed the truth that the status quo is ever-evolving. Remember the whispers about artificial intelligence taking over the physician’s role in diagnosis and surgery? Who knows, that could be right around the corner too.

The post What’s Up, Doc? appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Between then and now, in an ironic twist of fate, information fatigue has transformed into an entirely new and bigger beast, as the COVID-19 pandemic forces us to shift much of our social realities online. Swimming through headlines, numbers, and statistics became a daily chore; staring into pixelated eyes became our face-to-face. The information fatigue epidemic reached pandemic proportions in the span of these eight short months.

As we edge toward a new academic year, we anticipate hours of distance learning that will be conducted on video chat platforms like Zoom or Teams. It’s well-documented now that a type of information fatigue has emerged, colloquially known as Zoom Fatigue, whose common symptoms include stress and exhaustion from a seemingly low-effort activity like video calling. It might have been comical or worthwhile the first few times, but the prospect of turning on the video becomes more and more disheartening with every call. Why is that?

The mental exertion required in video calling is more substantial than it first appears. On the one hand, video calling demands your complete and undivided attention in order to pick up non-verbal cues like facial expressions, body language, or voice changes to the same degree as face-to-face interactions. Pauses in the conversation, which flow naturally in real life, become panic-stricken moments to check the wi-fi connection and to fill the silence everyone is so intensely concentrated on. The self-complexity theory also ties into Zoom fatigue – the idea that “the less complex a person’s cognitive representation of the self, the more extreme will be that person’s swings in affect and self-appraisal.” In other words, when varied facets of our lives are experienced within the same context (that is, the virtual one), we become more prone to negative feelings.

Along with the fact that Zoom and other platforms are, indeed, watching us, is the notion that having our own image reflected back at us during video-calls adds a dimension of self-awareness that can provoke feelings of surveillance, insecurity, and paranoia. Perpetual feedback on our own appearance is never more in-your-face than on a video call, and it can make participating in one feel like a performance, or a graded presentation. All these factors compound into a session of mental gymnastics that leaves you feeling drained by a conversation that would have breezed by last year.

In honour of the new and more-disorienting-than-usual semester, here are another few pieces of advice on how to manage this novel source of fatigue:

1. Making video optional… or limiting video calls altogether – Before the invention of the video call, it was the email and phone that dominated e-communication. They certainly have their time and place, and can be much more productive and relaxing ways of conducting the same discussion. If video calling is necessary, minimize the peer pressure to always have the camera turned on.
2. Looking away from the screen during calls – It feels wrong to look away from the screen during video calls, but think of how much we glance around in real-life conversations. Staring directly at something for an entire meeting is unnatural, and resting your eyes is another important benefit of looking away from the screen during video calls.
3. Keeping a particular space for calls – This one is to mediate the self-complexity theory. Strictly dedicating a space for video calling will sever the association your brain makes between your domestic or social life and your school or work life. Whatever happens, do not have Zoom meetings on your bed.

The post Death by Zoom Fatigue appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Too much information is a real phenomenon, and it has a name: information fatigue. The idea has been grappled with for over a millenia – in the 13th century, Dominican friar Vincent de Beauvais eloquently recorded his frustrations with “the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory.” In the age of the Internet, information fatigue has been defined along the lines of ‘a difficulty in processing and making decisions when faced with an abundance of information’. The psychologist who coined the term, David Lewis, equated the phenomenon with a faulty case of plumbing: what should have sped up the flow, ended up clogging the pipes.

What should have sped up the flow, ended up clogging the pipes.

Information fatigue is closely tied to analysis paralysis, which occurs when the fear of mistake or unknowingly foregoing a better solution can stifle decision-making and productivity, as well as induce feelings of helplessness and anxiety. Though counterintuitive, the theory is that with more information, there are more choices to be made, which can send individuals into a state of panic. These choices can involve assessing how reliable a source is, deciding which source to trust, or debating how relevant it’ll actually be to the individual’s task. Being unable to process and cognitively organize such large amounts of information can mean more serious consequences for professionals like pilots or surgeons, who rely on taking as much information into account to find solutions.

Information fatigue most often tasks those who work in fields where massive amounts of information are processed – collectively named ‘knowledge workers’ – but similar effects can also occur in anyone using social media, where platforms built-in with endless scrolling, personal curation, and algorithms are purposefully designed as such to keep users constantly consuming content.

As a result, it’s no surprise that youth can be affected by information fatigue. As post-secondary education students, particularly at research-driven institutions like McGill, there is an inherent pressure to constantly be on the pursuit of knowledge, and on the cutting edge of new information – so juggling studies, emails, appointments, extracurricular commitments, part-time employment, social media, news, the learning of new skills, and other endeavors is more often seen as an expectation than as a feat. Though it is a privilege to have access to such extensive knowledge at our fingertips, much of which resulted from thousands of years of accumulation and effort, feeling the need to know and keep tabs on everything – being cognitively overloaded – is ultimately unsustainable, driving down our performances and worsening our mental health.

There is an inherent pressure to constantly be on the pursuit of knowledge, and on the cutting edge of new information.

In an age where information bombardment is by design, remember to take a step back when needed and consider:

1. Just like you may not feel guilty about not reading all the books on your shelf, don’t feel guilty that you might’ve not considered all the available information – think of the law of diminishing returns, which states “at some point, adding an additional factor of production results in smaller increases in output.” Eventually, Googling frantically won’t yield any better conclusions.

2. Opt to exert tighter control over your technology – minimize notifications, filter emails, set limits, and use curation tools so only truly relevant information and news reaches you.

3. And don’t neglect decluttering your own mind – avoid multitasking, jot distracting thoughts on paper, rest periodically, and take care of yourself.

The post No Food for Thought, Please appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The challenge posed to this year’s teams focused on disease prevention in the region of Chocò, Colombia. Teams were told to develop a sustainable five-year malaria prevention plan for local health authorities to implement. Along the way, they had to take the area’s demographics and local health systems into consideration, paying particular attention to the role of climate change in global health.

The event began on Friday, November 8 with a Meet & Greet event for participants, followed by a formal opening of the case competition the next day. Participants were divided into six teams and given the whole of Saturday to develop a plan with the help of case files and expert mentors from the field. Guest speaker María Elena Ordoñez also shared with participants her personal experience working within the MSF organization, and her role in approaching infectious disease issues in South America and abroad.

Teams presented their solutions to judges on Sunday, but were hit with a twist: the top three teams were asked to adapt their five-year prevention plan to accommodate a massive influx of refugees into the region, mimicking the real nature of rapidly-evolving cases of infectious disease.

The case competition welcomed students from all universities and programs ranging from medicine to mathematics – yet despite these differences, all students came away from the competition with a better understanding of the complexity and planning involved in tackling issues in global health.

Current co-presidents of McGill Students Friends of MSF, Odessa Grimard and Rukshana Gupta, look forward to welcoming new students at future competitions. “[…] Each and every one [of the participants] blew us organizers and judges away with their dedication, creativity, and deep passion for making the world a better place through global health,” Grimard told The Daily.

McGill Students Friends of Médecins sans Frontières: https://www.facebook.com/mcgillfomsf/

The post Turning Student Science into Global Solutions appeared first on The McGill Daily.

McGill-based machine learning researchers met on October 30 to present a public lecture, hosted by the Rosalind & Morris Goodman Cancer Research Centre, on the future of cancer research and the essential role AI plays in it. The speakers, whose backgrounds ranged from medical physics to radiation oncology, collaborated to present the various aspects of this cutting-edge intersection of artificial intelligence and medicine.

One speaker in particular, Dr. Tal Arbel from McGill’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, explained how AI is being used as a crucial tool for optimizing detection and treatment of cancerous lesions, in a wave she hopes will move the healthcare system toward imaging-based precision medicine: a system that can offer more personalized treatment based on highly-accurate imaging tests.

Harnessing Computer Vision
What is artificial intelligence? Simply put, AI is any computerized technique that mimics human intelligence. A highly popular subfield is machine learning, which aims to train computers to recognize patterns in data to optimize their performance over time. Even more specialized developments are emerging in deep learning: a technique that enables computers to train themselves to perform a task.

Dr. Arbel’s research focuses on computer vision, another subfield which involves developing programs that can automatically analyze and understand the content of digital images through machine learning. Images used for training can be as light-hearted as movie stills or family photo albums. The applications of the software are limitless, including analyzing surveillance footage or, most pertinent to Dr. Arbel’s work, medical diagnostic imaging. The objective, Dr. Arbel explains, is to enable computers to develop artificial perception and interpret the visual world much as humans do. Examples of ongoing advancements in computer vision include facial recognition and tracking of moving objects.

How Artificial Eyes Can Help Us
Leaps in the sophistication of computer vision have significantly optimized the accuracy, usefulness, and timeliness of medical imaging in healthcare. Instead of having a clinician sit down with the laborious task of reviewing brain scan after brain scan, researchers like Dr. Arbel are training computers to search for the possible malignancies in an image themselves, and to do it better than a human can.

In the field of brain tumours and multiple sclerosis, her technology has already had clinical success. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the most common neurological disease in young people; its hallmark is the presence of brain lesions, which are often diagnosed through Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images. Using large datasets retrieved from the Montreal Neurological Institute, Dr. Arbel and her team have developed computer programs that can accurately distinguish healthy tissue in an image from possible MS lesions, through an imaging process referred to
as segmentation.

Segmentation of a tumour is highly important for staging diseases (classifying degree of severity) and predicting their progression, as well as planning surgeries. Dr. Arbel’s team later sophisticated this technique even further by feeding the program sequential scans of the same patients over several years, making her research group the very first to develop machine learning methods that can track MS evolution and distinguish between stable, growing, and shrinking lesions.

But this milestone is just a foot in the door. In her talk, Dr. Arbel stressed that these machine learning models are highly generalized; a common drawback of these sorts of models is that they are too specific. This means they have immense potential to benefit all cancer detection and research – and could even be taught to project damages into the future.

Pushing the Boundaries of Patient Care
As medical imaging analysis programs become more sophisticated, so does their predictive power. Artificial intelligence doesn’t just have the opportunity to improve diagnostic aspects of medicine, but can add an entirely new dimension to it: providing data-driven predictions on patient outcome.

Dr. Arbel’s research team is now focusing on sharpening AI’s ability to accurately predict tumour progression, while also experimenting with conveying confidence intervals about the accuracy of predictions back to the clinician. If the latter technique is successful, it would mean a huge leap toward crafting a healthcare system rooted in personalized or precision medicine: the tailoring of treatment for an individual based on their predicted response to a disease. As Dr. Arbel puts it, adding uncertainty to the machine learning framework throws the ball back into the clinician’s court; it would only function to accelerate workflow, rather than attempt to replace it. If artificial intelligence can honestly reflect on its own shortcomings, human judgment will still be able to provide a safety net.

Implications in the Field of Medicine
Imaging-based precision medicine has the potential to pave the way for many improvements in patient care. While it provides a more accurate diagnosis and a better understanding of cancer evolution, integrating AI into medical diagnostics also offers the opportunity to provide precise personalized predictions to patients and clinicians, a largely uncharted territory in the field of medicine. With the increasing reliance on machine expertise to detect, diagnose, and manage our illnesses, we must ask ourselves: where will be the point where we can trust artificial judgment over a clinician’s?

“AI and the Future of Cancer Research” is one installment of many in the Goodman Cancer Research Centre’s annual public lecture series. Look out for their next lecture on November 20, “HPV-induced cancers, immunization, and cancer prevention.”

The post AI and Cancer Research appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The event opened each day with a short presentation from an undergraduate research ambassador, who shared their experiences and advice to students wanting to get involved in research. One of the ambassadors, Daniel Krauss, an undergraduate biochemistry student working in the lab of Dr. Hanadi Sleiman, retold how he first came to be involved in the lab, encouraging students in the audience to reach out to professors regardless of department. He also spoke about the research being done in Dr. Sleiman’s lab, which revolves around DNA nanotechnology: using DNA strands as potential ‘building blocks’ in the creation of “unique 3D structures for uses in applications such as drug delivery and organization of other materials.”

In a similar vein, Dr. Paul Wiseman, from the Department of Chemistry and Physics, described his research as being at the intersection of physical science and biomolecular imaging. He explained his lab’s interest in the use of chemistry and physics as a way of looking at the “molecular mechanisms involved in cellular adhesion,” or the way cells stick together.

Another professor presented her work in computational medicine. Dr. Nicole Li-Jessen’s lab is focused on understanding vocal fold biology and wound healing, with an emphasis on how the larynx is “critical to our daily breathing, communication, and swallowing functions.” She explained that the goal of her lab’s work is to “advance personalized medicine in voice and upper airway dysfunctions,” by creating “patient-specific computational models” that would allow physicians to anticipate vocal fatigue and prevent vocal tissue injury.

For patients currently suffering from vocal cord damage, there are few diagnosis or treatment options that aren’t invasive and risky procedures. Dr. Li-Jessen’s lab is working on designing personalized injectable biomaterials that could replace the current solution of invasive throat surgery, which is accompanied by high risks and a long recovery time. Instead, this biogel could be easily injected into the patient’s vocal tissue, its regenerative properties working to repair the tissue. Dr. Li-Jessen’s lab is also developing methods of non-invasive diagnostics, as laryngeal disease is currently diagnosed through invasive procedures that “can cause irreversible vocal fold scarring.” These three projects would significantly improve patient care, and allow for physicians to treat vocal injury much more effectively.

An important area of interest for researchers at McGill is the understanding of biological molecules. Dr. Natasha Chang, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, presented her research, which focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms that regulate adult stem cell function during tissue homeostasis and regeneration. Muscle stem cells are highly regenerative, which makes them useful as models for studying the deregulation of the cell cycle, which results in degenerative disease and cancer. Dr. Chang’s lab uses experimental visualization to examine Duchenne muscular dystrophy and rhabdomyosarcoma (a form of cancer) as models for understanding exactly why muscle stem cells become deregulated.

Dr. Gary Brouhard, a faculty member in the Department of Biology, studies another crucial part of molecular biology: microtubules, which are important structural components in a cell’s cytoskeleton. Microtubules are rigid but non-static polymers which can ‘shapeshift’ by constructing and deconstructing themselves depending on the cell’s structural needs. Experiments in his lab seek to understand the molecular behavior of these microtubules and what influences their polymer formation. Dr. Brouhard’s lab also examines how microtubules influence disease, with specific attention on a protein called doublecortin (DCX), whose mutations cause a heritable form of epilepsy (double cortex syndrome). As DCX influences the shape and function of microtubules, Dr. Brouhard’s experiments aim to better understand the role of microtubules in this disease in the quest to develop pharmacological therapy.

Dr. Jonathan Sievers, an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics, presented his research, which searches for the signature of dark energy in an attempt to better understand the birth of the first stars in the universe. He described the Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX), a radio telescope array that can map nearly all of the southern sky, with the intent of measuring leftover ripples in the distribution of galaxies that are imprinted by the primordial sound waves that existed in the early universe. This can be used as a ‘ruler’ for charting the expansion history of the universe and for shedding light on the nature of dark energy.

For students interested in the environment, Soup and Science invited several researchers to discuss their more field-oriented research. From the Department of Biology, Dr. Laura Pollock presented her research’s take on ecology: working with quantitative “big data” to better model ecological systems and biodiversity. She cleverly pointed out that we tend to harbour our own biases toward animals we find “cute” or appealing, and that we invest our biodiversity conservation efforts into their survival, meaning many species in need of protection fall under the radar. With better modeling of our knowledge on biodiversity across different landscapes, Dr. Pollock hopes to answer the fundamental questions: “Which species are being overlooked, and how can we better address their conservation?”

From the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, Dr. James Kirkpatrick’s research also focuses on better understanding an aspect of the environment: earthquakes. With the interactive use of rock samples, Dr. Kirkpatrick explained that while earthquakes can be measured, they cannot be predicted, as the origins of earthquakes and other tectonic movements originate from over 10,000 kilometres below the surface of the Earth. His lab’s activities range from field observations in mountaintops to performing experiments in the F.D. Adams basement, all with the intent of developing knowledge on the mechanical response of rocks and how they react under various applied stresses.

Running for five days at the beginning of each semester, Soup and Science provides an invaluable overview of the various research activities going on across campus, and the opportunity to discuss and mingle with experts. For those who couldn’t make it, don’t worry: the next edition of Soup and Science will be held in January 2020.

The post Soup’s On! appeared first on The McGill Daily.