Tuberculosis: It's all the fashion rage!

In last night's epidemiology class, my professor said something very insightful. We were talking about Victorian era public health, and somehow beauty standards were tossed into the equation. To paraphrase, he said:

The Victorian beauty ideal, at least for Caucasian women, was thin, frail, and waif-like. This, coincidentally, described a woman with tuberculosis.

That comment sparked a massive internal dialogue for me. So much that I could barely even focus during the rest of class. It was as though all of the ridiculous beauty standards to which women are upheld were suddenly flashing before my eyes, bolstered by historical precedent. Painful beauty routines for women are ubiquitous throughout cultures and geographical distributions. These aesthetic requirements even cause us to compromise our health.

Women's pursuit of beauty could very well kill them.

The Victorians thought you looked great if you had a deadly respiratory disease. Really. That's what they considered "hot." Is it so different in other countries? Not really. The implications of this statement, aside from the obvious eating disorder concerns (which may or may not be related to "beauty," but that's another topic), are massive!

I thought about

• Foot binding: crippled women
• Genital mutilation: dehumanizes women
• Permanent makeup: tattooing our faces! ouch!
• High heels: cripple women still
• Corsets: caused us to faint and put unnecessary pressure on our internal organs
• Waxing: self-explanatory pain. Also, makes us look like pre-pubescent girls if performed on certain body parts (which is creepy!)
• Hair products: exposure to potentially carcinogenic chemicals
• Parasites: to help us lose weight (yep, seriously)
• Lysol: to make our vagina smell fresh (also, yes, seriously)

This list doesn't even include the weird devices we use:

Anyway, maybe you all already knew everything I'm writing about, but the enormity of this topic really just sank in last night. It was like getting hit with a brick wall.

I think those of us in the public health professions have a responsibility to promote healthy beauty ideals, not those that harm us. In light of the recent obesity freak-out, I think it's critical for us to maintain a skeptical perspective about what's "good for us." I'd rather be killed by Teh Dethfatz than an intestinal tapeworm designed to keep me slim and trim. Just saying.

Bringing it back to the basics

We'll bring back a discussion of Men's Health Week later today, but this morning I wanted to talk a little bit about the use of conceptual models in behavioral health interventions.

I, like many other public health students (I assume), memorize the constructs of a whole bunch of behavioral models during the introductory Social and Behavioral Health class. We have the Trans-Theoretical Model, the Theory of Planned Behavior, Social Cognitive Theory, Health Belief, Risk Perception ... the list goes on (and on and on).

I, also like many other public health students, learn the models, categorize them within my brain, and then promptly forget to actually apply their messages to any of my work. I found this out this morning during my practicum work; my preceptor came to me and said, "Well, you have all this information about distracted driving, and you have this fancy model ... are they related?" And the light bulb went on. Although I had created an outline for my paper that seemed to make sense, it was only loosely related to the theoretical basis I had chosen. *headdesk

This is why I'm happy that they give us preceptors to give us feedback and input about our duties. Otherwise, I'd be making silly mistakes like this for the rest of my career.

It's so important that, as we go down the empirical research path, we consider our theoretical basis. That is, we can't just do a literature review without relating each piece back to its fundamental theory. Drawing conclusions about empirical research is useless unless we can determine how to apply our learning.

Just a little advice for all my fellow PH students out there. Stay tuned for more fun information this afternoon!