Blog Summary

Throughout the entire semester, I have read a wide range of articles involving medical technology and different aspects of healthcare throughout the world. I have learned a lot about different countries and about the positives and negatives associated with their healthcare systems. As a future physician, I think that it is important to me that I understand global healthcare and the disparities that exist in other areas of the globe. I hope that this post will effectively summarize my blog, and will help to highlight the best of my blog so far this semester.

My favorite blog post was the one about Health's Angels, but since I wrote something about this in my last post, I will choose another one to highlight in this post. I enjoyed the posts including the photographs that I took as well as the ones I chose for my visual representations of medical technology. I enjoy looking at photographs, especially from other countries around the globe, and as we discussed in class, a photograph can say so much without any text to go with the photograph. I particularly enjoyed going into the doctor's office and taking photographs related to my blog, and I found it interesting that I took around 150 pictures, and only ended up using three of them. I had a few other good ones, but those were clearly the best and most of the 150 were not of good enough quality to post. It was an interesting assignment, and I enjoyed feeling like a professional photographer for that day.

My least favorite post was probably my first post about social networking, because I don't feel that social networking related very well to my particular topic so I had trouble producing quality posts during the week of that topic. While I understand that it fit in with our class themes well, I think it was one of the most difficult topics for many people to apply. While facebook and other sites have come a long way in various fields, I think that have a long way to go to encompass all topics, especially medicine.

Overall from this blog, I learned that there are a lot of stereotypes that exist about other countries and the healthcare that they have and the technology associated with medicine used. Particularly, I was surprised with the information that I learned about India. I didn't know that they were so far behind in many areas of medicine, including public education and medical technology. However, I also learned that India is advanced in their medical education, and they have a strict and rigorous path for aspiring physicians, and India produces a lot of great and well-known physicians. In addition, I learned ways in which technologies that I never thought could be applied to medicine are used in the medical field in some way. Particularly interesting to me was the use of cell phones in Africa for health professionals to receive information to help them to provide better and more comprehensive healthcare.

I hope that from my blog, my readers have expanded their horizons regarding medicine and their perceptions of others areas of the world and their levels of technology. For those with a science or medical background, I hope that I have expanded their knowledge and helped them to have a better understanding of the United States in relation to other nations in the area of healthcare and medical technology. For those with no science background, I think that I avoided the use of medical terms or anything extremely scientific so that everyone was able to hopefully learn something from this blog. I hope to have changed the way people think about areas of the world like India and Africa, and maybe even changed their perceptions of healthcare and medicine in the United States.

After a semester in this class, I feel that I've had a valuable experience and that I have learned a lot about a variety of subjects. I am glad that I signed up for the class, and would recommend it to future students. Not only did I learn about various technologies including video games, social networking, and mobile technology, I also learned a lot about my personal blog topic as well as the others that I have read. I think the peer evaluations were an important part of the class because it gave me the chance to read other people's blogs that I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I enjoyed learning about technology and communication, fashion, and sports/exercise, and I think that I'll continue to read blogs more often after the culmination of this class. In addition, I think that I will keep blogging, either on my blog from this class, or on another personal blog about a topic of choice. I'm glad I was introduced to so much technology, and I think the class was extremely educational.