Distance Education in the Clinical Laboratory Sciences: Part of the Solution to the Professional Labor Shortage

The purpose of this paper is introducing research conducted about issues related to influences and barriers to the potential use of distance education for mitigating the clinical laboratory sciences labor shortage. Diagnostic careers such as those in the clinical laboratory sciences remain a mystery to many people because they do not have the same prominence or visibility associated with therapeutic careers. Clinical laboratory science courses often have both didactic and laboratory components. Coursework with laboratory components require additional faculty time for preparation. When health care education is offered in traditional university or college settings not affiliated with a teaching hospital or clinical setting, laboratory costs are higher due to purchasing supplies, reagents and media. Issues are further explored in a brief series of papers addressing them. Using DE for delivering diagnostic clinical educational is a potential viable solution for addressing national diagnostic labor shortages.

“Our one great national malady”: Neurasthenia and American Imperial and Masculine Anxiety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

White upper middle-class Americans at the turn of the twentieth century were entrenched in a battle with a newly discovered, or invented, mental illness called neurasthenia. This essay examines the ways in which the medical discourse of neurasthenia reflected late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century white Anglo-Saxon men’s belief in, as well as anxiety over, American values bolstered by their idea of cultural, racial, and sexual superiority and consolidated through a conjunction of medicine and politics. The idea of neurasthenia as white American men’s malady functioned as a mark both of whites’ racial superiority to the “new” immigrants and African Americans as well as of women’s intellectual inferiority to the opposite sex of their own race. Imposing a subtle distortion on the etiology and diagnosis of neurasthenia and associating it with specific groups of people, the “American disease” constituted the era’s representative pathological symptoms which addressed Anglo-Saxon American men’s anxieties about overcivilized effeminacy and racial and national decadence which was originated as a response to the racial and sexual heterogeneity. This essay also argues that neurasthenia was an imagined disease which addressed late nineteenth-century American men’s spatial anxiety about the decline of the American pastoral ideal caused by the closure of the frontier. Given that the treatment for neurasthenic men was an escape to the frontier in the West in which they could rejuvenate withered American masculinity, their uneasiness about barbarous, unhygienic, and prolific immigrants and unruly white women, in fact, was tied to their spatial anxiety which symptomatically signifies the crisis of American masculinity. Channeled through the medical knowledge of neurology, it made American men’s racial, sexual, and spatial anxieties function to act out their racist, misogynist, nativist, and imperialist impulses which legitimized exclusionary political techniques toward the racial and sexual others such as the U.S. imperial expansion in the 1890s and 1900s and a eugenic-influenced immigration policy from the 1900s through the1920s. In this sense, the decline of neurasthenia around 1920 should not be attributed solely to the continued efforts to professionalize American medicine accompanied by recent discoveries of chemical factors such as hormones and vitamins and the rise of psychiatry and psychology which offered physicians with a more specific theory of health built on clinical laboratory science. Like its rise, the decision to move away from the neurasthenic diagnosis was rather a cultural phenomenon, which reflected the American ascendancy to global power in the early twentieth century, particularly after the First World War. Sustaining a political order rested on racial and sexual hierarchies both within and outside the American continent, American men felt that they were no longer liable to specific, time-tested anxiety and somatic symptoms of neurasthenia, which was more an ideological and cultural construct than a clinical entity that dramatizes the racial, sexual, and imperial politics of the-turn-of-the-twentieth-century America.

Sosialisasi Fungsi Vitamin dan Penggunaan Cairan Antiseptik Berbasis Alkohol dalam Pencegahan Covid 19 di Panti Asuhan Yatim Piatu Ar-Rodiyah Tembalang Semarang

The Covid-19 pandemic (Corona virus) is a pandemic transmitted by the corona virus that attacks humans, especially children and the elderly. The transmission of Covid-19 can be through droplets; therefore, it is necessary to prevent it through health protocol, namely clean and healthy living habits, including using masks, washing hands, maintaining distance, and increase body immunity, The purpose of community service is to provide education about the function of vitamins, and how to use an alcoholic-based antiseptic solution for children Ar-Rodiyah Tembalang Orphanage, Semarang. This activity was carried out by lecturers, D4 Health Analyst students and S2 Clinical Laboratory Science students at Universitas Muhammadiyah Semarang on January 31, 2021. The target of this activity was 51 children aged 8-20 years. The results of the implementation of community service at the Ar-Rodiyah orphanage Semarang were distributing 2 posters about the function of vitamins, and how to use an alcoholic-based antiseptic solution, then during the meeting an explanation of the material and the function of vitamins, and how to use an alcoholic-based antiseptic solution and questions and answers was delivered during the meeting. The conclusion from this community service increase knowledge of orphans about function of vitamin from 30 to 80 and knowledge to use alcohol-based antiseptic fluids correctly can increase from 45 to 90. The orphaned children also really hoped for sustainability of this community service activity with other counseling material.

In memory of Professor Rolf Neth October 6, 1926 – March 17, 2020

With great sadness, we learned of the passing of Professor Dr. med. Rolf-Dietmar Neth, the founder of the Wilsede meeting, on March 17, 2020, aged 93 in his home town Buchholz near Wilsede/Lüneburger Heide. Rolf Neth was born 6.10.1926. After the 2nd World War, Rolf Neth studied Medicine from 1949 to 1955 at the University of Göttingen. Then he was at the Max-Planck-Institut für Experimentelle Medizin (University Göttingen, 1956-1957), and promoted his skills in clinical and experimental hematology in St. George Hospital (1958-1959) in Hamburg. From 1960, his activity was connected with the pediatric clinics of Hamburg University where he became a Professor at the Children Hospital in 1972. From 1970 to 1980, Rolf Neth was occupied implementing new laboratory diagnostic approaches in the booming field of clinical hematology. Blood cancer treatment was developed, due to novel drugs invented to combat leukemic cells and rescue the small patients which 10-20 years ago had only zero chance to survive. Histo- and immunochemical diagnostics became routine tests for evaluation of clinical forms of leukemias and efficiency of their therapy. Since 1982, he coordinated laboratory hematology at the Department of Clinical Chemistry, University Hamburg, until retirement in 1992. Along with contribution to clinical laboratory science, Professor Neth, over 1973 to 2002, arranged a series of famous Wilsede Meetings "Modern Trends in Human Leukemia" dedicated to leukemia research and treatment. Rolf Neth and Robert Gallo decided time and topic of the meeting, and Rolf Neth proposed a place, i.e., a lonely village in the Luneburg heath, not far from his home. Hence, Leukemia and Viruses was selected as a specific topic for a meeting in Germany, because it was timely for convergence between clinical medicine and cancer biology. Rolf Neth organized the first Wilsede meetings himself for more than 20 years, until he passed these efforts to Wolfram Ostertag and Axel Zander. In the late 1990s, Carol Stocking and Boris Fehse took on this responsibility. Over last years, Wilsede meetings were arranged by Nicolaus Kröger and Boris Fehse. And as long as his health permitted, Rolf Neth came along to see how his baby was doing. He participated and assisted at any stage of the next meeting. We are thankful to have had the privilege of knowing and cooperating with Rolf Neth and to cherish his legacy by keeping the Wilsede tradition alive. He was married with Hanne-Lore Cohrs, 8.11. 1958, survived by his wife of 62 years Hanne-Lore, and four sons and several grandchildren.