With the fast-developing coronavirus crisis in the United States and beyond forcing many people to stay at home, that has become our new reality. People are learning to adjust to doing everything from home, including working, socializing, and trying to stay active. 

Less than two weeks into stay-at-home orders across the country, people may be feeling the effects of staying put on their bodies. In New York City, where so many people live in small apartments, access to gyms, workout classes, and group outdoor activities are sorely missed. During this time where good health is prioritized, how can we work out when we shouldn’t be leaving our home? 

Fordham News spoke with Jenny Mendez, a yoga instructor at Rose Hill, about the best ways to stay active while homebound. Mendez has been working with Fordham staff and students since 2018, and more recently with student-athletes, teaching them yoga and mindful moving techniques in a therapeutic fashion.

What do you think is the best way for students and staff to practice staying active at this time that they’re all homebound?

I think the best way is to slip it in your schedule or into your day. They have to eat, they have to do homework, or tune into a lesson online. I think just scheduling a workout is important, and just holding yourself accountable until it becomes a necessary part of your daily activity.

What is the best way for people in small spaces to stay active?

I was thinking about what they can do with their natural surroundings. One thing they can do that’s easy and requires no equipment is dance. If you like to go out dancing, just dance around. That’s a really great way to get your heart rate up. It’s a great way for you to sweat. It’s a great way for you to release stress. It’s a great way for you to just help kind of take your mind off of what’s happened. It’s also a great way for you to learn a new dance. You could search YouTube if you want, and there’s lots of great things happening on TikTok. Dance is a natural form of working out. You’re moving your whole body, you’re moving your joints, and it’s fun. 

Another thing that you could do if dance isn’t your thing, you could just do your own body-weight workout using your body, no weights. A very simple thing that requires no weights is a pushup. You could do planks, shoulder taps, squats. These really low-impact things that you can do using body weight help build strength and build up for sweat.

If you wanted to do more, you can make it more high-impact. You could do cardio, lunges, burpees, jumping jacks, all of these different things. And then when you have a list of things that you can jump off of, you can start to get really creative and create your own sequence. There’s no right or wrong and as long as you move for… I would say 15 minutes, maybe schedule that move two to four times a day, and that would be sufficient. Or you could do something for a longer period of time, maybe 30 minutes, maybe 45 minutes, or one hour, once a day.

Are there any online resources that you would recommend?

I’m currently hosting free virtual wellness events for the Fordham community via Zoom. I’m also offering free online yoga and fitness classes via Instagram Live, where you can view my full online teaching schedule. Donations, although not necessary, are very much appreciated!

There’s lots of great material on YouTube, on Instagram TV. There’s also some online platforms that are offering a free 30 day membership to their online content. Exhale is one of them. I actually worked for Exhale in the barre fitness studios—so, they have free online barre classes, cardio classes, HIIT classes.

Yoga on YouTube—I like Yoga with Adriene. I think that her content is accessible, it’s easy, it’s simple. I also like Briohny Smyth, and she’s also a yoga instructor.

How can we use this time at home to also practice mindfulness?

In order to find balance too, you want to sort of explore the other point of it. And I guess, coming from a yoga point of view, it’s a really great way to be really contemplative, right? To be still, to kind of sit with yourself, to listen to the quiet inside, and what it says when given a chance to speak.

I think up until this point, all of us, including myself, are busy people. We are always on the go, go, go. We’re always thinking like five steps ahead, we’re always looking into the future and thinking, what’s next? So hardly do we ever get a chance to be still, and to sit, and to listen. And I think that not only is it important for us to move and to move mindfully, but it’s also a great opportunity to be still and just kind of contemplate, and to connect with people over the phone, maybe write a letter. Things that we don’t do anymore. Things that we might take for granted. Because I think in the time of crisis, it always provides clarity on what really matters. I think that is also important too.

“I would call people in other countries and say, ‘What’s your facility fee for an operating room’,” said Rosenthal, author of An American Sickness (Penguin Press, 2017). “And I’d hear this silence and they would go, ‘What do you mean a facility fee?’”

Rosenthal was the speaker at an April 18 talk and panel discussion organized by the Gabelli School’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center. She holds an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School and currently works as the editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit news service that reports on the health care system. A former health care reporter for the New York Times, she is best known for her award-winning series on the costs of health care called “Paying Till It Hurts.” Through her research and conversations with patients, practitioners, and other health professionals, she said, she learned that medical concepts like facility fees are “uniquely American.”

According to Rosenthal, there are evidence-based studies about how medicine should be practiced in the U.S., yet economic incentives remains a top priority for many hospitals.

“We know what things work, but there is a lot of financial interests against them working,” Rosenthal said.

Cautionary Tales 

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, U.S. health care spending increased 4.3 percent in 2016 to reach $3.3 trillion. The agency projected that national health spending will grow at an average rate of 5.5 percent per year to reach $5.7 trillion by 2026.

In an age of hospital consolidations, Rosenthal said illnesses have become a form of commerce. This has led many Americans to seek alternative options in countries like Canada.

“That’s a sign of a broken system if there ever was one,” said Rosenthal.

One cautionary tale Rosenthal told was the story of a 28-year-old college student from Texas who was charged $17, 850 for a routine test that checked her urine for a host of things, unbeknownst to her, including opioids, amphetamines, and other classes of drugs.

“If you don’t ask these questions upfront, this could be you,” said Rosenthal. “That urine test was sent off to a lab that tested it for everything under the sun and it was out of network.”

Rosenthal said patients are often left with astronomical medical bills because they are billed by out-of-network medical assistants and other hospital staffers who treat them after surgery without their knowledge. Advances in treatment for conditions such as diabetes and astigmatism can also lead to increases in the costs of care. As hospitals became conglomerates, she said, they also began to look less like medical facilities and more like luxury hotels equipped with everything from indoor waterfalls to flat-screen TVs.

“We’re paying for amenities rather than care, and that, I think is a flaw of our system,” she said.

Though ambulance companies used to be volunteer-run and operated mostly by the fire department and local EMS more than 30 years ago, Rosenthal said they too have adopted a business model. According to Rosenthal, many ambulances charge by the mile and bill riders different rates based on whether they were treated by a paramedic or EMT. The ride can cost up to $2,000, she said.

Rosenthal said fees like these can be a burden for middle-class and lower-class patients who are struggling to make ends meet.

“If you don’t have a disposable income, the weight is infinite.”

Pushing Back at the System

Rosenthal believes many hospital facilities and physicians get away with unfairly charging patients for visits, exams, and procedures because patients often “scarily write checks” to avoid having their bills being sent to collection agencies.

“Medical bills are not like you made a choice where you know upfront what you’re paying for and you’re being delinquent,” she said. “It’s often [that]you didn’t know. You get these confusing bills and you’re trying to figure it out and that can take months.”

She encouraged patients to become proactive about health care by negotiating hospital bills; requesting itemized bills; asking for referrals to in-network physicians, labs, and facilities; and requesting estimates of tests and surgeries beforehand so there are fewer surprises.

“There is something that everyone can do to push back at the system,” she said.

Financially Rational Decisions

After her talk, Rosenthal was joined by internist Barney D. Newman, M.D., co-founder of WestMed Medical Group, and Mitra Behroozi, executive director of the 1199 SEIU Benefit and Pension Funds, a labor-management fund, for a panel discussion about the state of health care.

Behroozi explained that the decision to go to the doctor or the ER is still a difficult decision for many Americans.

“People will make financially rational decisions— especially if a $50 co-pay [at the ER]could mean the difference between being able to afford their transportation to go to work or not that week,” she said.

Newman noted that these economic strains are often the result of hospital CFOs and other finance personnel looking to generate high return on investment rather than being concerned about efficient clinical care. Still, he believes there are ways to use business to enhance the health care system.

“The consolidation of health care and the idea of applying business principles to health care is not all bad,” said Newman. “It has been focused on only the financial part of the outcome. There are actually a lot of opportunities to reduce cost in this country and improve quality by trying to apply classic business practices of quality management and continuous quality improvement to the process of care and how care is delivered.”

New research from the Gabelli School of Business suggests that a deeper understanding of the role that financial exclusion plays in health care can help health care providers to better market programs that serve disadvantaged populations.

“Health care is a service that requires financial planning,” said Genevieve O’Connor, assistant professor of marketing at the Gabelli School. “Those who are financially excluded don’t have the resources to access services that meet their needs, which creates a barrier to care.”

Using data from a major metropolitan hospital in New Jersey, O’Connor studied how insurance and income enable use of health care services, and how this varies among millennials, Generation X, baby boomers, and the Silent Generation. She also measured utilization across gender and ethnic lines.

Her research, which was published in the Journal of Financial Services Marketing earlier this spring, showed that various groups and populations used insurance differently. While insured customers of all generations used less services, she learned that Asians, and other ethnicities of the Silent Generation used fewer services than whites—both insured and uninsured—of the same generation.

Conversely, while these non-white groups in the Silent Generation used fewer services, African-Americans in Generation X, for example, used health care much more—even as Generation X whites were using health care services less. A similar pattern was observed among Asian-Americans.

O’Connor’s findings suggested that cultural and generational life experiences may shape a person’s behavior or attitude toward health care.

Since studies have shown that immigrant populations such as Hispanics, and younger generations such as millennials, harbor a distrust of banks and banking, O’Connor wondered if the same thing was happening with health care, and if financial exclusion was a key factor.

“We typically think of financial exclusion as a lack of financial services,” she said. She explained that individuals who are “unbanked” are typically women, the poor, ethnic minorities, elderly, single parents, the unemployed, students, and people living in rural communities. “But those who lack access to financial services are the same people who lack access to health care.”

O’Connor said financial literacy impacts decision-making, including understanding how the use of health care services affects well-being. Also, complex health care terminologies such as premium, deductible, HMO and PPO, can be challenging to comprehend— even for educated consumers.

“Just because insurance is offered, that doesn’t necessarily mean most people will use it,” said O’Connor. “This is where marketing comes into play.”

In situations where the mere fact of having health insurance doesn’t lead individuals to use health care services, O’Connor said personalization of the marketing message is instrumental.

“It’s about getting into the mindset of those consumers,” she said. “Maybe there’s a shared experience that they have that we can tap into, even from an environmental perspective, to see how they might be more amenable to using those services.”

Three Fordham students are hoping to revolutionize and reshape those two facets of mental health treatment.

“We have all these different fitness apps out there, so we figured, why not create a similar model for mental health patients?” said Mariella Sypa, a sophomore at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

The founders of KindMind Mental Wellness Mobile Technology see their start-up program as a mental “fitness” app.

Teaming up for innovation

The KindMind team includes five founders—two of them Fordham students and one a recent graduate, Weiyu Shen, GSAS ’16. Sypa manages operations and business strategy along with her brother, Steven Sypa, who handles legal matters.

The team also includes Elijah Bullard, who will graduate from Fordham this year with a master’s in computer science, and Elle Bernfeld, a licensed therapist who heads KindMind’s creative development. Undergraduate student Francesca Zambrano helps with front-end development.

The app is the brainchild of Mariella Sypa and Bullard, who came up with the idea in February of 2016 after having met at Fordham while studying computer science.

Shen, who graduated with a master’s in computer science, joined the duo as the chief technology officer in April of last year.

The KindMind app team won a pitch competition this past February at TrepCon, sponsored by the   Entrepreneurship Society at Fordham, Adobe, and Deloitte.

With features like mood tracking, a mood diary, and easy access to mental health providers, KindMind aims to benefit both first-time users and people already in treatment. Among the newest features the team has added are voice and face recognition functions that can help detect a person’s mood.

“We wanted to focus on mood tracking to help people become more aware of emotional patterns—and of their importance,” said Sypa.

The mood-tracking feature asks users to describe their moods, how they are feeling, and who may have affected their mood on a given day. The KindMind team hopes to optimize this function even further, with features like emojis and progress achievements.

“All of the features of KindMind work together as one unit,” said Shen, adding that he hopes their users can utilize the app to improve their mental health on a daily basis.

24-hour community support

Another essential tool that users will have is the ability to connect with a licensed mental health professional directly from their phones.

“Help is right in your pocket,” said Sypa. “You don’t even have to worry about getting to a physical location.”

Much like existing popular fitness apps, KindMind will offer a 24/7 community support forum as well as a mental health blog with contributions from professionals.

“We want to have a widespread and honest dialogue about mental health, one in which there is no judgment for anyone,” said Sypa.

Sypa said that KindMind will be a useful resource for mental health professionals just starting out.

“Mental health providers can work from home, set their own work schedules, and hopefully optimize the number of clients they can treat,” she said.

KindMind has been in the beta testing stage and Sypa said the testing will continue during Mental Health Awareness Month. Interested parties can log on to the site (iOS only) to try it. Sypa said the team expects to have an official launch this summer.

—Angie Chen, FCLC ’11

For Kristin Uscinski, who is completing her doctorate in history this spring, these simple yet unusual mixtures can open doors into the lives of medieval women and their health care.

Uscinski has spent the last four years scouring through medieval medical recipe manuscripts, seeking to understand the major health complaints of women, the types of cures they sought, and how involved they were in their own healing practices.

The recipes she found revealed that medieval women were actively engaged in their own health care, both as professional practitioners and in their own homes, using botanicals that could be found in any domestic garden.

“From the beginning, when medicine is coming into its own as a profession in 12th-century Italy, women are there,” she said.

Supported by a Schallek Fellowship from the Medieval Academy of America and a Presidential Scholarship from Fordham, Uscinski travelled to England and studied more than 50 manuscripts, from the 12th through the early 16th centuries, at the British, Bodleian, and other libraries.

In order to fulfill her need for comparative and quantitative data, Uscinski used FileMaker Pro to create her own searchable database of about 2000 recipes.

The data she gathered showed that, not surprisingly, the most common complaints of women related to the reproductive system and childbirth.

What interested Uscinski, however, was how strongly her evidence pointed to women’s direct involvement in health care at home, making recipes in their own kitchens using techniques familiar to any cook.

“A lot of these recipes are very simple to make,” she said. “So if you can make tea and you can make soup, you can make these things.”

Charms, chants, and frog powder

Uscinski discovered that folkloric elements also made their way into the medical manuscripts— including charms, chants, and occasionally a frog powder or hare’s foot.

Though the effectiveness of the more eccentric recipes may be attributed to the placebo effect, she said, the other recipes appear to contain active ingredients more recognizable to a modern audience.

“When you see the same recipe 20 times there’s got to be a reason for it. I don’t think that they are just choosing these things at random,” she said.

She acknowledged, however, that testing the recipes is difficult, as there is no way to know if medieval ingredients correspond to the plants we know today.

Currently an adjunct professor of history at SUNY Purchase, Uscinski’s future plans include publishing her dissertation, which is titled Recipes for Women’s Healthcare in Medieval England.

Part of this work consists of her annotated transcription of a recipe collection called Isabella’s Book of Medicine, written for the wife of Edward II, which Uscinski would like to make more widely accessible.

She also hopes to put her searchable database online to help facilitate the work of others studying medieval medicine.

What motivates Uscinski’s ongoing work is her strong desire to help fill the gaps in medieval women’s history.

“Women can be remarkably difficult to see, especially in medieval sources, but they’re right there on the periphery. You have to look for them in a more creative way,” she said.

—Nina Heidig

Wellness Manager in the Office of Human Resources Management

WHAT SHE DOES

“My role as the wellness manager is to promote the health and well-being of Fordham’s faculty, staff, and administration.”

TURNING PASSION INTO A CAREER

“My first career was in commercial real estate in Manhattan. I always took classes in nutrition while working in real estate because it was my passion and then after I had my first daughter, I switched to dietetics full time.”

Before joining Fordham’s Office of Human Resources Management, she worked for Sodexo, a worldwide leader in quality-of-life services.

“I was the registered dietitian for Fordham students. If anybody had special dietary needs, I would meet with them so that their needs would be met within the community, as opposed to getting off of the meal plan and potentially eating alone. From there, I became a wellness director for the business and industry division of Sodexo, where I helped our client partners achieve their wellness initiatives.”

SHARING INFORMATION

“Because we’re spread out on three campuses, the monthly well-being newsletter is one way to let faculty and staff know that I’m here, and impart a little information along the way. This fall, we have had a massage therapist visit campus during the benefits fairs and organized flu shots at all three campuses. In November, I worked with organizations on campus to participate in a Great American Smokeout program. For Diabetes Awareness Month, I set up a table at the Westchester campus and handed out information and samples of Jicama, which is a low glycemic food. My ultimate goal is to create a culture of health and well-being at Fordham University.”

DIMENSIONS OF WELLNESS

“The National Wellness Institute has a six dimensional model of wellness: Social, Emotional, Occupational, Physical, Intellectual, and Spiritual.  The Physical dimension includes the benefits of regular physical activity, healthy eating habits, strength and vitality. I’m starting to build education and activity through the physical dimension first.”

STAYING FIT

She said that a majority of staff members want to learn how to incorporate exercise into their day.

“Some people want to exercise close to work and others want it close to home. I try to educate staff about the resources we already have and try to create new opportunities to help them achieve their wellness goals. So far, we have created partnerships with the White Plains YMCA and West Side YMCA for discounted membership.”

TAKING A BREAK

“So many people don’t break from their desks to eat their meals. It’s important to try and break away from that environment and clear your head a little bit. Walking outside and connecting to the earth can be very therapeutic.”

HOW SHE MAINTAINS A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE

“As a registered dietitian, I try to follow a plant-based diet. I like to experiment with different ingredients and come up with nourishing and appetizing dishes. I love to take advantage of this beautiful campus of Rose Hill and the New York Botanical Gardens. I also like to exercise my muscles for 30 minutes at the Ram Fit Center during my lunch hour.”

A FRESH START

“The New Year is a great time for a fresh start and that may include making personal wellness resolutions. Be mindful to set yourself up for success by making small changes towards your wellness goal until it becomes part of your daily routine. Don’t forget to be kind to yourself. Forgive any setbacks and get yourself back on track toward your goal. Being able to bounce back and be tenacious is a key skill for having a rich life. Once you’ve attained that goal, reward yourself. It could be the gift of time to read a book by your favorite author or shopping the sale rack at your favorite store.”

Bassett came to Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus on Nov. 18 to deliver the Sapientia et Doctrina Lecture to celebrate the University’s Dodransbicentennial, as well as the Graduate School of Social Service’s (GSS) centennial.

Father McShane said that the heritage and work of GSS represent the “underlying values of the republic and the republic will endure.

“It will endure and emerge because of the hard work done by women and men like you,” he said to the audience of social workers.

Travis then delivered a lecture that cast an unflinching eye on how race equity and social justice, or lack thereof, affects the health of underserved communities and racial minorities in particular.

“In our city it is too often the black and Latino communities that don’t get what they need,” said Bassett, adding that those communities experience a higher burden of mental health issues, heart disease, asthma, and diabetes. She said that one’s race affects life expectancy and susceptibility to illnesses.

“It’s not genetics; it’s due to the social contexts of race,” she said.

She pointed out that premature morality is considered to be 65 years of age and the life expectancy for the white population hit 65 in the 1940s. Black women hit a life expectancy of 65 in the 1950s. But black men didn’t reach that life expectancy until 1994. Also, mortality rates for African Americans in the highest income bracket didn’t surpass lowest income bracket for whites until 1990.

“We are not losing lives because of microbes or bad habits,” she said. “It’s because of the way our society is structured. It’s true across the nation and it’s true in our city.”

She said that racial segregation in New York City is such that it is easy to correlate health disparities and race on a map. In one graphic, she showed life expectancies along several subway routes. At a No. 6 Train stop in Murray Hill the life expectancy is 85 years of age, while six stops north in East Harlem the life expectancy drops 9 years to 76.

She then pointed to four colored maps of New York where dark orange shading highlighted the city’s “sickest neighborhoods.” One focused on asthma hospitalization for children, while another displayed deaths due to HIV-AIDS. The final two highlighted diabetes deaths and drug related hospitalizations. In each, the dark orange fell on the same regions: poor neighborhoods of color.

“These illnesses have nothing to do with each other in terms of biological pathways, so if there is anything we need to see that shows there are structural differences that effect the distribution of health outcomes across our city, it’s maps like these,” she said.

When officials tried to explain health disparities between races through genetics, science refuted the argument, she said. Current theory focuses on lifestyle choices. The reasoning became “poor people don’t eat right, they smoke,” she said, adding the poor don’t get to make housing choices that, in turn, affect their health.

“Nobody says I want to live in a rodent infested house and nobody says I want to live in a neighborhood with terrible air quality,” she said. “These aren’t personal choices; these are social structures that are produced and reproduced.”

Bassett said that in her role she “wants to make a claim on advocacy” and sees it as a part of her job as health commissioner to speak out on injustices affecting people’s health.

“Health is strongly tied to neighborhoods, as are many of the forms of racism,” she said. “We can only be as good as the systems we work in and no field is immune from racism.”

“But these are our neighbors and our relatives, we have many challenges arising in the form of democratic challenges, but we can meet the challenge.”

The lecture can be viewed in its entirety here at Fordham Libraries. 

Masterson, a sophomore marketing major at the Gabelli School of Business, is the creator and owner of SNOX, a company that sells non-slip, non-skid grip socks and donates 100 percent of profits to charity.

“The socks are similar to what they have in hospitals, but it’s also a product everyone can use,” said Masterson, a Rhode Island native. “They’re great for yoga or Pilates, wearing around the house, or just using as regular socks.”

The idea for SNOX came when at the age of 14 Masterson developed a four-inch blood clot in her arm. She was admitted to the hematology floor of the Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), California, where most of the other patients were battling blood cancers.

She vowed that when she got better she would find a way to give back to the hospital and its young patients.

With the encouragement of her parents, who are both entrepreneurs, Masterson opted to launch a company so that she could donate on a regular basis. She thought back to the non-slip (“really unattractive”) socks that the hospital issued to all of its patients, and decided to make a more child- and teenage-friendly version.

“My parents raised me to be socially conscious, and we always did a lot of volunteer work,” she said. “At the time, I didn’t need an income for myself—I babysat, and it’s not as though I needed for anything—so I decided to give 100 percent of the profits away.”

Since launching SNOX (the combination of “sneaker” and “sock”), Masterson has donated nearly $9,000 to charities including CHOC, Teach For America, Water Aid, Rotary International, Action Against Hunger, and Hope For the Warriors. She uses the website Charity Navigator to ensure that she donates to only the most reputable organizations.

Last year she was one of 15 freshmen fellows in Fordham’s chapter of Social Impact 360 (formerly the Compass Fellowship). She participated in the fellowship’s national competition in Washington, D.C. and won a national Kenneth Cole Foundation grant. The $2,500 grant has helped her boost her inventory for the upcoming Christmas season.

This year, she is mentoring younger Social Impact 360 fellows and was also accepted to the Fordham Foundry, where she will continue to learn about growing her company.

“Currently, the socks are made overseas and then shipped through Amazon, since I can’t really be shipping out of my dorm room,” she said. “But I would love to start manufacturing in the United States, which I couldn’t do at first because it would have spiked the cost of my socks. I would also like to come out with more styles.”

She is particularly looking forward to using what she’ll learn in her businesses classes this year to help expand SNOX further.

“I’m taking financial accounting, marketing, business communications—all of the basics,” she said. “I love the mentorship and my professors are amazing. I’m really excited to start this year off well.”

Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation

Timothy Jorgensen is a scientist with a knack for narrative storytelling.

In Strange Glow, he relates the history of human experience with radiation—from William Roentgen’s 1895 discovery of X-rays to the recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident—in a style that’s largely free of scientific jargon and full of subtle humor and practical wisdom. He recounts the “hard-won lessons of how radiation helps and harms our health,” focusing not only on pioneering scientists like Roentgen, Thomas Edison, and Marie Curie but also on victims of the Fukushima disaster and the tragic story of the “radium girls,” factory workers who created glow-in-the-dark watch dials by using a fluorescent paint that contained radium.

Finally, and most practically, Jorgensen, a professor of radiation medicine and the director of the Health Physics and Radiation Protection Program at Georgetown University, addresses the risks of radiation exposure related to everyday cellphone use, diagnostic X-rays, full-body security scans, nuclear fallout, and the food we eat.

Not all forms of radiation are equally hazardous, he notes. For example, the dose of radiation we receive from a full-body scanner at the airport is extremely low compared to the background radiation at high altitudes. “The time we spend in the scanner results in the same dose that we receive from just 12 seconds of flying at high altitude,” he writes.

To ask whether a form of radiation is safe or dangerous misses the point. The question, Jorgensen writes, is whether or not the risk level is low enough that we shouldn’t be concerned—and not everyone has the same tolerance for risk. So his goal is not so much to dispel our fears of exposure but to present the facts as evenhandedly as possible.

“This book,” he writes, “seeks both to convince people that they can be masters of their own radiation fate, and to empower them to make their own well-informed decisions about their personal radiation exposures.”

Working in Swinarski’s lab, Fordham College at Rose Hill senior Jeremy Fague set out to help find the answer. For almost two years, Fague has been helping Swinarski and a group of Columbia University Medical Center researchers use math and computer programs, like Visual Basic and Excel, to analyze patients who are short of breath.

The researchers place 89 sensors in different patterns on patients’ chests, backs, and stomachs to measure changes in their chest volume while they exercise. They’re hoping this new data will offer better insights compared with data from breathing tests, and will eventually lead to better ways of managing emphysema and other pulmonary issues.

In his work as a research assistant, Fague has been trying to determine what sensor patterns work for different types of people. “The original pattern only works for one body type,” Fague explains. “We want to use this technology to serve a wider population of patients. I’ve spent a lot of time writing a program to try to unlock a lot of this data.” 

Fague, a Massachusetts native, started out on the pre-law track at Fordham before realizing he could apply his passion for logic through a double major in math and economics and a minor in computer science. After taking a linear algebra class with Swinarski, he approached him about research opportunities and was invited to join this project.

“I was really attracted to the applied nature of it,” he says. “I’ve always been drawn to how I can use math and technology to directly impact the world around me. Through this work, I can really see how being able to analyze the data differently is going to make a difference in someone’s life.”

Working with Swinarski outside the classroom has been particularly rewarding for Fague. “He challenges me to think on my own and to find solutions,” Fague says. “He gives me a lot of feedback and also works alongside me. He’s everything I hoped I would have in a mentor.”

It’s part of the Jesuit tradition that initially drew Fague to Fordham. “I’ve found that the different perspectives here on campus have always challenged me and made me grow. People here think deeply about fundamental questions.”

Fague’s Fordham experience—his research, his courses, and his work as president of the Alternative Investments Club—landed him a full-time job with Goldman Sachs postgraduation; he also plans to pursue a graduate degree in the near future. Although he is starting a career in finance, he believes this research experience will prove to be invaluable.

“I’m just a mathematician who has really found a lot of different things I can do with math,” he says.

Solomon described one of his research subjects, Clinton, who was diagnosed at birth with diastrophic dwarfism, a condition that led to more than 30 operations during his lifetime. Such operations can address the medical aspect of the dwarfism, he said. But Clinton’s inability to reach items off a store shelf is an example of a social problem, particularly if the store doesn’t provide staff to assist persons with disabilities.

When Clinton was born, doctors told his parents to leave him to die at the hospital, said Solomon. His mother didn’t see him for three days, at which time she decided to take him home and find a good specialist. Most doctors foretold only medical problems, but eventually she found one of the best specialists in the country. Solomon said that the doctor lifted the boy up and announced “He will make a handsome young man one day.”

“This [story]is an example of how much language or belief can alter medical reality,” said Solomon, author of Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Scribner, 2012).

The conference, sponsored by Fordham’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center and the Center on Religion and Culture, focused on spiritual and cultural diversity in healthcare. Solomon said that identity has played a large role in a person’s health in many of the cases he has studied.

A disabled person’s identity, he said, is defined in terms of “horizontal and vertical” influences. The vertical identity is one formed in the home and related to language, religion, ethnicity, and class. A horizontal identity is one discovered outside the home, where the identity is learned from a peer group.

For example, Solomon spoke of befriending a deaf person who introduced him to deaf culture. He went to deaf theater performances and deaf gatherings. He discovered a “beautiful society” of hearing-impaired people—something that a deaf child would likely not discover until he or she left the family and went out into the “real world.”

The horizontal culture of disabled people is very similar to the gay experience, said Solomon. There, too, the horizontal identity is often discovered in adolescence.

Solomon said he was a believer in medical progress and social progress, but that “I wish they could see each other more clearly.”

He reminded the audience that it was not long ago that homosexuality was diagnosed as a medical disorder: he read from a 1966 Time magazine article that described homosexuality as a “pernicious sickness.”

Regarding Down syndrome, he said, the Atlantic Monthly published a 1968 article that stated, “There is no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down syndrome child away, whether it is put away in a traditional sense of hidden in a sanitarium, or in a more responsible lethal sense.”

Today our understanding of diversity has so shifted that there are even Hollywood stars with Down syndrome, he said.

Yet even today, parents of children with Down syndrome could choose to have cosmetic surgery for their child that would reduce the size of the tongue and lift drooping eyes so that they’d appear “normal,” he said.

“That is a medical solution to a social problem, and it’s very deeply troubling,” he said. “It’s a kind of a tyranny of mainstream values.”

He then cited several medical breakthroughs that may also eliminate some of the identity cultures he celebrates in his book. A cochlear implant could be placed in a child’s ear so that he or she could grow up and function in the speaking world; and a substance, BMN 111, could soon block the gene that causes dwarfism.

“There is the question of what should be treated, what should be cured, and what should be left alone,” said Solomon. While Clinton needed surgeries to be able to walk, does a child with Down syndrome need plastic surgery?

“There are people who have been subjected to treatment who didn’t want to ‘get better’ or change in the way that was put forward,” he said. “What they wanted was to go on to live their lives as themselves.”