Understand And Communicate Book 3 11
Joseph Zyiuahndy
LinkedIn and 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. Learn more in our Cookie Policy.
The half day training course offered through The Scottish Centre for Conflict Resolution was full of practical, effective tools when dealing with conflict in relation to young people and families. Understanding conflict style, RESPOND to stressful situations (consciously decide how to convey the message) instead of REACTING (be taken over by instinct and act in the moment, mindlessly), compassion and understanding for others going through a different developmental stage than your own,(AKA remembering what it was like to be a teenager *cringe* but necessary) effective intervention and wonderful mediation tactics such as active listening, open-ended questions, de-escalation and "I" statements to name a few.
But the thing that struck me the most from the open learning session was when the training leader asked everyone to raise their hands if they were in a relationship. My eyes immediately began to cut as I scanned the room for others with their hands clasped in their laps or on the desk either out of solidarity or awkwardness of being the 'single' ones out. I immediately thought, well he never specified what KIND of relationship surely it is a strange question to ask the marital status in a CPD and of course this was the point of the excercise. I must've typed the word "relationship" approximately 10, 000 times (and I am not finished yet!) during the duration of my Masters in Mediation and Conflict Resolution, "building relationships...," "maintaining relationships...," "preserving relationships..," "future professional relationships...," and STILL I did not feel inclined to raise my hand. It illuminated how we view relationships, even those who work closely with processes to maintain positive relationships for youth work and homelessness prevention. So why are we still wired to view relationships in a strictly romantic/intimate light?
This brought back a vivid childhood memory for me where I was playing 'house' with some friends at around the age of 7. I referred to a friendship I have with a female as a "relationship" and was quickly met with some ohhhhhs and ahhhhhs followed by a bit of laughter at my 'crush' on a girl. Exasperated I exclaimed, "We're all in relationships with each other right now, I have a relationship with the mailman too! We are all in lots of relationships!" (Arguably, I was a strange 7 year old) But the point persists, English language seems quite limited in how we refer to our casual and more meaningful interactions with others be it acquaintances or long term friends. The focus on the training was geared towards people working closely with families and youth and it seemed slightly concerning when we were informed the results of the "hand raising" excercise was similar across the board and especially with young people. Is there damage in young people viewing relationships with a purely "who is dating who" mentality?
The training illustrated the importance of communication, as it is the first step to any problem solving framework. It then is critical to talk to young people (and not so young people) about the importance of having safe relationships that are not purely romantic. Helping youth establish and recognize positive relationships versus negative relationships creates a plan of who to turn to in crisis mode when our decision making abilities are jeopardized due to high stress levels. Prevention versus crisis management, a tale as old as time. Instead of asking if a child/teenager the cringe worthy question of, "Do you have a 'special someone' in their class," consider asking how they view their relationship with friends or teachers. "What do they like/not like about them?" "How would their friends describe them?" "If something was stressing you out would you talk to (insert friend name here) about it?" Ensure they understand there are people to turn to when things go badly so that they do not seek unhealthy coping strategies and influences. Challenge them to think about how their actions and reactions affect the people around them that they interact with on a daily basis on varying levels of intimacy/frequency. Change the dialogue away from dating (they probably won't want to talk to you about it anyway) and towards their place in the world as a human being with other human beings all pushing and pulling away from and together with endless differences, strengths and weaknesses.
Many medical imaging examinations involve exposure to ionizing radiation. The exposure amount in these exams is very small, to the extent that the health risk associated with such low levels of exposure is frequently debated in scientific meetings. Nonetheless, the prevailing scientific view is that there is a finite (though small) amount of risk involved with such exposures. The risk is increased with the amount of exposure, repeated exposures, and when the patient is young. This material aims to provide a brief overview of the risk associated with medical imaging examinations that involve ionizing radiation.
The amount of radiation required to produce these deterministic effects has been derived from studies in experimental cell cultures, animal studies, as well as human epidemiology studies. From these studies, the dose thresholds have been established where the effect is observed in 1% of a population (see Table 1). This means, these values are the amount of radiation energy absorbed by the tissue where if 100 people were exposed to this level of radiation, only a single individual would experience this effect. The unit used for absorbed radiation dose in Table 1 is the Gray (Gy). This value is the standard international measure for absorbed radiation energy. We will see later that this unit must be converted to another unit to understand the stochastic effects (i.e., genetic and cancer effects) of radiation.
Cancer induction is arguably the most important and the most feared radiation effect. From the discovery of ionizing radiation there has been documented evidence of radiation induced cancer in animal and human studies. The initial human experiences were all at high radiation dose levels from people working with radiation or using radiation without the knowledge of its potential harm. In addition, long-term follow-up studies of the Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the early medical usage of radiation in treatment and diagnostic studies have shown increased cancer incidence in the exposed populations.
All radiation effects have a latency period between the time of exposure and the onset of the effect, as seen with deterministic effects in Table 1. For cancer induction, the latency period is on the order of years, with leukemia having the shortest latency period (5 to 15 years) and solid tumors having the longest latency period (10 to 60 years). Therefore, it is very difficult to prove that a cancer is directly related to earlier radiation exposure, because other factors encountered during the latency period may be the actual cause of the cancer. This is particularly true when the exposures are at low radiation levels such as those received in diagnostic radiology and cardiology studies.
Currently, at low radiation exposure levels no study has been comprehensive enough to demonstrate stochastic effects conclusively. But as stated above, at very high radiation exposure levels there is good data that proves the induction of cancer from the exposure. So the estimation of risk for cancer induction at low radiation exposure must be extrapolated from the high exposure level data. This is where most of the controversy concerning radiation effects exists. The most conservative estimation of risk from radiation exposure assumes the effects from low radiation exposure are a simple scaled version of the high exposure results (i.e. a linear or straight-line) extrapolation from the high- to the low-exposure results). Most groups that monitor and analyze radiation exposures use this linear extrapolation model to estimate cancer induction from radiation.
Currently there are two models used to assess risk of stochastic effects from radiation exposure; these are the absolute and relative risk models.
Absolute risk is defined as the probability that a person who is disease free at a specific age will develop the disease at a later time following exposure to a risk factor, e.g. the probability of cancer induction following exposure to radiation.
These data also demonstrate that you cannot simply use the average relative risk shown in Table 2 to estimate the increased incidence of cancer due to radiation exposure. In order to do this analysis correctly you need take into consideration the age of all individuals in the group that is irradiated.
The early development of life is a time when rapid cell division and differentiation are occurring. Therefore, radiation sensitivity is high for the developing embryo/fetus and protection from radiation needs to be considered differently than the general public. Table 3 provides a review of the stage and deterministic effects that may occur in the embryo/fetus following exposure to different levels of radiation. Similar to what was shown in Table 1, deterministic effects below an absorbed dose of 0.1 Gy are not found, even in the embryo/fetus.
Although deterministic effects are not seen at low dose levels in the embryo/fetus, there have been many studies that have shown an increased incidence of cancer (i.e. stochastic effects) in children following in-utero exposure to radiation. Pre-natal radiation exposures resulted in an increased cancer rate in the offspring of the survivors of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In other epidemiological studies, there have also been good statistical results that demonstrate an increased cancer rate in children following pre-natal radiation exposure from diagnostic radiology studies. Unfortunately, these epidemiological studies do not provide very good data on the specific absorbed dose received to the fetus or embryo. This limits the ability to accurately characterize the dose vs. response as has been done for deterministic effects. But since the doses received in these epidemiology studies were in the diagnostic radiology range, they suggest that low levels of radiation exposure to the embryo/fetus definitely increase the risk of childhood cancer.
b1e95dc632