{"id":6671,"date":"2016-04-20T14:26:17","date_gmt":"2016-04-20T18:26:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/?p=6671"},"modified":"2016-05-04T15:22:37","modified_gmt":"2016-05-04T19:22:37","slug":"student-spotlight-kristen-delwiche-thinking-beyond-the-individual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/2016\/student-spotlight-kristen-delwiche-thinking-beyond-the-individual\/","title":{"rendered":"Student Spotlight – Kristen Delwiche: Thinking beyond the individual"},"content":{"rendered":"

A strong love of the outdoors, and a childhood rooted in exploring the woods and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, influenced Kristen Delwiche\u2019s decision to attend Geisel School of Medicine. \u201cWhat better place to attend medical school than here, in close proximity to nature, where I can find balance and be happy. I feel a strong sense of community here too\u2014and I like that,\u201d says the first-year medical student.<\/p>\n

Delwiche studied biochemistry in college and during her junior year she participated in a wildlife conservation and political ecology study abroad program in Tanzania\u2014an experience that piqued her interest in the intersection between environment and population health.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t specifically health focused, but there was an independent study aspect to the program that gave each of us one month to pursue an area of interest,\u201d she says. With thoughts of becoming a doctor lurking in the back of her mind mixing with her mother\u2019s use of herbal medicine to treat the family\u2019s aches and pains, Delwiche set out to learn how women living in a rainforest village with limited access to healthcare thought about illness and used plants to heal.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought I\u2019d be learning about native plants with powerful medicinal properties. Instead, I discovered spiritual healing involving charms made of animal parts and herbs were perhaps an even more valued aspect of the traditional healing process,\u201d she recalls.<\/p>\n

I was accustomed to thinking about health from a molecular level up, but my research in Tanzania pushed me to think about health from the community level down.\u201d<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

- Kristen Delwiche '19<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Initially, Delwiche found this practice horrifying\u2014she saw elderly people with massive scars on their backs and chests from having burned herbs placed inside cuts made on their already frail bodies. Traditional healers were expensive, but with limited access to Western medicine they provided accessible medical care to the villagers. As she began to understand the substantial role traditional healers play in caring for a population, it reminded her to be non-judgmental toward their practices when treating those patients.<\/p>\n

This experience was pivotal because it changed the way Delwiche thought about healing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was accustomed to thinking about health from a molecular level up, but my research in Tanzania pushed me to think about health from the community level down,\u201d she says. It became obvious to her that access to quality medical care was only a small contributor to overall health and she began thinking about a career in public health rather than direct medical care. \u201cIt can be overwhelming, but I like thinking about how the whole system fits together,\u201d she adds. \u201cThere are a lot of problems that can be solved by scaling existing technologies, and there is a lot of money flowing into global health as well\u2014the key is to make sure it\u2019s channeled to the right places.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Delwiche-03\"As she sees it, one of the issues in the field of global health is a lack of high quality information about population health and health system function to inform both policy decisions and well-intentioned donors.<\/p>\n

Delwiche\u2019s next step was a three-year global health fellowship at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, where she worked on collating information on the prevalence and relative global impact of health risks. \u201cIt\u2019s useful to know how many people are dying or suffering from specific disease,\u201d she says. \u201cBut from a prevention perspective, what we want to know is what\u2019s really driving disease \u2014what are the biggest contributors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her research delved into quantifying the impact of risk factors such as drug use, intimate partner violence, childhood sexual abuse and physical inactivity on death and disability from associated health outcomes. \u201cIf we have information on the prevalence of intimate partner violence, in combination with information on the magnitude of excess risk for say major depression associated with violence exposure,\u201d Delwiche says, \u201cthen we can estimate the relative contribution of intimate partner violence to the overall burden of depression in any given country.\u201d<\/p>\n

In places like sub-Saharan Africa for example, intimate partner violence is highly prevalent especially among women of childbearing age\u2014and she thinks it\u2019s important to expose these issues on a global scale because they aren\u2019t getting attention. \u201cI like working with risk factors we don\u2019t typically think of being immediately related to health issues, and thinking about how we can build capacity around prevention by looking at things that are strong predictors of health\u2014education, violence, and access to good nutrition,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n

The fellowship armed Delwiche with extensive data analysis experience and taught her the importance of using data to guide decisions. But staring at a computer screen everyday and thinking about people in terms of mere numbers took its toll. \u201cIt was really hard on me losing sight of those individual stories,\u201d Delwiche says. \u201cUltimately human connections are what energize me and really ground my sense of purpose. I chose a career in medicine because I wanted both the depth of understanding and the flexibility to heal on an individual and population level.\u201d<\/p>\n

Population health is important because it keeps you in touch with health on a larger scale\u2014and I\u2019m trying to figure out how to incorporate that into a medical career.\u201d<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

- Kristen Delwiche '19<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When asked about future global health works, Delwiche says she is not enthusiastic about isolated mission work. \u201cWhat does excite me,\u201d she says, \u201care programs that build capacity by training professionals on the ground and have a long term bilateral plan\u2014like the DarDar program in Tanzania and Dartmouth\u2019s ongoing partnership with Kosovo, where I\u2019ll be going this summer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Delwiche loves traveling and acknowledges there is a lot of work to be done globally, she ultimately sees herself practicing medicine in the United States. \u201cI\u2019m not yet sure what medical field I see myself in, but I do know I\u2019d ultimately like to have a leadership component to my work,\u201d she says. \u201cPopulation health is important because it keeps you in touch with health on a larger scale\u2014and I\u2019m trying to figure out how to incorporate that into a medical career. It\u2019s really those individual patient experiences that highlight problems and provide the context and insight that can fuel innovative solutions with the potential to impact many people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First-year Geisel student Kristen Delwiche chose a career in medicine because she wants both the depth of understanding and the flexibility to heal on an individual and a population level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":6677,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,1],"tags":[71,23,706,409,43,257,70],"class_list":["post-6671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-news","tag-dardar","tag-global-health","tag-kristen-delwiche","tag-medical-student","tag-population-health","tag-student-spotlight","tag-tanzania","author-12"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2016\/04\/Delwiche-01.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4r3h1-1JB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6671"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6685,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6671\/revisions\/6685"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}