Honors Coursework

After having course notifications on for weeks leading up to spring quarter, I was finally able to take a spot in Honors 222A: Pain when someone dropped on the first day of spring quarter. After reading through the syllabus, I saw what would prompt someone to drop the course: the daunting 20-page term paper. This class met once weekly for three hours, which seems quite long. However, each class was filled with mild disagreements between the professors, thought-provoking discussions, guest speakers, and philosophical discussions. Going into this class, I expected to become more prepared for medicine, but I actually stepped away with knowledge of how to be a better consumer who understands the complexities of pain.

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After reading through the syllabus, I saw what would prompt someone to drop the course: the daunting 20-page term paper.

 

This course covers the biological, social, and psychological causes and impacts of pain. It is by no means the STEM class I was expecting. Instead, it is like a seminar where students get to hear from pain experts, hear these same experts agree and disagree, and consider the ethics involved with pain care. Taking this along with a bioethics course really got me thinking about how the US poorly handles medical care and education. I've attached my term paper, which I wrote on neuromodulation therapies for phantom limb pain. A big focus of this class is using proper language. It's not chronic or acute pain, it's actually centrally-generated pain or peripherally-generated pain. I discuss this in my paper. My goal was to write in a way that could be easily understood by a general audience because I truly believe the lack of proper education on pain is also due to a lack of easily understood and accessible medical writing. I also included hand-drawn illustrations to help the reader better visualize the therapies and neural pathways or structures. In my own research for this paper, I struggled to find proper studies comparing neuromodulation therapies to other phantom limb pain treatments. Because of this, I also discuss the need for more pain research, specifically the short-term and long-term results of neuromodulation therapy compared to other pain treatments.

 

I've attached my term paper, which I wrote on neuromodulation therapies for phantom limb pain.

 

I really enjoyed researching and writing for this term paper, and I hope you enjoy reading it as well! 

 

Beyond the Pain class, I also took the following Honors courses: 

• Honors Chemistry

• Honors Organic Chemistry

• The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine

• Denmark Art and Colonialism Study Abroad

• International Human Rights

• Rose-Colored Retrospectives: Period Media and Cultures of Nostalgia