My summer fieldwork showed me that to treat the body, you sometimes first have to treat the mind.
There is a small room at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC). It holds a table, a coffee machine, a couple of utensils and a huge green thermos that’s always filled with tea. It overlooks a lovely garden, and often, you will find student nurses and staff engaged in animated conversation with each other. I love that room; it is a cheerful room.
The other rooms in the center don’t quite hold the same cheer. They have an air of urgency and somberness that that causes voices to hush and steps to quicken as people approach. In these rooms, men, women and children receive treatment for various cancers. My workstation, the cancer research office, faces one of the wards for male patients, and the quiet flurry of activity in and out of the ward never seems to cease.
I am in Moshi Tanzania, to collect data for my summer research on Cancer Stigma. My research is part of a larger study; Exploring Cancer Stigma in sub-Saharan Africa (ECaSSA), which is led by my mentor and DGHI assistant professor Brandon Knettel and Dr. Nosayaba Peters of Duke’s Department of Head & Neck Surgery. With a local team, I am collecting data on cancer stigma and how people treat those with cancer in Tanzania. We also seek to find out the effect of cancer stigma on how cancer patients seek care and treatment, and what cancer patients feel could help to reduce stigma in the community, in the clinic and in their personal lives.
Read the full article at:
https://globalhealth.duke.edu/news/learning-cancers-impact-mental-health