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Date: | Sun, 18 Mar 2007 21:11:15 -0400 |
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I have to second Jo-Anne Elder's opinion about what ultimately makes a difference and it
is NOT an understanding of biochemistry.
My dissertation advisor used to admonish us all the time with the following hierarchies of
knowledge:
A mathmetician only needs to understand math to be able to be excellent in the field.
A physicist needs to understand both math and physics to be excellent in the field.
A chemist needs to understand both math, physics and chemistry to be excellent in the
field.
---- I have to diverge a bit here --- the so-called brain chemist who was financed by a
well-known pharmaceutical company that is heavily marketing the fear of a specific
nutrient deificiency fell prey to what we in nutritional epidemiology called the Linus
Pauling syndrome of thinking that if you are an expert in one field you can extrapolate
your area of expertise into another---- or, if you read the NYTimes Magazine article on
the Nutrification of foods - this person forgot that not all of us are into supplements ----
some of us still like to eat food.
A biochemist needs to understand math, physics, chemistry, biochemistry....
And you can continue on up into understanding psychology.
You cannot work with individual mothers and expect to give them the "ideal" and have
them do it. You MUST understand their individual psychology on top of everything else.
A few days in the hospital is not a long enough window to really help a mother process
this --- it is but a step towards a longterm relationship with her child.
Social marketing (a la the pioneering work of Richard Manoff) eventually led to Marcia
Griffiths developing the Trials of Improved Practices (TIPS). It was a radical notion for
me. Yes, we may know the biological ideal. Sometimes, however, you do better by
working with mothers to tell you about the practical reality of what is doable. Richard
Manoff did this excellent talk whereby he deconstructed all the things that UNICEF was
telling women in developing countries to do. By the time he got through with all the
tasks, all the mothers in the room totally got how impossible those tasks were and even
the nonmothers (at the time myself) got it too. He then put back together all the
supports of others that were important. What Marcia Griffiths added to the picture was
the radical notion that nutrition education could leap out of the tired old telling women
what to do and actually create a dialogue whereby mothers tried it out and gave feed
back about what techniques actually worked --- TIPS!
Anyway ---- I have taken more biochemistry than I care to even think about. I can't even
count on my fingers how many courses I have had in straight biochemistry, molecular
biology and nutritional biochemistry. In the end, I can't even say that I remember even a
fraction of it and I could care less -- that is not the part that counts.
Best Susan Burger
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