Reflections

It was interesting to hear from the health psychologists at the roundtable about their career paths and preceding experiences.  Health psychology is still a very much developing field, however, since the 1970’s it has become more prevalent and necessary in the healthcare industry.  The experiences of the health psychologists and the information I have learned in the class, has opened up the idea that not everything can be fixed by medicine, drugs, and surgeries.  In fact, there are numerous healthier and effective ways to address several health problems.  Something I have repeatedly learned in my Principles of Behavior course, is to perform a functional assessment of what contingencies are causing a behavior to occur.  Behavior most often occurs due to reinforcement or escape from aversive stimuli.  I think a lot of different aspect in psychology can be applied to the medical field and discovering why people engage in certain behaviors.

Medical professionals do not necessarily have the time or the tools to discover the underlying causes of someone’s sickness, therefore, that is where the role of health psychologists come in.  A huge issue for America right now is the opioid epidemic, in which their is continuous debates about whether this is the fault of physicians, pharmaceuticals, government, or other entities.  I believe a lot of different professionals need to be involved in solving this epidemic, including health psychologists.  Physicians are very quick is prescribing prescription pain killers for patients instead of looking for underlying causes.

I have learned a lot of interesting information in this course that I can hopefully apply to my career path.  I prefer to take notes in my laptop for this course, because so much of the information is relevant to my other courses so I find myself incorporating it into papers and research projects in other courses.

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