“Inequality and the Patch” Podcast.

Note: All music used in this podcast is free to use from FreeMusicArchives.Org. The song used here is Prelude No. 22 by Chris Zabriskie. For further information and the full citation, please go to my Works Cited page for this section.

Transcript:

[Music]

Hello. My name is Julia and this podcast is called “Inequality and the Patch.” As the title suggests, we will talk about inequality and we will talk about patches. We will also talk about things that we don’t like to talk about.  We’ll talk about a little known eye condition that reveals problems with health care and class in America that undermine part of what we think makes us America, that no matter where you’re born you can do anything. Well,  a little known eye condition is showing the cracks in that theory. Let us begin.

[Music]

When I was a child.  Sometimes I had to wear an eye patch and not on Halloween. I hated it. I didn’t want to look different. I didn’t want to look like Captain Hook. So I hid my patch. I threw tantrums. I did anything I could. But my mother also did anything she could. She took away television privileges, gave time outs, anything she could think of. And despite my resistance, my mother prevailed. I wore that patch until I didn’t have to anymore. Then I grew older and my patch became a funny anecdote to liven up boring party conversations. I never questioned it. That is, I never questioned it until a professor tasked me and his other students to write about a flaw. By writing about our flaws, we were to become more unique and intimate in the reader’s mind.  I chose to write about my patch. I thought of it as a flaw, something that made me different. A humorous childhood humiliation. A benign form of suffering. But I was wrong on both counts.  Many parents force their children to wear patches every year. And those children are not the children who are suffering, even benignly suffering.  The children who are really suffering are the ones who are supposed to wear a patch but don’t.

Thinking back on that story now makes me uncomfortable. The story of the patch was supposed to be funny and innocent. But now the patch reminds me of how who your parents are can still heavily impact who you are and who you can become.  A true we try to deny in America but is coming unavoidable.

[Music]

Strabismis is a strange word. The more common term is lazy eye, you know when both eyes don’t look in the same direction.  For me, it looked as if my left eye was desperately trying to reunite with my nose. Desperately but futilely. To this day, I hate the term lazy eye. The word is a joke. Clowns cross their eyes for laughs. However strabismus is a sign of something much worse. Strabismis causes another funny word. Amblyopia. Amblyopia is when the brain receives a different image from each eye, one weak, one strong.

If left untreated the brain stops using the weak eye and taxes the strong eye. This can cause blindness in one eye, loss in overall vision and problems with depth perception.  People with amblyopia are also more likely to lose all their vision in an accident. To make things worse, if amblyopia isn’t cured around the age of eight, it’s permanent.  However there is a cure. A cure that can be bought in a Halloween store. The patch.

The patch covers the strong eye.  The brain is then forced to use the bad eye, which makes it stronger. Overall vision improves. All those risks go away. Children regain vision in both eyes. But it’s not really that simple. See when you have a cure or really good prevention, you assume that a disease or other medical condition isn’t a problem for society anymore. For example, we don’t have polio anymore and it isn’t a problem for society anymore because we have a vaccine. Having a cure doesn’t just heal the person, it helps solve a problem within society.  However with the treatment of amblyopia we have a cure, but adults still struggle with amblyopia and they still face the negative consequences.

[Music]

When not wearing contacts or glasses, I still have a lazy eye but I no longer have amblyopia because of the patch.  Actually, I no longer have amblyopia have amblyopia because of my mother. To be totally accurate, I no longer have amblyopia because I wasn’t born into poverty.

Let me explain

The patch works. So the reason amblyopia continues into adulthood amblyopia is the patch isn’t used.  Parents don’t force their children to wear them. Children ignore doctor’s orders. I think my story explains why children don’t comply. No child wants to look different or dumb or be uncomfortable.  But why don’t parents comply? Why don’t parents appreciate the risks and force their children to wear the patch. One study sought to find the answers why.  It compared children on Medicaid and children not on Medicaid being treated for amblyopia.

Researchers boldly titled it “Poverty predicts amblyopia treatment failure.”  They weren’t exaggerating. Children on Medicaid were around half as likely to have good results and three times as likely to have bad ones.  Another study found that lower income families faced different problems than higher income families. They struggled with allergies, the cost of the patch and a phenomenon researchers called “child removing patch.”My mother called it misbehavior.  My mother managed to pull thorugh despite “child removing patch.” Why weren’t lower income families able to?  My mother was and is a good mother. But it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room.   Her circumstances, her class, her money allowed her to give so much and enabled me to be successful. She was able to comply because she had the time and the resources.

[Music]

It’s easy to get lost in terms like strabismus and amblyopia. Perhaps that’s why very few low income parents understand why their child ahs to wear the patch. Only 8 percent.  Logically, why would you force your child to do something you don’t understand when they don’t want to do it? And there are more immediate concerns than the patch, which largely has long term consequences.

My mother has encountered children in this position. I interview her about it.

Me:  What is the average income or social demographic for your school?

My mom: I can’t tell you about income but I can tell you that approximately 90% of students attending qualified for free and reduced lunch.

Me: How would you describe the challenges children with amblyopia face?

My mom: These children were experiencing difficulties reading. Well, sometimes difficulties reading are attributed to difficulties seeing.

The school my mother taught on focused on remedial math and reading skills The children there were already behind.  And Amblyopia didn’t help. It hindered already struggling children in poor areas. And who knows how many failed test scores it contributed to?

[Music]

It must have been strange for my mother like traveling between two different worlds.  She worked in Lansing but she lived in an affluent suburb. She saw success and she saw failure.  And she saw how parents, how circumstances, how class can dictate outcome.

[Music]

In the U.S society especially, we want to believe that it doesn’t matter into what family you’re born. Money shouldn’t matter. Class shouldn’t matter. It should be about the content of your character, your hard work and your skills. A child on Medicaid can and should succeed like any other child. But that’s not true. Amblyopia treatment failure shows that. It seems to be one more symptom of the greater disease of inequality within our society. So what can we do?

Government investment can help with programs that educate and promote awareness with families who have to patch. It can show them how to increase compliance and explain to them why they have to patch to begin with.  Some say there isn’t money. But I believe we lose more than money. We lose the potential of future generations. That’s a cost we rarely talk about when we talk about the cost of healthcare in America. However it is something to think about as the debate rages on Capital Hill.

[Music]

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s