Activities
One of my overreaching activities will be building a liver quilt or mobile. I will print out paper hexagons and the students will color and cut them out. Art activities are part of my curriculum because of the creativity aspect of relaxation. Learning techniques to deal with stress is an extremely important part of my health curriculum. I try to make sure they have opportunities to draw, write songs and sing, write and recite poems, make up skits and act throughout the year. The hexagons will represent the hexagonal arrangement of the functional units of the liver. Each student will get several hexagons and build a contiguous surface with them. I am thinking they can put them on cardboard and make a flat presentation of the model or make a mobile with the hexagons by the end. We will start with how they fit together. Then we can add cut pieces of straws at the corners and in the middle to represent the central venule, hepatic arteriole, bile duct, and portal venule. I will push them to color the deoxygenated blood some other color than blue, since they are convinced that veins carry blue blood. I would like them to work on what comes into the hepatocyte and what goes out of it in some physical way, whether writing or making up symbols with a key to what the symbols mean. Over the course of the unit, about two weeks, we will pull them out and work on them.
For an introduction to ethics of transplants, I want to do a Socratic seminar on who should donate organs. I would like to explore the possible abuses that can take place in pushing people to donate organs. I would like them to read Nancy Farmer's book, The House of the Scorpion, about a boy who is a clone grown to provide replacement organs for the rich head of the household. I am not sure I can get enough copies, but it would definitely enrich the discussion. This book takes ideas presented in other books about illegal harvesting organs to the limit: human clones are treated as pieces of merchandise to be slaughtered at need. I would also like to bring up experiments that have been done on humans, whether prisoners or people considered sub human by the people in power. We can also discuss books and movies they may know, like "Coma", a thriller about doctors putting people into comas to keep their organs alive to sell. There have also been many stories on criminal groups buying organs to sell in exchange for protection of illegal immigrants.
The second Socratic seminar I would like to do is the ethics of who should receive organs. There are guidelines for doctors to interpret that are specific about who should have priority for a transplant. They attempt to be fair and not subject to the doctor's personal biases. Because there are so many more people who need a transplant than there are available organs, this is a life and death situation and is the type of decision medical providers must make every day. One thing we could take into consideration for our imaginary recipient list is how valuable a contribution the person makes to society. Physicians have tried to get away from that, since it is such an individual judgment, but there are many people who feel that prisoners should not get extreme medical benefits such as this over more productive members of society. There is also the question of people who have destroyed their own livers through their risky behavior. Do they deserve the same consideration as someone who had a genetic illness and did not engage in risky behavior? Of course, then there is the argument that those with defective genes should not be allowed to pass them on to the next generation. What about religion? Above all, there is the money aspect. Who can afford a transplant? Many insurance companies will not pay. Sometimes the state pays. Can we as a public afford that? I can see the possibility of a very rich discussion.
I will assign each student to a group of four and ask them to prepare a power point about one specific drug and include in that:
Why might people abuse that drug?
Is it dangerous?
Does it have a medical use?
Is it addictive?
What are the effects on your body?
Which organs does the drug target?
I can assign a variety of drugs; aspirin, ecstasy, oxycodone, methamphetamine, ritaline, opium, marijuana, and nicotine.
We will also do a short storybook about the liver. I am considering calling it Billie Bile. Each student will be responsible for their own and will be required to include many of the facts they have learned, but using as much creativity as they would like.
We will first brainstorm what criteria students think are used for transplant. Then I will explain the criteria as explained by Dr. Stephen Latham, a prominent bioethicist. I will put the students into groups of four. They will be given instructions that they are to persuade the class that their assigned patient should be first on the list for a transplant. I will assign each group an imaginary person with positive and negative characteristics. Each will be in need of a liver transplant. Each will have a different indicator for a transplant. I will ask each group to write a short essay on why their patient deserves the first liver. Then, I will ask them to act out the discussion among the doctor, the patient and the person who is going to list the priority of each transplant.
I also want them to create a Billy Rubin book. They must focus on transplants. I want them to design their book as an explanation of transplant to a small child. They will be required to do pictures or cartoons, words to explain and some sort of simplified information on how they pick a donor and how they pick a recipient.
After a brief lecture on new artificial organ techniques, I want the students to think about what needs to be included in an artificial organ. We won't spend a lot of time, but I would like this issue to be brought up for some discussion.
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