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Since my life is taken up almost exclusively by school and writing occasionally for Mess + Noise, Inpress or ToneDeaf (all of which you can find at my blogspot linked to above, latest entry an interview with Belle and Sebastian!) I've decided to turn my LiveJournal, at least temporarily, into my thesis diary.
The topic of my thesis is -
Using a naturopathic philosophical model, how does psychoneuroimmunology enable further understanding of chronic stress responses, and what is its relevance in clinical practice?
Here are my first few entries.
February 14: Begin my summer intensive class Principles of Social Research Design’ which encourages us to keep a diary during the creation of our theses. I’m glad to see this class also focuses on us coming up with our thesis question and allows us to workshop each student’s question. After getting to know some of the other students I feel I’ve been wasting quite a bit of summer on a futile earlier question about an ethnographic study of the NDI Clinic in Nicaragua which Hans Baer encouraged me to do late last year. Over summer I found there was no funding for a Master’s thesis and the clinic itself was undergoing restructuring and they wouldn’t be able to accommodate me at the clinic. Though I (and Hans) was very keen to pursue exploring the role of naturopathy in a developing country, this setback has led me to approach another subject, one that is even more useful to the general population; psychoneuroimmunology. After the first lesson I set up an appointment with James to ask him to be my supervisor to which he quickly responds asking me to see him in a few days. This is great! I think the idea of stress socialisation, Foucault, the individualisation of the stress response and naturopathic philosophy is more his bag that Hans, who seems to be better suited to studying the effect of climate change on health and the ideologies around integrative health, areas I of course would love to study further, but not right now or as part of my thesis. Ideally, I’d like to study a PhD next year somewhere overseas and would like my Masters thesis to be a stepping stone to that.
February 18: I have an appointment with James to hammer out a thesis question. I’m 20 minutes late for my appointment because of bus and tram difficulties and because my interview with Ninja from The Go! Team went a little longer than I planned. I imagine this won’t be the last time music gets in the way of me being able to be a better student, but this is the compromise I’ve set myself. I’m sure in the long run I’ll be a better practitioner, researcher and teacher because of all this extra-curricular spontaneous and unpredictable life experience. Creativity HAS to be practiced alongside more academic, structured research to allow better insights and more interesting models of thought. James is, as always, calm yet caffeinated, rational and slightly dazzling in a modest, avuncular way. I explain my intended areas of study and he pushes me more into the direction of the social structure of a disorder, like chronic fatigue syndrome and more into the theoretical world, because this is more his ‘bag’ and I do find this very interesting and relevant, but I want to keep things more practical. This is where PNI is so useful; being at the point of social and personal, medical and anthropological. Our meeting is brief but I feel slack for turning up late so, as soon as I’ve dashed off my interview and another gig review, I decide to set out my thoughts more rationally.
February 22: I realise that I want to focus on a combination of stress response, the suitability of naturopathy in addressing a generalised stress response and I want to plug this research in to something clinical so it’s not just theoretical. There is an inherent need to understand this area better so as to help everyone. I can’t think of anything more appropriate for someone studying naturopathy to know about. The stress response is so ubiquitous and so individualised and it is something that biomedicine has always struggled with, indeed, often ignoring until recently, that it fulfils another of my criteria; focus on something that naturopathy is especially good at dealing with. Today I decide that I won’t focus on a condition such as bulimia, chronic fatigue syndrome or an auto-immune disorder. Stress is more often undiagnosed and pervasive than presenting itself as part of a diagnosed complaint and I think my research can be more useful when looking at the individualisation of the stress response than any one condition. I email off this brain dump to James under the title My Thesis Overview in which I draught a thesis outline, a brief lit review and settle on the question: ‘Using naturopathic philosophical principals, how does psychoneuroimmunology enable further understanding of chronic stress responses and what is its relevance in clinical practice?’. This is a really long question but it does cover everything I want to cover in my research and James seems to like it, emailing me back: ‘I’ve had a flick through and this will form the basis of a very thorough discussion. Looks interesting’ which is great. I think he liked the idea of my inclusion of the Romantic scientific movement and their tussles with the Enlightenment which has a lot of scope for philosophical arguing and anthropological analysis, something I’m looking forward to.
February 24: I present my newly redrafted question to the Principles of Social Research class and prepare to have my question picked apart and redressed, or, at the very least, be told off for sneaking two questions into one. It now reads: ‘Using a naturopathic philosophical model, how can psychoneuroimmunology enable further understanding of chronic stress responses, and what is its relevance in clinical practice?’ Happily, my question is deemed as well-constructed and passes with no changes made to it at all. Marilys points out that I’m going to mainly focus on the interplay between naturopathic philosophical model and PNI with almost the last section of the thesis actually focused on clinical use and practical application which isn’t what I set out but is a great idea. Even better, Marilys points out that this is essentially a literature review for a PhD involving empirical study into the same area and I thrill at the thought of being able to improve my PhD application by about 2 kilos.
March 1: I begin to look at the core of PNI and go over the main points of it and remind myself how it works. Most students have a practical job in the health field already and get to use biochemical and pathophysiology knowledge every day. I’m really behind on this and decide that I have to set myself an essay on the Explanation of the Biochemistry of PNI, so that I can explain it to my peers who occasionally ask me about it. I already know what it is and how it works, but not well enough at a biochemical level. I do enjoy having to explain my thesis to my non-peer friends as it gives me a chance to reconsider it and get to know it a little better. A thesis, as with work, should be an extension of your own passions, not a toad that squats on your life, as Larkin was suggesting.
The topic of my thesis is -
Using a naturopathic philosophical model, how does psychoneuroimmunology enable further understanding of chronic stress responses, and what is its relevance in clinical practice?
Here are my first few entries.
February 14: Begin my summer intensive class Principles of Social Research Design’ which encourages us to keep a diary during the creation of our theses. I’m glad to see this class also focuses on us coming up with our thesis question and allows us to workshop each student’s question. After getting to know some of the other students I feel I’ve been wasting quite a bit of summer on a futile earlier question about an ethnographic study of the NDI Clinic in Nicaragua which Hans Baer encouraged me to do late last year. Over summer I found there was no funding for a Master’s thesis and the clinic itself was undergoing restructuring and they wouldn’t be able to accommodate me at the clinic. Though I (and Hans) was very keen to pursue exploring the role of naturopathy in a developing country, this setback has led me to approach another subject, one that is even more useful to the general population; psychoneuroimmunology. After the first lesson I set up an appointment with James to ask him to be my supervisor to which he quickly responds asking me to see him in a few days. This is great! I think the idea of stress socialisation, Foucault, the individualisation of the stress response and naturopathic philosophy is more his bag that Hans, who seems to be better suited to studying the effect of climate change on health and the ideologies around integrative health, areas I of course would love to study further, but not right now or as part of my thesis. Ideally, I’d like to study a PhD next year somewhere overseas and would like my Masters thesis to be a stepping stone to that.
February 18: I have an appointment with James to hammer out a thesis question. I’m 20 minutes late for my appointment because of bus and tram difficulties and because my interview with Ninja from The Go! Team went a little longer than I planned. I imagine this won’t be the last time music gets in the way of me being able to be a better student, but this is the compromise I’ve set myself. I’m sure in the long run I’ll be a better practitioner, researcher and teacher because of all this extra-curricular spontaneous and unpredictable life experience. Creativity HAS to be practiced alongside more academic, structured research to allow better insights and more interesting models of thought. James is, as always, calm yet caffeinated, rational and slightly dazzling in a modest, avuncular way. I explain my intended areas of study and he pushes me more into the direction of the social structure of a disorder, like chronic fatigue syndrome and more into the theoretical world, because this is more his ‘bag’ and I do find this very interesting and relevant, but I want to keep things more practical. This is where PNI is so useful; being at the point of social and personal, medical and anthropological. Our meeting is brief but I feel slack for turning up late so, as soon as I’ve dashed off my interview and another gig review, I decide to set out my thoughts more rationally.
February 22: I realise that I want to focus on a combination of stress response, the suitability of naturopathy in addressing a generalised stress response and I want to plug this research in to something clinical so it’s not just theoretical. There is an inherent need to understand this area better so as to help everyone. I can’t think of anything more appropriate for someone studying naturopathy to know about. The stress response is so ubiquitous and so individualised and it is something that biomedicine has always struggled with, indeed, often ignoring until recently, that it fulfils another of my criteria; focus on something that naturopathy is especially good at dealing with. Today I decide that I won’t focus on a condition such as bulimia, chronic fatigue syndrome or an auto-immune disorder. Stress is more often undiagnosed and pervasive than presenting itself as part of a diagnosed complaint and I think my research can be more useful when looking at the individualisation of the stress response than any one condition. I email off this brain dump to James under the title My Thesis Overview in which I draught a thesis outline, a brief lit review and settle on the question: ‘Using naturopathic philosophical principals, how does psychoneuroimmunology enable further understanding of chronic stress responses and what is its relevance in clinical practice?’. This is a really long question but it does cover everything I want to cover in my research and James seems to like it, emailing me back: ‘I’ve had a flick through and this will form the basis of a very thorough discussion. Looks interesting’ which is great. I think he liked the idea of my inclusion of the Romantic scientific movement and their tussles with the Enlightenment which has a lot of scope for philosophical arguing and anthropological analysis, something I’m looking forward to.
February 24: I present my newly redrafted question to the Principles of Social Research class and prepare to have my question picked apart and redressed, or, at the very least, be told off for sneaking two questions into one. It now reads: ‘Using a naturopathic philosophical model, how can psychoneuroimmunology enable further understanding of chronic stress responses, and what is its relevance in clinical practice?’ Happily, my question is deemed as well-constructed and passes with no changes made to it at all. Marilys points out that I’m going to mainly focus on the interplay between naturopathic philosophical model and PNI with almost the last section of the thesis actually focused on clinical use and practical application which isn’t what I set out but is a great idea. Even better, Marilys points out that this is essentially a literature review for a PhD involving empirical study into the same area and I thrill at the thought of being able to improve my PhD application by about 2 kilos.
March 1: I begin to look at the core of PNI and go over the main points of it and remind myself how it works. Most students have a practical job in the health field already and get to use biochemical and pathophysiology knowledge every day. I’m really behind on this and decide that I have to set myself an essay on the Explanation of the Biochemistry of PNI, so that I can explain it to my peers who occasionally ask me about it. I already know what it is and how it works, but not well enough at a biochemical level. I do enjoy having to explain my thesis to my non-peer friends as it gives me a chance to reconsider it and get to know it a little better. A thesis, as with work, should be an extension of your own passions, not a toad that squats on your life, as Larkin was suggesting.
Did I write this at my desk or in bed?: desk!
And was feeling a bit: 
cheerful
cheerfulThoughts?
sleepy
busy