Transcript
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The speaker introduces the idea that public health should be viewed through a more complex, multidisciplinary lens. He contrasts this with the traditional linear approach and argues that disease often reflects deeper societal problems.
thank you very much I'm Chris Tiki I'm a faculty member at the college of global Public Health here at it at NYU and thank you for coming out and giving us your time on a Sunday afternoon a beautifulSunday afternoon it's really fantastic to share a stage with so many talented and brilliant thinkers and and experimenters and great speakers so I'm here my job today is to tell you and to convince you that looking at publichealth through a different lens actually gives you an advantage over looking at it through sort of a traditional type of public health and when I got into public health and I think in most cases public health is anarea that tends to look at linear solutions to problems so we have an agent that causes a disease and a number of people are affected by it and so we think that removing the agent or preventing people from
getting exposed to the agent is enough to solve the disease that's a linear way of thinking and in truth Public Health and life really is much more complex than that and usually the disease the disease itself is morea symptom of what is going wrong in a larger society when I got into public health and whenever we all do some of our public health students are here now in the very first class among the first classes
Using Jon Snow's cholera investigation as an example, the speaker explains how public health has traditionally relied on specialized silos. He argues that these narrow perspectives can miss the broader complexity of health challenges.
we look at Jon Snow not the Lord High Commissioner of the Nights Watch but Jon Snow was a nineteenth-century physician in London and in 1854 he was faced with a cholera epidemic that was killing a number of peopleand what Jon Snow did was he mapped out the cases of cholera and found that there were a number of cases that seemed to cluster around wells and the solution that Jon Snow came up with was to removethe handle from the well and the cholera epidemic was ended and we we tend to see that as being a triumph in public health and of course it was was a great triumph in public health because he wasable to use science in statistics to decide how to deal with a public health emergency and in fact it's carried through today to how we look at challenges so if you were to go into public health now you
would probably become a health policy expert or an epidemiologist or you might get a specialty in immunization or in child health and in fact it carries all the way through to how we do international development if you wereto get hired at UNICEF or at w-h-o you would become a specialist in a very specific area in public health you could be involved in HIV or in nutrition and and that could be your career and you wouldspend much of your life looking at public health or the problems from a very specific silo the danger is that if you're a hammer everything starts to look like a nail after a while and you start to seethem really as very specific types of challenges and those silos can actually prevent you from seeing the complexity of a public health challenge so we at the College of global public health here it's a relatively new college although
public health has been at NYU for over 40 years we tend to look at these types of challenges in a multidisciplinary way we think it gives a better lens into the complexity of the problem at hand and so
The talk shifts to obesity as an example of a problem shaped by psychology, environment, physiology, and food systems. The speaker describes courses that train students to treat such issues as symptoms of larger societal challenges.
I have a couple of examples one that we look at very frequently is obesity if you think of obesity as a public health challenge if you talk to people who see it as a linear problem with a linearsolution it's just an energy balance problem right it's just how many calories are coming in on average and how many calories are going out on average but in truth it's way more complex than that obesity is a societalchallenge has to do with individual psychology it has to do with group psychology it has to do with individual activity or the activity environment how easy is it for you to work out it has to do with physiologyit has to do with food production has to do with food consumption so all of those pieces are areas when you start to look at it you can see that they all have an impact on the challenge of
obesity and that the obesity is really a breakdown of all of those complex features in society and the other piece is that they're interrelated you can push down on one area and it's going to probably change another areaand so if you look at that as a complex challenge using what we call a systems approach you're much more likely to find something that's going to be there's gonna have a long lasting impact for you and theother piece is that if you look at health challenges that way you're more likely to see unintended consequences so if you're gonna do something to try to change the outcome you can start to see how the the unintendedconsequences might outweigh the benefit of the choice that you made so in that in that in that context we've designed a number of courses here so we've designed a course working with UNICEF on behavior and communication strategies and
epidemics where they bring in those people that are siloed from around the world and they bring them to us we mix them together with our students we have them work on real challenges on Colorado Zika virus on Ebolaand we specifically task them with trying to look at these problems as a as a symptom of a greater societal challenge that they need to address and in fact is incredibly effective and and we've seen them with the
The speaker explains how students and professionals are mixed into teams and assigned different roles to push them outside their comfort zones. This approach helps generate more innovative and practical solutions to public health problems.
UN it's there's a real a realnow a it's it's a it's a trend for them to train their senior staff using this type of an approach it's very very powerful and what we do in this case is we put everybody on teams so we'llhave their students and we'll have our students together on teams everybody on the team gets an avatar they'll be an environmental scientist they'll be an anthropologist they'll be an economist there'll be a political scientist in that Avatar they'retasked with looking at the challenge from that perspective and very importantly we give them an avatar that's outside of their day job so if you're an economist in real life we're gonna make you an anthropologist during the courseand we're deliberately trying to get people to be uncomfortable during the course of that that two week or three week course that we do and and what we've seen is that by being uncomfortable everybody in the class is
looking at the problem through a different lens and the benefit for us is that we're getting new solutions we're getting innovative solutions we're getting workable solutions we're getting we're getting ways of approaching a challenge that they hadn't donebefore so they can approach it and return back into the field or our students can get a job with these agencies and they can have a benefit they have an advantage over people that have only looked at it
He closes with the InnoCentive example, showing how people from outside a field often solve problems better than specialists. The conclusion reinforces the value of looking at challenges through unfamiliar lenses and treating them as part of complex systems.
in one way and what I use as an inspiration on this there's a company called InnoCentive that was started maybe ten years ago in Indianapolis by a company called Eli Lilly and in incentive the the management Lilly realizedthat having a bunch of PhD chemists on staff to create molecules was ultimately inefficient so what they did was they put the solution out into the cloud and it's thought well let's see if we can get people whoare not working for you that Lilly who can make molecules more cheaply and more efficiently than our chemist can and so they did and they offered a prize and they got people who made solutions who are coming fromIndia and from sub-saharan Africa and from Latin America and they got better solutions and they would have gotten from their own scientists it was pretty amazing and so they thought well maybe we're on to something let's see if
we can solve other problems this way let's solve biology problems this way or chemistry or physics or environmental health problems and now that the company has been there for about ten years they've had thousands of these problems solvedand so about two years ago a number of professors went in and they looked at the types of problems that were solved and who saw them and what they found was that the people who solve the problems weremore likely to be people who came from other disciplines in their own so it was the physicists they were solving the biology problems and was the chemists that were solving the environmental health problems in fact the best predictorof the likelihood of solving the problem was how far away the person was in terms of their education it's a pretty fascinating so having that lens and the ability to look at something completely differently and to be able
to look at it as a part of a complex system meant that these had a greater chance of solving these problems and we see that it really works I mean we can probably talk to any of our studentsthat have taken these classes and they're innovative you don't find them at other colleges NYU is way out in front of other places with this but if you talk to our students they'll tell you that this approach isa new way of doing it it's a powerful way of doing it and it's a way that we can really address some major challenges so I'm delighted to be able to tell you about it today I'm really honoredto be here with you and I think it fits perfectly within the context of this this great event that we have the framing and the lens of looking at it through a different lens that really shows you how
powerful this approach can be so thank you very much