HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — A diagnosis of HIV/AIDS comes with new medications (hopefully) and a change of lifestyle, but it also comes with a new stigma attached to a person.
“As a physician, you really see the clinical aspect of treating a patient,” said Abbie Short, third-year Marshall University Honors College student. “You just see them as what is biologically affecting them, but you don’t see how that might affect their day-to-day life. You are treating the whole person, not just the one aspect.”
Short and her classmates in Maggie Stone’s honor’s seminar “The Stigma of Disease” had a Stigma Fair in the basement of the Memorial Student Center to illustrate the stigmas associated with different diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, cancer and mental illness.
The idea for the class, Stone said, was to give future practitioners, from nurses to therapists to doctors, a new perspective on how their future patients will experience different stigmas.
“The goal is as they go out into the field — and they are practicing whatever discipline they are and they are working with people that have stigmatizing conditions — that they are aware and find better ways to treat people so they don’t feel ‘othered’ or shamed,” Stone said.
Short and her partner Holly Farkosh chose inflammatory bowel diseases, such as Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, to present during the fair. They turned the stomach and intestines into a life-size Candyland-type board game. As fairgoers moved through the GI-tract, they would receive symptoms of the diseases.
Farkosh said many of the stigmas associated with inflammatory bowel diseases are because they are bathroom related.
