Day 4

Inner Journey: Today was a good day. We went to a pharmacy museum, and so far, it was the best part of the trip for me. When learning about old medicine practice, I learned that most older medicine was unsound science, and a lot of it flat out didn’t work. For instance, when learning about the old practice of putting leaches on an individual as a form of bloodletting, we learned that to this day leaches have an anticoagulant and that no medicine we have today is as effective as a leach to stimulate blood flow to an area such as an amputated appendage. This made me stop and think about how much we still have to understand about the human body. When the tour guide was telling stories about using opium as a cure all my first thought was, “well that’s just dumb,” or taking pills with arsenic one hand and on the other hand labeling arsenic as poison. This seems like it was madness. Although as reflection I came to the understanding that this is why we call it, “practicing medicine.” While what some of these doctors did was immoral, and flat out illogical at least they were trying something new. This drive to want to try new medicines, I believe, was the bases of the empire that western medicine has become. Without these strange and diluted practices, that really hurt a lot more people than they helped, we would not be where we are today. I thought it was really interesting that different sodas where originally made to help medicines taste better or for some other therapeutic purpose. For instance, Tonic soda was made with the bark of a cinchona tree. This substance called quinine is extremely effective at fighting off the symptoms of Malaria and was added to this soda for that reason. To this day Quinine is still used in tonic water and helps to give it it’s bitter taste. When thinking about how these old medicines are still relevant today, it made me think about what medicine practices we use today that one day we may look back and see how wrong we really were. If leaches have such a great effect on the human body, better than any medicine, why have we not figured out how? Could it be that one day we will, and then look back on medicines like warfarin or Coumadin and be in complete dismay as to how we could have been so wrong? This is interesting to think about. How many people do we unknowingly cause more harm too simply because we lack an understanding of how the world around us effects our body’s. As nurses we are supposed to take a vow to never do any harm and yet, whether conscious or not, we do harm every day to patients simply because science is always a work in progress, and I am convinced after seeing this museum that even with the scientific method and all the hurdles western medicine has jumped, that still are unknowingly harming many people more than we are helping them, but only time can tell whether the methods we use are effective or not.

Outer Journey: Today we started out going to a museum of Louisiana. This was really interesting to see all the artifacts that helped to make this city what it is today. When we started the first part of the museum was a collection of different guns and swords that were used in the battle of Louisiana. We saw many different pictures and depictions of the what happened in the battle of Louisiana. They also had a lot of old musical instruments such as a bugle, a drum, and an odd looking handmade banjo. While walking through this museum, I noticed that the wood floors were extremely well made and the wood work was phenomenal. You could tell someone put a lot of time and money into making this place beautiful. They also had a portion about pirates and how they helped both sides during the war in different ways. I think we coolest thing I saw however would have to be the old 45 vinyl’s singing about what happened during the war. To me, this told the story in a way that I understand it best, through music. After we finished at the Louisiana museum we decided to go to lunch and we ate at a place called café Dumont. I had a shrimp po’boys sandwich and it was really delicious. The Cajun seasonings that are used down here really are exceptional. I realized during lunch that a place I had gone to the night before charged my card an extra one hundred dollars, so after lunch I had to deal with that. I found out that if you open a tab at a bar in New Orleans, if any will open a tab at all, they automatically hold one hundred dollars, on top of your bill, for up to five days. I was able to transfer money, but this made for a very stressful morning. We then went to a pharmacy museum, and this was definitely something everyone should see. We saw a lot of medicines that were used during this time that today we know are very bad for a person. I saw a machine that was kind of like a tanning bed with one bulb and was used for vitamin D deficiency and jaundice. We had a guide toward the end of the time being there, and he was very knowledgeable about older medical practices and also told the stories in a way that was humorous and appealing. Once we finished at the museum we took an Uber back to the hotel, and decided to go down and get in the hot tub. It felt good after walking the last two days, to kick back in a hot tub. After we got out we went back to our rooms to get ready, and ended up going to a Mexican restaurant across the street. The food was actually really good. I got the vegetarian fajitas and I had enough food for two meals. Finally, we went to bourbon street to see what all the hype was about. It was fun, but a little bit too crazy for my taste. Overall, today was a really good day filled with excitement and plenty of walking.