Health Sciences

This course explores the concept of human ecology and welfare. It provides a study of the human relationship with environment and habitat; the links between health, technology and behavior; the policy application of health ecology; and the connection between health care systems and welfare.

Correct medical knowledge is necessary for a modern intellectual. In this course, experts from various fields are invited to give in-depth introductions on daily life care or health problems that are easy to encounter from the physiological and psychological levels, so that college students can acquire correct medical concepts.

This course examines wicked, or complex, problems in health, including human health impacts from climate change and addressing it through perspectives from medicine and epidemiology, law and governance, and health and natural resource economics.

This course examines the rapidly emerging functional food/nutraceutical industry with an emphasis on the history, regulation, chemical basis and quality control of  healthy ingredients/products and their effects on human health. It covers concepts, history and global regulations of functional foods and nutraceuticals; classification of functional foods and nutraceuticals based on their chemical structures; unsaturated fatty acids, proteins, food pigments and dietary fibers as healthy food ingredients; health benefits of dietary phenolics, terpenes, phytosterols and sulphur-containing compounds; probiotics and prebiotics; small berries, spices, teas and herbs for health; and quality control and assurance of functional foods and nutraceuticals.

This course examines changing contours of human life including the experiences of health and illness and conceptions of life and death in relation to the development, production, and use of new or emerging technology. Moreover, looking into the entanglement of biomedical knowledge, policy, and technology in everyday life, it explores how life itself is made into an object of technological intervention. The course furthermore explores how this process, rather than simply offering solutions to given problems, also might reshape our bodily experiences of and relations with the world while engendering novel ethical and cultural problems for us to deal with. This course engages in extensive reading, contemplation, and discussion of literature in and around medical anthropology and science and technology. The format, with interactive class activities and oral and written assignments requires active participation.

Stress is a major determinant of global public health. Stress has been called a “health epidemic of the twenty-first century” by the World Health Organization and is associated with massive humanitarian, medical, and economic costs. This course introduces the basic principles of how our body's health is threatened by psychosocial stressors as diverse as daily worries, work stress, low social economic status, discrimination, and natural disasters. A major role is played by psychological factors such as perceived control, and conscious and unconscious thoughts, and emotions. The lectures cover the many ways in which the mind influences the body during stress, including the cardiovascular, hormonal and immune systems, metabolism, sleep, growth, ageing, reproduction, and sex. The course discusses stress management and recent contributions from the field of emotion regulation. Stress is not a “luxury problem” of the industrialized countries; it is also, and perhaps even more so, a leading health risk in less developed countries. Therefore, the course also explores the global relevance of stress and health. There is hardly a concept that is so ill defined in and outside science and at the same time so important for our health as stress. Not surprisingly the media are teeming with erroneous information about its effect on health. Students learn how to systematically gather information about stress and health thereby training the essential academic skill of distinguishing scientific knowledge from omnipresent unsupported claims in the rapidly accumulating information volume in the media (especially internet), and evaluating this knowledge in terms of its meaning for public health. This course requires students to have completed an introduction to psychology course as a prerequisite.