Ethnic Elders and American Health Care—A Physician's Perspective

The aging process is a fugue composed of innumerable themes; the theme of “ethnicity” is by far one of its more dominant. Due to the increasing incidence of chronic, progressive infirmity and acute, catastrophic illness, the elderly are thrust into direct contact with the health care systems of their society. The experiences of ethnic elders in American health care situations are fraught with conflict and mutual dissatisfaction with the physician-patient relationship. Both providers and consumers of health care services harbor differing culture-bound perceptions of health, illness and the healing process; these cultural beliefs define personal and professional needs and expectations and notions of how those needs are to be met by others. Both physicians and patients can enhance their communication and their compassion for one another by acknowledgment of cultural differences and by increased willingness to interpret motives and behavior within native context.It behooves us in medicine to examine the cultural traditions underlying our own attitudes, beliefs and values about the aged in a universal sense, as well as in a culturally specific sense, that we may gain insight that will be helpful in serving elderly persons more effectively, and in solving some of the problems inherent in the aging process.     

Comparison of biophysical properties characterized for microtissues cultured using microencapsulation and liquid crystal based 3D cell culture techniques

Growing three dimensional (3D) cells is an emerging research in tissue engineering. Biophysical properties of the 3D cells regulate the cells growth, drug diffusion dynamics and gene expressions. Scaffold based or scaffoldless techniques for 3D cell cultures are rarely being compared in terms of the physical features of the microtissues produced. The biophysical properties of the microtissues cultured using scaffold based microencapsulation by flicking and scaffoldless liquid crystal (LC) based techniques were characterized. Flicking technique produced high yield and highly reproducible microtissues of keratinocyte cell lines in alginate microcapsules at approximately 350 ± 12 pieces per culture. However, microtissues grown on the LC substrates yielded at lower quantity of 58 ± 21 pieces per culture. The sizes of the microtissues produced using alginate microcapsules and LC substrates were 250 ± 25 μm and 141 ± 70 μm, respectively. In both techniques, cells remodeled into microtissues via different growth phases and showed good integrity of cells in field-emission scanning microscopy (FE-SEM). Microencapsulation packed the cells in alginate scaffolds of polysaccharides with limited spaces for motility. Whereas, LC substrates allowed the cells to migrate and self-stacking into multilayered structures as revealed by the nuclei stainings. The cells cultured using both techniques were found viable based on the live and dead cell stainings. Stained histological sections showed that both techniques produced cell models that closely replicate the intrinsic physiological conditions. Alginate microcapsulation and LC based techniques produced microtissues containing similar bio-macromolecules but they did not alter the main absorption bands of microtissues as revealed by the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Cell growth, structural organization, morphology and surface structures for 3D microtissues cultured using both techniques appeared to be different and might be suitable for different applications.