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TikTok has more than 1.5 billion users globally. Health and wellness content on the application increased by more than 600% in 2021. This systematic review seeks to summarize which fields within medicine have embraced researching health communication on the TikTok platform and the most common measures reported within this literature. Research questions include what categories of health topics on TikTok are investigated in the literature, trends in topics by year, and types of outcomes reported. Embase, CINAHL, Scopus, and Ovid MEDLINE databases were searched in March 2024. Eligible studies met four criteria: (1) investigated human health topics on TikTok; (2) conducted in the United States; (3) published in English; and (4) published in a peer-reviewed journal. Of the 101 included studies, 50.5% (N = 51) discussed non-surgical specialties, 9.9% (N = 10) discussed topics within surgery, and 11.9% (N = 12) discussed COVID-19. The number of papers referencing non-surgical topics spiked in 2023, and no increase was seen in the number of COVID-19 papers over time. Most papers reported a number of interactions, and papers about mental health were least likely to report accuracy. Our findings highlight several health topics with a wide breadth of research dedicated to them, such as dermatology and COVID-19, and highlight areas for future research, such as the intersection of cancer and TikTok. Findings may be influential in the fields of medicine and healthcare research by informing health policy and targeted prevention efforts. This review reveals the need for future policies that focus on the role and expectations of the healthcare worker in health communication on social media. Implications for clinical practice include the need for providers to consider an individual's perception of health and illness, given the wide variety of information available on social media applications such as TikTok. This review was pre-registered on PROSPERO (CRD42024529182). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sick Body Writing: Towards an Affective Genetic Criticism examines the idea that manuscripts can be affected by illness as much as their authors' bodies are. This article aims to highlight a critical gap in the methodology of literary genetic criticism by introducing a new lens of affective genetic criticism. Genetic criticism looks at the archive of drafts and notes related to a literary work-in-progress. The application of affect theory brings focus to the impacts of the author's bodily experience during writing while in different states of un/healthiness. The effects of authors' health on their writing, especially textual non/production and the representations of un/healthiness, can be found in their archive in a variety of forms, whether represented in the narrative or responsible for elements of the narrative's structure. Using two case studies from different literary canons, James Joyce (modernist) and Aidan Chambers (children's and Young Adult), the article concludes that this lens can be productively applied to understand better the embodiment of writing processes and adaptations of writing environments as a result of affective needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION: We aimed to assess the effect of a shared institutional research database on medical students’ scholarly work, perceived research competency, and self-reported satisfaction. METHODS: An institutional inventory database was created on Google Sheets with a listing of available mentors and a description of their ongoing research projects. The inventory database was shared with interested students and faculty. Students who agreed to participate were surveyed pre- and post-inventory. Survey questions assessed student demographics, prior research experience, and their perception of research competency and satisfaction. The number of presentations, publications, and articles pre- and post-inventory were also abstracted. Survey responses were compared using the Mann-Whitney U test. RESULTS: A total of 20 students were surveyed pre-inventory and at a median followup of six months (5–7) post-inventory. There was a significant increase in scholarly presentations and publications post-inventory (p<0.05 for all). Furthermore, post-inventory, students reported feeling more confident in establishing an academic career, finding good mentors, managing their relationship with their mentor, managing professional challenges, and effectively showcasing themselves professionally and describing their research (p<0.05 for all). More than 65% of students agreed or strongly agreed that the database was easy to use, accessible, transparent, and would like a similar database created for other specialty departments. CONCLUSIONS: After performing mentorship-guided research through an institutional research database, medical students felt more confident in their ability to perform research and produced more scholarly work. Therefore, we recommend a research database be created across all institutional departments to foster interest in conducting research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on American writer Djuna Barnes’s novel “Nightwood” (1936) and Estonian writer Reed Morn’s novel “The Talented Parasite” (Andekas parasiit, 1927). Specifically, the article analyses how the two novels represent bodies, affects and materiality, relying on the notion of affective modernism (Taylor 2012). English language modernist texts have been frequently portrayed as aiming for impersonality and the rejection of emotions and sentiment. Authors like Julie Taylor have challenged this assumption, demonstrating the presence of emotions, drives and sensations in modernist texts. New research on modernism has shown modernist texts both portraying and theorizing bodies (Watts et al. 2019), discussing the relationship between the human and the non-human (Ryan 2015) as well as the Anthropocene (Adkins 2022). This article focuses on affects and senses, in particular the way affects move between bodies, being simultaneously creative and disruptive (Taylor 2012: 1). Both authors analyzed here employ affective ambivalence (Taylor 2012: 2). The article uses Tim Clarke’s (2021) concept of morbid vitalism to analyse how the two novels engage with a central problem of modernity: how to live in the context of despair. This question is viewed from a gendered perspective. The article builds on Taylor’s and Clarke’s analysis of Barnes, enriching their interpretations with insights from other scholars to bring the notion of affective modernism into the study of Estonian literature. The analysis shows that Barnes’s novel provides an excellent example of morbid vitalism, showing recognizable affective tensions between life and death, felt especially keenly in the social margins where gender trouble does not permit characters to identify with normative social fantasies. Marginality becomes a privilege that permits the characters to see the contradictions in ideologies promising coherent subjecthood and to create modes of being that are oriented towards death while remaining open to the presence of others. The morbidity of Morn’s novel does not come to a similar understanding of affects and embodiment or embrace the vital potential of morbidity. “Nightwood” challenges the binary gender system, while “The Talented Parasite” fails to break out of the culturally prescribed internalized misogyny. However, both novels test the boundaries of affective modernism. Women writers faced the especially difficult task of finding ways of writing about bodies and emotions without being criticized for dated sentimentality. Both texts provide new modes of affective writing, in which the body is present in the text, but not subjected to stereotypical emotional regimes. Barnes is bolder in her project. Morn, despite the pessimism of her final conclusion, addresses the same range of questions about representing the affects created by living outside of social expectation. Barnes does not grant a happy ending to her freak dandies, but affords them considerable vitality. Morn’s conclusion is pessimistic: the marginal can escape only into death. Both novels pose the question of how to live with despair and both conclude that the only answer can be found in affective ambivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a marked impact on healthcare businesses since 2020. Healthcare organizations suffered greatly from financial stress coupled with disruptions in national and global supply chains. Healthcare workers and patients alike experienced significant downturns in their physical and mental health. Large government and legislative reforms were enacted to combat the progression of the pandemic. This paper explores these areas in detail in order to provide a clearer understanding of the successes and inadequacies that exist within the United States healthcare system as illuminated by the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editors would like to thank the following reviewers for their assistance. Yao Liu Xian Xue Liu Yang. [Extracted from the article]