The project that I am undertaking this summer is titled "Investigating the Role of Pharmaceutical Companies in Propagating a Potential Opioid Crisis in India through Corporate Donations to Indian Medical Societies".  This project aims to understand how drug companies are promoting the use of opioids in treating non-terminal illnesses as a means of making additional profit off the additional sale of opioids.  In terms of what I have done in the past few weeks to pursue this research, I have looked at the different pain societies based in India and also looked at other research pertaining to the use of opioids in India and the potential corporate role in their overuse.   project that I am undertaking this summer is titled "Investigating the Role of Pharmaceutical Companies in Propagating a Potential Opioid Crisis in India through Corporate Donations to Indian Medical Societies".  This project aims to understand how drug companies are promoting the use of opioids in treating non-terminal illnesses as a means of making additional profit off the additional sale of opioids.  In terms of what I have done in the past few weeks to pursue this research, I have looked at the different pain societies based in India and also looked at other research pertaining to the use of opioids in India and the potential corporate role in their overuse.  

My plan has not changed a lot in the past few weeks, although originally my topic was just about the corporate sponsorships of medical societies in India generally.  My mentor suggested that there might be more to be explored with regards to opioids in India so I changed my topic accordingly.  During my data collection, I further explored the use of opioids in palliative care, cancer care, and pain care in India.  This started with a precursory web search of the list of medical societies in India in these fields, and following this, I did a preliminary search on articles and other research that might be relevant to the research.  I decided later that focusing on pain societies over palliative care and cancer care societies would probably be best because the prescription of opioids for chronic pain is what mostly leads to overuse of opioids.

Going into this project, I did not expect to learn about how to best approach the topic in terms of research.  Most of the research that I have conducted so far outside of the Laidlaw program has been geared towards hard science or primary research methods, but this research project is definitely involving more secondary research as well.  I am learning more about how the healthcare system in India is structured and how different states have different approaches towards medicine.  For example, the state of Kerala in India has the most palliative care success because it utilizes a community-based approach that includes major lifestyle changes above all else in addition to opioids.

Some challenges I have faced include finding additional pain societies due to the website search engine I was using being more inclined towards Western websites rather than Indian websites.  To address this issue, I used an incognito browser to do most of my searching for these societies, and also consulted an online database to see which medical societies were still active.  Going forward, I still need to address how to best organize my data such that it is logical and cohesive.

Looking forward to the next few weeks, I still need to accomplish the following steps: finishing the last part of my data collection, organizing my data and research into a poster format, and writing out the limitations section of my paper such that I know what the scope of the research I completed fully is.