Week 4:

During this week, I delved more into researching specific pain societies based in India.  Originally I looked at some of the cancer societies based in India, but after further consultation with my mentor, I realized that the opioids used in cancer treatment is not being used to propagate a potential opioid crisis so it would be better to focus on pain societies.  This led me to look at the Indian Society of Pain Clinicians.  I perused the list of members that is available on their public website and checked whether there was any overlap between clinicians in the society and clinicians who are advocating for greater opioid use for chronic illnesses.  

I did not find much overlap so I continued to look at articles about whether there is a sizeable opioid use difference in India in the past 20 years.  This was where I began focusing my research going forward such that I am able to finish my data collection by next week as well.

Week 5:

This week I focused primarily on writing my introduction and background for my paper/poster - I first looked at statistics regarding the opioid epidemic in the United States and other countries across the world.  I initially found some difficulty in only finding statistics regarding opioids in western countries only, but later I found some more articles and public government websites in other countries that could supply me with the data I need to illustrate the relevance of opioids across the world as a point of study.  I then focused more on the use of opioids in India for the second half of the introduction and I continued looking at articles and other aspects of pain societies for my data collection.

I looked at the poster template in order to determine what other components of my research I should focus on for the remainder of my summer.