If you’re out and about in Ann Arbor on any given day, you might see medical anthropologist Katherine Hendy, PhD headed to work on her gigantic electric cargo bike. “It’s a great way to get around and Ann Arbor’s protected bike lanes make it easy to get to campus,” said Hendy.
Once at work, her curious nature has her asking questions the way anthropologists ask – open ended, wondering how everything is intertwined with everything else in society, and taking that richness and complexity as a starting point for her ethnographic research.
Hendy, a MICHR Postdoctoral Translational Scholars Program (PTSP) scholar and winner of this year’s three-minute-thesis (3MT) competition between U-M and the University of Minnesota, understands the importance of clear, concise communication when it comes to research. “The 3MT process forces you to strip out jargon, tell a good story, and get to the punchline quickly,” Hendy explained. Before the competition, she practiced her presentation on her parents while visiting them in San Francisco, where she grew up and later returned to pursue a PhD in anthropology at UC Berkeley.
A Winding Path
Like many researchers, she enjoys her winding career path. Job searching after being an undergrad in the early aughts, she landed with a nonprofit institute hiring ethnographic researchers in the Bay area. She liked interviewing people in the underground clubs about why they used MDMA (ecstasy) and other drugs. After receiving her master’s in social sciences from the University of Chicago, she returned to UC Berkeley for her dissertation project, examining how activists, researchers, and therapists are making the case for transitioning ecstasy from an illicit to an FDA-approved therapy.
“It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle but having an expanded network of scholars and an array of mentors allowed me to build key relationships.”
– Katie Hendy, PhD
Hendy moved to Michigan 10 years ago and started a family. Her husband is also an anthropologist and teaches criminology at Eastern Michigan University. She took up knitting during the pandemic, to help get her through endless Zoom calls while continuing her work. She heard that Michelle Obama also took up knitting during the pandemic and laughed as she wondered if Obama was secretly in one of her knitting groups on Facebook.
Insights from Pharmacogenomics
In 2019 she was accepted to a T32 training program at U-M’s School of Public Health, focusing on the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomics, a topic in which she knew nothing about but found fascinating. She began moving away from studying psychedelics to asking questions around pharmacogenomics testing its transforming care for depression. For example, a person with depression may be prescribed meds that are either ineffective or have severe side effects, as it can be challenging to get the right drug for the right person.
She gained a deeper sense of what the problems are for people going on and off different meds, which can be a very difficult process and experience. Tapering off one drug while battling side effects, the waiting period between primary care and specialty providers, then eventually moving on to a new drug is incredibly risky. And, many of the patients Dr. Hendy interviewed reported not being believed and even dropped by their physicians. over what they were reporting about their meds.
Commercial testing companies offer pharmacogenomics tests that can help drive decisions around which ones to prescribe, based on clinically important genetic variations that may impact how a person metabolizes and responds to certain meds. These commercial tests typically divide medications into three bins for that particular patient: green (continue prescribing as normal), yellow (start at a lower dose), and red (could have a significant gene-drug interaction).
While it may seem straightforward and helpful to do such testing, this new approach is controversial within psychiatry, which is what drew Hendy in. “That kind of debate between scientists and clinicians is a good place for qualitative researchers to get in there and start asking questions. What are the debates? What are the criteria for deciding whether a test is helpful? What other criteria are there?”
One of the participants in her study had struggled with anxiety and depression for 15 years and tried over a dozen medications, but had struggled with difficult side effects. The specialty clinic noticed side effects, so they suggested pharmacogenomic testing to help it all make sense. This helped her not only find the right med and dose but reassured her that her difficulties were not all in her head. Before the testing, she believed it was all in her head and she felt like a guinea pig. After testing she found order in the process, which felt comforting. The test proved valuable and gave both the patient and the physician a reason for the next drug they tried. Such testing can offer patients more certainty about the process.
A Little Help From MICHR
MICHR has been helpful on Hendy’s career path. As a PTSP scholar, she was able to do a lot more immersion in pharmacogenomics. “It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle but having an expanded network of scholars and an array of mentors allowed me to build key relationships with people like Vicki Ellingrod, PharmD, Dean of the School of Pharmacy and MICHR Associate Director,” explained Hendy. “And, the grant writing support was immensely helpful, as well as a K Writing workshop and mock study section.”
One key outcome of her experience as a MICHR PTSP scholar is diversification of her research methods. Well-trained and comfortable with qualitative methods, her coursework in statistical analysis now has her interviewing and surveying clinicians for exploratory sequential mixed methods and more robust data.
Medical anthropologists like Hendy think expansively about medicine and healing practices around the world. They put things in context of larger social historical conditions in which they exist. What’s different about medicine in the 21st century? How does that connect to other things happening in the world? How do governments make decisions around how medical care is given out? How do corporations influence the care people receive? Anthropologists connect to what it means to be human, how we think about illness and disease, and how people navigate their lives. They look for better ways to integrate new technologies and new interventions into clinical care that account for the kinds of problems people have when being treated.
As she rides her cool cargo bike home, Hendy is thinking about how when tests occur and the resulting interventions leave the lab, they become part of people’s lives and offer new possibilities – for them and for a better world.