The following paper explores the various effects of stress on the endocrine system. Many understand that being stressed can jeopardize maintaining adequate health, but what specifically happens when humans are stressed? Why does stress affect human health? This paper delves into background information, previous research, and the depths to which stress negatively affects the body. The effects stress has on the endocrine system, specifically on the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis (HPT) and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), is discussed, and additionally, at home de-stressing methods are researched. The study included a set of participants at Arizona State University. The method took place over the course of 2 weeks: one normal week, and the other with the implementation of a de-stressing method. The normal week involved the participants living their daily lives with the addition of a stress-measuring survey, while the second week involved implementing a de-stressing method and stress-measuring survey. The purpose of this study was to discover if there was a correlation between performing these relaxation activities and decreasing stress levels in ASU students. The results found that students reported they felt more relaxed and calm after the activities. Overall, this thesis provides information and first hand research on the effects of stress and stress-reducing activities and discusses the importance of maintaining lower stress levels throughout everyday life.

The following paper explores the various effects of stress on the endocrine system. Many understand that being stressed can jeopardize maintaining adequate health, but what specifically happens when humans are stressed? Why does stress affect human health? This paper delves into background information, previous research, and the depths to which stress negatively affects the body. The effects stress has on the endocrine system, specifically on the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis (HPT) and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), is discussed, and additionally, at home de-stressing methods are researched. The study included a set of participants at Arizona State University. The method took place over the course of 2 weeks: one normal week, and the other with the implementation of a de-stressing method. The normal week involved the participants living their daily lives with the addition of a stress-measuring survey, while the second week involved implementing a de-stressing method and stress-measuring survey. The purpose of this study was to discover if there was a correlation between performing these relaxation activities and decreasing stress levels in ASU students. The results found that students reported they felt more relaxed and calm after the activities. Overall, this thesis provides information and first hand research on the effects of stress and stress-reducing activities and discusses the importance of maintaining lower stress levels throughout everyday life.

The United States healthcare system does not perform as well as other countries including Germany and England, despite spending the most money on healthcare. It is well-established that there have been attempts at reform in the U.S. healthcare system multiple times in the past. This research paper describes the health care systems in the U.S., Germany, and England to analyze the strengths to create practical healthcare reform ideas for the U.S. This was done by describing each of the country's health care systems in detail, including the history of each country's health care system, the quality of care, the access to care, and the funding of the health care system. Based on this analysis of these health care systems, recommendations for health care reform are provided for the U.S. with revisions to the Affordable Care Act.

Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disorder where the body mistakenly attacks healthy joints. This in turn causes inflammation resulting in pain and swelling. It is very important to get RA accurately diagnosed and treated as early as possible. Similarly, with any disease: the longer it is left untreated, the more damage it can cause. RA can cause irreversible joint damage leading to disability. The purpose of this study is to determine if oral microbiome can be used as an additional criterion to aid in diagnosing RA. Several oral microbes have already been identified as biomarkers for RA in saliva. In this study, 10 participants were recruited: 6 diagnosed with RA and 4 Healthy as a control. Two subgroups of RA were done within this study; those diagnose with a positive Rheumatoid Factor (RF) and those diagnose with a negative RF. These subgroups were then compared in order to determine the validity of using certain microbes as biomarkers for RA even when different diagnostic criteria were met. The microbe Parahaemolyticus had the largest measure of effect, showing the greatest potential for statistically significant results with a larger sample size. If we can work narrow to down specific microbes to be undoubtedly higher in abundance with already diagnosed RA patients when comparing to healthy participants, this will be a gamechanger. Not only could we give a higher sense of confidence with the diagnosis of RA, but this could streamline RA diagnosis.

Populations in the United States and globally struggle to receive equal and affordable access to healthcare, this is no secret. However there are several minority and underprivileged groups within the population that experience disproportionate quality of healthcare when compared to their cis-gendered heterosexual counterparts.
Individuals that align and identify themselves as part of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning (LGBTQ+) Community, often face discrimination and bias from within the healthcare system that prevent them from receiving adequate patient knowledge, tailored and beneficial healthcare, as well as social support when seeking treatment for conditions that may at times, be more persistent within the community. Examples of these holes within the healthcare system include a lack of culturally competent and appropriate care for those in the community, access to affordable treatments, and other unique health needs.
Consequently, as a minority group these members face social and environmental factors that contribute to their overall wellbeing and health, and therefore training and education need to be implemented for future and current healthcare providers to assess, recognize and acknowledge these varying factors and how they contribute to a patient’s overall wellbeing.

Project C.U.R.E. is a nonprofit organization that delivers donated medical supplies and services to developing nations across the world. Currently, the Phoenix location has three full time employees, so a majority of the manual work is completed by episodic and long-term volunteers as well as semesterly interns. Volunteers are the backbone of the organization's daily productivity. Productivity among the Project C.U.R.E. warehouses varies greatly by location and is not directly related to the size of the warehouse. Productivity if hereby defined as as a warehouse's capability to meet the organization's goal of one container per week. Productivity can be increased or decreased based on the number of volunteers, funding, and catalogued inventory. Across all warehouses there is generally an overflow of donated equipment and consumable products, and therefore this is not usually a factor in productivity. In order to better understand why the Phoenix warehouse is the second most productive despite being the smallest, we researched how the motivations of volunteers. A survey was conducted to assess the motives of Project C.U.R.E.'s volunteers by quantifying their responses according to the Volunteerism Functional Inventory (VFI). The survey also produced information regarding volunteer demographics (ie. including gender, age, and occupation), as well as statistics about how often they volunteer at Project C.U.R.E. and their overall satisfaction with the organization. The data was then analyzed to determine the most relevant VFI characteristic. Upon analyzing the data, it was observed that the majority of participants were male (58.95%) and were between the ages of 18 and 25 (82.11%). The results also showed that Project C.U.R.E. utilizes a large number of episodic volunteers from Arizona State University (due to its close proximity to the Phoenix warehouse) was supported in that the data showed 72.63% of participants were undergraduate students and that 48.42% had just volunteered for their first time. After combining survey questions that corresponded to the same characteristic of volunteerism as outlined by Clary et al. (values, social, career, understanding, protective, and enhancement) the average of the responses was taken and used to determine the most relevant motives for our volunteer population. Based on the data, values (average score of 5.0) and understanding (average score of 5.0) were the two most relevant characteristics and protective (average score of 1.0) was the least relevant to volunteers. Additionally, 41.1% of survey respondents reported food would incentivize them to return to Project C.U.R.E. Additionally, 35.6% of survey respondents reported receiving Project C.U.R.E. merchandise would incentivize them to return in the future. Moving forward, it is recommended that the Project CURE Phoenix location begin providing their volunteers with merchandise and other forms of recognition based on the number of hours they committed to the organization.

The rise of the average life span in developed countries in the past couple of centuries can be traced back to implementation of relatively simple health interventions. Also, accompanying the rise in the average life span is the rise in chronic disease. Current treatments for chronic disease is often very costly and only offers partial alleviation to the problem. Preventing the chronic disease upstream of the problem happening in the first place is both significantly more effective and cheaper. Raised bed gardening helps prevent chronic disease processes from happening through mental, physical, and nutritional health benefits. A subset of people that would particularly benefit from raised bed gardening would be families receiving homes from Habitat from Humanity for many different reasons including susceptibility to a gardening intervention, availability of materials, and location of the homes. A guide to implement these gardens is provided which is supplemented with a combination of research and personal experience.