Help Others to Help Yourself

So much for a vision of what a healthy society should be. As an individual, what you can do to improve your community's health is to participate actively and to volunteer your services in various fields: for example, as a guide in hospitals; to lobby against polluting industries; or to care for older citizens. Improving a community's health can be the entry point for improving the quality of life for the entire community! Remember, that by helping to improve the health of the community, you are helping yourself and your children!

Health Community

A healthy community looks after the health of all its members, including the underprivileged. It protects the rights of the disabled and treats them respectfully as individuals who are 'differently abled', and also develops active programs for preventing and treating drug abuse and alcohol abuse. Progressive communities also provide hotlines for suicide prevention as well as counseling, so that people have someone to reach out to and talk to.

Individual Initiative

All political action, however, starts with an individual's initiative. Doctors in India constantly complain about the shortage of safe blood banks. Isn't this state of affairs tragic in an overpopulated country like India (where one would imagine that there would be no shortage of people willing to donate blood). When was the last time you donated blood? If we do not develop a social conscience, we will not be able to improve our community's health, and we will all pay the price sooner than later.

Eradicating the root cause

We still continue to take a piecemeal approach to treating disease on a case-by-case basis, but this approach is doomed to fail in the long run. Let's take the example of bronchitis. At present, we treat only those individuals who are suffering from the disease. However, a social approach to treating bronchitis would focus on removing those factors in the environment which are known to cause or aggravate bronchitis, such as air pollution, poor working conditions, industrial pollution and cigarette smoking. While the modern medical system is designed to look after ill patients, we cannot improve the health of our community without taking concerted political action!

ILL Health Care System

The entire health care system is ill! It concentrates on treating the sick, but does little to prevent them from becoming so. In fact the term 'health care' system takes care only of the sick. It treats only individuals, but does not attack the basic causes of illnesses, such as poverty and illiteracy. Far from encouraging people to lead healthy lives, our society encourages them to harm themselves, and a prime example is cigarette smoking. Unfortunately, profits come before people --- and there are too many people making too much money from tobacco, so that the tobacco industry continues to spend billions a year encouraging people to smoke, and the government allows them to do so. The question is: what sort of society lets a small group of people persuade the masses to engage in behavior which might kill them --- and then provides medical care to try to save them?

Political problems need political solutions

Political problems need political solutions, but governments in India have done precious little for providing health care for the common man. They make grandiose plans for a primary health centre in each village, but typically these PHCs have no medicines or supplies, because they have been siphoned off. They build expensive super specialty hospitals in cities, but most of these just end up as a palace of diseases, while the poor continue to die without food and shelter.

Origins of Illnesses in different sections of society

Keeping in mind all the foregoing factors, we simply cannot afford to continue to live in our own shells! In the final analysis, health is a political matter, and the types of illnesses found in society are reflection of the nature of that society. Illnesses do not hit all groups in society randomly and equally, and just as wealth is unequally distributed in Indian society, so is ill health. One of the best predictors of a person's life expectancy is his annual income and extensive research has proven that many illnesses have their origins in social conditions. The difference starts right from childhood, and poor nutrition means that the children of the poor are shorter, weaker, sicker and thinner than those of the rich --- even at birth.

Although an individual's life expectancy has increased, the gap in life expectancy between the poor and the rich has also continued to increase all over the world. According to a survey of global health by the World Health Organization, poverty was the greatest underlying cause of disease, leaving many with inadequate access to nutrition, drugs and basic health care. Those living in poverty must focus on survival priorities and often don't have the time or the energy to prevent or treat illnesses, until they are forced to. Leading a hand-to-mouth existence means falling ill is a luxury they really cannot afford! Unfortunately, many doctors and hospitals fail to treat the poor as well as they would treat the rich, so that many simply avoid doctors and hospitals completely because of inferior care.