Friday, August 12, 2011

An extension of the last post

Okay I'm sorry. It's just unbelievably frustrating. My question to you is why become a health worker if all you believe about people is that they are ignorant and cannot understand anything you say? Maybe it's your condescending tone that makes them not want to listen. All they, the person in pain and in need, hear is, "You are so dumb and I cannot believe I'm wasting my time on you. Could you just hurry up and die so that I can move on to my next person that could maybe survive?" Well would you like to go to a place where you are constantly publicly berated for basically who you are and the opportunities that were never offered to you? It's no wonder that so many people in the world prefer their traditional healers. I sure as hell would (except my acupuncturist at home is kind of a jerk to me but guess what? I stopped going to her... consequences).

I'm so tired of hearing about people becoming health workers, and this is global mind you, and then being annoyed that they "have to" care for the sick and the needy (and more often than not, the poor). Isn't the whole point of becoming a health worker to help these people? Isn't the reason why a person chooses the difficult path of education to become a health worker to be able to try to heal the sick and help them lead a healthy, fuller life? Am I completely naive in this? Am I alone in this?

Unfortunately I do know of a good percentage of folks that choose medical school or another health care path merely for the money and status. That drives me insane too.

This is all stemming from me reading the 2005 World Health Report put out by the World Health Organization. Want to know one of the prime reasons why women and children (at a rate higher than men) are dying around the world? EXCLUSION. What do I mean by that? Any barriers to accessing (any kind of including traditional medicine) health care like poverty (in bold because that's a huge one and because it includes illiteracy), gender (another huge one e.g. in India a girl is up to 50% more likely to die between her first and fifth birthday than a boy), culture (including language) and geographical location. What set me off this time were these quotes, "When, for example, in a busy urban maternity hospital in India, the nurses in the labour ward do not complete patient case notes for low-caste women, that deprives them of the quality safeguards given to other women. Poor and anonymous patients .... get inferior treatment, especially when scarce resources are reserved for richer patients." (I'm going to pull a Seth Meyers and say, "REALLY?!?!? Really you so-called carers of the sick? Just because the woman is put into a low-caste you would deny her the care she deserves BECAUSE SHE'S A PERSON?!) and the other was this, "In rural areas of the United Republic of Tanzania, for example, children from the poorest part of the population who sought care for probable pneumonia were less than half as liekly to be given antibiotics as richer children." HONESTLY?! What is the justification? "Well I won't get paid..." TOUGH. Do you get paid for other things? Yes. Do these CHILDREN have to go to work to get paid to be able to pay you (you greedy jerk) so they can live to see their fifth birthday?

I get it. Health workers have families too. Health workers need to look out for themselves. But you know what? Just because you now have the "status" of being a health worker doesn't make you some super awesome human being. You are still a homo-sapien sapien just like everyone else. Act like it.

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