The Sociology of Sickness

I spent my weekend in the hospital taking care of my mother –in-law who has been experiencing chest pains and difficulty of breathing.
The sociology of illness is related to the organizations managing health care, the professions giving health care and the attitude and behavior of people around illness or health care in general.

In first world countries, rich and poor people rely on public health care. In short, public health care is very accessible. 
In our country, tertiary hospitals are found in cities only as though only people in the cities get sick of ailments requiring highly specialized health care such as major surgical operations requiring state- of -the - art facilities.

In many rural areas, if you need emergency tertiary health care between midnight and dawn, you are at risk of dying because there is no public transportation at these hours to bring you to tertiary hospitals in cities. 

The health profession, especially the medical profession is now very specialized that one wonders whether, at all, the doctors remember that there is a value added to examining the entire body as the sum of all the body parts.
Doctors feel constrained to be the MD of record of a patient if the ailment is not their specialization - even if MDs studied medicine for decades. 

This kind of medical ethics and tradition need to be revisited. 

Today, in doctors’ offices, we find medical secretaries getting the medical history of a patient when the tale of a patient is crucial to the diagnosis of an ailment.
In effect, what the doctor gets in terms of history is hearsay.
Indeed, perhaps, this is part of the medical transcription age.

In emergency rooms, resident doctors spend more time preparing their report for their mentors rather than physically examining the patient who has come for emergency treatment.

In another third world country, I actually witnessed resident doctors neglecting to pay attention to a patient who was having a heart attack because they were more focused on writing their report to an incoming mentor consultant doctor.
Perhaps, the patient could have lived if they had focused their attention to the patient instead of writing their report.
I mean, there should be a time for writing the report later when the patient has emerged from the emergency condition.  Instead of studiously hearing the symptoms as felt by the patient and religiously performing a physical examination, the knee jerk reaction is to order a battery of  laboratory procedures ( expensive for a majority of patients ) as a data gathering procedure in aid of diagnosis.
Needless to say, some of these procedures are unnecessary for some good doctors.

The emergency rooms of our public hospitals are another sordid tale.

All these observations are related to how public health care is financed in this country which is also related to budgets and government revenues from  taxation.
In other first world countries, the ordinary citizen is mostly taxed thirty five per cent ( 35%) of  gross income.
Just after the second world war, rich British citizens were charged ninety five per cent ( 95%) from income.
We need this kind of taxation provided public funds are really used for public expenditures but this is another topic altogether. 

                            

Demystifying The Flu: A ( H1N1)  Virus

                                    

The flu that we know as children was so ordinary.
Doctors call it a self limiting disease as one gets healed rapidly even in the absence of treatment. All right, granted, one gets over the counter drugs but for the symptoms only.  But, this influenza A ( H1N1) virus is something.  Doctors go to school for years or decades and that is why we always think that health knowledge is a monopoly of health professionals. But, with this pandemic, the tendency is to “ google “ and read to know this ailment. Some of us are still skeptical about this swine virus. Why? Because, health care is an industry.  It can spell the difference between  rich  first world manufacturing drugs and third world  consuming drugs.

As young activists, we were socialized and educated to understand that  treating a sick patient is as important as working for a society where there is no poverty and  where health care is affordable and accessible. Someone asked me, “ what is the gender perspective to the swine virus pandemic? “  I said, women are poorer, and that  in reality, when someone gets sick in the family, it is always the mother or wife who takes care of the children or who  gets to be absent from work.  Ideally, of course, health should be a social concern with state funds for health care services. 

  

Just before this swine virus, there was an Ebola virus. Then, they said, that animal to human transmission is not possible. So, some of us said, maybe bird flu, but swine flu, as in pigs flying?

Nobody wants to be infected with this swine virus and so let us see what we already  know so far. The mode of transmission is droplet inhalation. It is not transmitted through the air per se. School briefings have advised that the masks are for the infected only. 

WHO experts have said that the H1N1 virus is not so severe and that most of those infected have made a rapid recovery often in the absence of treatment and that the number of deaths are small.  In the Philippines, the cases for the virus have reached 193 cases.   Despite the pandemic level, with 30,000 confirmed cases in 74 countries, the World Health Organization said, “ it continues to put  NO  restrictions on travel.’’  Of course.  To restrict travel, would be a violation of liberty.

So, why the media hype?  Dr. Kenneth  Balanay- Antonio, my surgeon cousin says, that what  is  precarious is the potential for an “ exponential  transmission from person to person. 
 Imagine, if you will, a passenger in a crowded international airport waiting for a flight  to wherever   for about an hour, coughing and smearing  secretions all over the place that        is then easily picked up by even a fraction of those within his / her immediate         vicinity, who  will also have destinations to other  points abroad.  Then, the             danger  that the virus will mutate  is always there; the more it gets           propagated globally the greater the chance of it developing into an instantly   fatal or really virulent strain that would be a public health nightmare.
While,  there is also media  hype abroad as  updates or news are released   to inform     the public, these are not as scary or panic-laden as our news releases here.   Someone emailed me that  Australia has the highest number of A(H1N1)         cases per capita in the world but nowhere were  the kind of measures being       taken in the Phil.  In Melbourne alone there are over 1,000+ cases and         Melbourne has a small population of under a million.  The screenings were     done in airports only but there is  no  temperature taking in schools. As most      everyone agrees, dengue is an even more scary as an  epidemic or pandemic           as it can be fatal within a few days.
Death from swine flu will be  due to             neglected symptoms of pneumonia, dehydration and general debility brought      about by the infection usually in very old or very young or very health-           compromised patients. The swine flu...like any other flu...is very debilitating             especially for  the very young and the very old and the very immuno-     compromised. Otherwise,  it is just like any other flu…  maybe a bit more    debilitating compared to the run-of-the-mill types of flu. So, when flu     symptoms do come about...do not ignore...have a consultation  WITH A  COMPETENT AND TRUSTED MEDICAL PRACTITIONER.”

Health & pharmaceutical industry are already making big money in the sale of pharmaceutical gadgets and drugs. So, expect the market to be flooded with the vaccine soon. This needs to be monitored and we ask the question: Who benefits? Who loses?