The Need for Connections (in life, but more so in Global Health)
I don’t know what it is about today, but I think the word “connection” has prodded and poked my brain enough to put a hole through my forehead. In reading a post on the blog concerning partnerships and equity in global health research/initiatives written by Ankur Asthana (http://www.sghequity.org/?p=539), I realized that there is a real disconnect between the rather sterile, scholarly world and the nitty, gritty world of practicioners. Asthana’s closing question: “when it comes to something so vital as global health, is it just to withold valuable information from practicioners because of their inability to pay such large sums?” The question is rhetorical, but the expected answer is a stern “no”. And he is right in his acknowledgment of the injustice. But, I have certain problems with the implications of this rhetorical question. I understand the injustice of a scholarly journal or database’s “greed” and am all for an easier way for practitioners to access this valuable information, but I am a little hesitant to lash out at the institutions that help propogate this information-gathering research with much the same fire and brimstone as Asthana. There is a need at this stage in the Global Health Dialogue (what I see as a three way conversation between scholars, practitioners, and the public) for building bridges instead of drawing lines in the dirt. What we need right now is to connect and allign our forces, our various knowledges, together to make a unified approach to fighting Global Health Inequity. And honestly, I find complaining about the system only an initial step between the impetus of the problem and its solution.
Christine Gorman, in her blog “The Global Health Report” (http://globalhealthreport.blogspot.com/), shows that connections are being made (allbeit on a very local level) between scholars and interested outside parties. She discusses a progression on the blog “The Pump Handle” (http://thepumphandle.wordpress.com/) much alligned with the needs I see to solving our problems. Gorman states: “I have noticed that they are expanding their list of contributors well beyond Georgetown to academics at Boston and Tufts Universities, as well as a few well-chosen advocates and even one anonymous blogger.” While these connections to other institutions (opposed to the George Washington University-centric posts of the site’s past) and the lone “anonymous blogger” are small gains in this struggle to expand the discussion (the circle, as Gorman would call it), we must still understand that they are gains.
But the future, at least in my mind, does not look so bright if we cannot somehow connect the problems of Global Health to the problems of the average, bourgeois Westerner. We believers in Global Health Equity (or should I say we believers in the notion of positive human rights) do nothing for our cause if we preach at our friends and family. As Gorman implies with a question to the GlobeMed Health Summit held the first weekend in April: “How do you translate the goals of universal access to health care in language that resonates with everyone from the ordinary Muslim laborer to the anti-abortion activist to the libertarian atheist?” We cannot gain by merely quibbling with the people who are already on our side (“the converted”) or by using the same dogmatic language on “the non-believers” (my phrase).
We cannot fundamentally change the world’s view on the need for Global Health Equity through the shibboleths of medical jargon used by the practictioners and researchers that Asthana discusses. The gulf between the practitioners and researchers probes is equaled (if not dwared by) the canyons between these very practitioners and the general public.
In my limited involvement thus far with GlobeMed at Rhodes, I’ve already experienced this disconnect. I cannot count the times that people have seen the phrase “GlobeMed” on our pamphlets and put them back on the table saying “Oh, I’m not a Bio major”. We must, as Gorman demands in the same address to GlobeMed students, stop “preaching to the converted” (I will lump “bicquering with the converted” into that as well) and start spreading the news, the good news, the Gospel of Global Health.
We need to start making connections amongst all of our different backgrounds (is now too late to mention I’m a creative writing major?). We need to show the world (or at least those around us) that the problem of Global Health Inequity can only be resolved through inter-subjectivity, through the connecting of our own individual cogs. We must translate (or at least close-caption) the Global Health Dialogue so that everyone can understand their part in the discussion.
2 years ago