Monday, December 15, 2014

Should the physician be aware of what happening globally?


I asked myself this question a lot, how could global health improve the performance and optimize the role of medicine? And how medicine can benefit the global health as well?  I was trying to find how could global health help me in my future decisions and it is impact of my career as a physician. The emergency doctor who first receive Mr. Duncan as a patient in the emergency and treat him with some flu and diarrhea medicine then discharged him, would he treat him in a different way if he knows about what’s going on in West Africa at that time?  I assume that patient’s health related to national and global health. The experiment proves that whatever is going on globally affects the individual health and the individual health affect public and global health. We cannot just say polio are no longer here so, we can stop polio vaccination, for example.

The question about how much knowledge the physician should know regarding global health? Global health workers would benefit from the medical doctor by knowing biomedical basis of the disease and risk factors, causes and pathogenesis. On the other hand the medical doctor will benefits from knowing about global health in disease history, distribution, other hidden behavior, cultural, and socio-demographic risk factors.  Globalization of health makes it necessary for the medical doctor to know about organizations and different health systems in the world. To apply the medical knowledge to real practice it needs more than training nowadays. Economics, social sciences and politics has a lot of impact nowadays on health and disease process. Global health makes it easy and possible for physician to see the problem from different aspects rather than the biomedical basis. Many medical school curriculums give that attention to the role of importance of international health studies in medicine.

Diseases do not stop at countries borders. We should concerned as a doctors for other diseases that are in Africa, Asia, and worldwide.  In addition to that there is an ethical concern to decrease pain in people who suffers more especially if there is a defect in their medical system and lack of physician. AIDS would not be here if we cared enough about what was going on in Africa then. Global health will broaden the knowledge of medical doctors in the matter of disease causality and relations with others diseases or risk factors. Global health well rich the knowledge of medicine. Through understanding about what is going in outside, by comparison, we can better estimate and understand about what is going on in inside.

1 comment:

  1. I agree with the idea that many doctors view medicine from a western perspective when the world is rapidly changing and what use to be common knowledge is no longer so. We believe in the idea that somehow as borders keep people out it also keeps disease out. We are finding that Ebola, HIV/AIDS and currently Zika is not something that’s happening to those people over there but something that is very present. I think that doctors do need to have a broader perspective and understanding of the global health impact. But how do we do this, what mechanisms do we put in place? What classes do these doctors have to take and who teaches these classes. I have a few friends that are doctors from the Caribbean who are not able to practice medicine in the U.S, this is absolutely stunning to me because all my life my family went to Cuba for medical care and I have rated the medical care in Cuba over that of the U.S, that is personal, but how can U.S doctors be trained to deal with what other countries deal with on a regular basis. I believe that doctors who practice in other countries and then come to the U.S are more prepared, because of the dual learning system, than doctors who have only practiced in the U.S.

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