Tag Archives: Public Health

The emperor of all maladies: a review

Posted on October 21, 2011 by | Leave a comment

This is one of the best books I have read. Depressing, intense, detailed, thorough, free-flowing and reflective. The book pulls the people from the history of medicine (or sceince itself) into a living narrative putting together pieces of apparently disjunct and inconspicuous and serendipitous events in the lives of cancer patients, researchers, doctors, surgeons, scientists and poets and presents it as as if a coherent story could be made of it and read out over a fireplace. Perhaps one of the few books of this genre that I have read that went so smoothly. Continue reading →

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Posted in Notes, Public Health, Reviews

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From questionable social subsidies to unquestioned corporate welfare

Posted on September 18, 2011 by | Leave a comment

An unusually punctual gathering on the dais greeted me at Rotary Club. Thankfully, this was a gathering of unimportant people both on and off the dais; none of those species of “Very Important People” often sporting Anna-like caps were invited to the gathering and things started on time. P Sainath was supposed to be speaking on “Rural India after two decades of liberalisation” and the gathering included a fair mix of people across age groups, occupations and stereotypes, yet so unrepresentative of rural India. A lot of those ‘civil society’ types that Sainath loves to decry and dissociate from were there too. Continue reading →

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The truth that dare not speak its name: corruption in health services

Posted on January 25, 2011 by | Leave a comment
Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of democracy, as they undoubtedly are today

-Mahatma Gandhi

A neglected statue and a neglected message

Some things are better assumed and neglected, than acknowledged and attended to. In public health research, these often find a passing mention in “Discussion” section where findings are explained, and worse still, may be as a “contextual” element. Prime among this is corruption. Corruption in health services is nothing new. Perhaps merely a sub-set of the general corruption prevalent in administration of public services, the corruption in health is much more than merely a “contextual” element to be taken into consideration in planning and implementing health programmes. Nor is it merely a feature that may explain some of the poor health outcomes that we often find. Continue reading →

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Posted in Public Health

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