Today,
November 12, 2015, is the 76th death anniversary of Dr. Norman Bethune
who made an immortal contribution as a doctor in the Chinese revolutionary war
against the Japanese and made innovations on forms of medical practice and
surgery. All Chinese know of Norman Bethune and they love to tell everyone
about the how the Canadian doctor cured the wounded Chinese in their war against
Japan until the day he died of blood poisoning from an infection contracted
after cutting himself during surgery. Mao Zedong, in his Little Red Book,
though he and Bethune only talked once, wrote a tribute about him that every
child had to memorize during the Cultural Revolution and Chinese schoolchildren
today continue to learn about him. My mother used to work as helper in a store
of a Chinaman before she got married and gave birth to his first born (who
happened to be me).
I
will not very much dwell here about Bethune’s (or Mao’s) ideological or
political ideas or anything that concerns Communism, but about the field of
medicine in the Philippine social context especially with the glaring medical quackery
and anti- scholastic tendencies among our people. In a third world country
such as ours, many private hospitals as well as private doctors charge excessive
fees only the elite wealthy classes could afford.
Hundreds
of thousands of Filipinos work abroad as health workers, the province of
Occidental Mindoro agonises from lack of such professionals compared with the
total population of each municipality. In the study titled “Health Status of the Residents in Occidental Mindoro, Philippines: A
Way to Make a Healthy Community”, (2014; Rosa Mistica C. Ignacio, et. al)
concluded, “Health programs do not
guarantee a healthy individual and a healthy society, but a combination of
health programs and socioeconomic support can help in creating a healthy
community.” But to zero in to emergency care, sans the benefit of reliable statistics,
many of the poorest of the poor including the Mangyans die each year due to emergency
care they cannot pay. There goes the lack of socioeconomic support from the
government.
What
Occidental Mindoro needs most, aside from sufficient complete surgical
facilities and professionals, is adequate number of ambulatory surgical clinics
(ACS) that could provide day surgeries and ambulatory procedures. Though emergency
care is emphasized in RA 8344 in 1997 and it penalizes hospitals and medical
clinics for refusing to administer appropriate initial medical treatment and
support in emergency or serious case. It mandates that all emergency patients
be stabilized by giving needed treatment and support without deposit or advance
payment. But it is not stipulated in the law how it will be financed. Some greedy
private hospital owners, with such legal flaw, designed and effect internal
policies and other schemes, denying the patients or making it very hard for
them to access emergency health care.
Still,
we hardly find specialists and surgeons in Occidental Mindoro serving even in our first class municipalities. Medicines are scarcely provided to the sick and market forces
tightening their grip over medical institutions. The people suffer when they
cannot have complete reasonable access specifically with regards to emergency
care. All we could do is agonize each day when someone we know dies in our hospitals
due to unaffordable emergency health care services. We are like living in the
battlefront depicted in the 1990 movie “Bethune:
The Making of a Hero”, a Donald Sutherland starrer directed by Phillip
Borsos.
Bethune,
at against the backdrop of medical disciplines and work ethics states: “Medicine, as we are practicing it, is a
luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels. ... Let us take the
profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession
of rapacious individualism ... Let us say to the people not ‘How much have you
got?’ but ‘How best can we serve you?’” These words still ring true to this
every day after more than 76 years ago when our man, my namesake, uttered these….
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(Photo: The
Province . Com)
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