Health, the greatest gift
THE EDITOR: We take health for granted. We waste it thinking that we will get more of it or we can buy it back if it is gone. It was a birth gift. We abuse it and hope that others can be trained to replace it. We take ourselves to the brink, not realising that recovery will not yield 100 per cent.
Of the ministries many will think that Education is the greatest. We learn of man-made plans that would never materialise or be used or have to be halted because of some other interruption.
Have you ever considered that in the pursuit of health we need health to recover health? The world of the individual grinds to a halt when health is lost temporarily. We cannot even pursue education when health is challenged. All the money in the bank adds to zero when we are flat on our bed. The mansion cannot be enjoyed when we are rendered immobile. All our prayers are directed to the healer in the universe.
We have been misled by the society that our health becomes important only when a limb is paralysed. Our health minister has pointed out that this is a sick society. So true, we all are.
Health is an individual responsibility, but in this so-called modern world honest guidance is necessary.
Have you ever been to the hospitals? They are bursting at the seams with outpatients jostling for appointments. Who in TT is not suffering with something. Misguided, the society is unfairly relying on the healthcare institutions, which are secondary caregivers, to restore normalcy.
Health should be at the top of the pyramid of ministries. The medical robots are not coming fast enough, Mr Minister. Soon TT will be one massive hospital.
The greatest gift, health, can be preserved and sickness reduced through education. Stop the man-made intrusion masquerading as education and spread the gospel of managing age-related illnesses, avoidance, symptoms and treatment, and arrest causes. I am certain this will reduce the dependence of the citizens on the public healthcare system because knowledge is power.
Convert the TT environment into one island-wide healthcare system.
An area that is totally neglected is the health of the elderly. Education can prepare us for the coming of old age. We do not have to be bedridden or helpless or in pain in the golden years.
Health must, therefore, be the main pathway in education and lessen the significance of academia. Nothing matters if health is absent.
Earning money has blinded the society from setting the right priorities. Success and achievement are measured in dollars, not sense. Sometimes we even believe that our problems will vanish into thin air with an increase in wages and salaries, forgetting that soon we will return to stage one – our original level of dissatisfaction.
Regulations, though poorly fashioned, were used to control the outbreak of covid19. Can’t the administration institute more effective measures to force the citizenry along the pathway paved with health?
The training of doctors should not be confined to Western medicine. Other modalities are available in China, India, Japan, and even Ukraine. Bring researched knowledge and wisdom to our shores so patients can have other options. The use of local herbs should not be discounted. Let’s reveal the power of nature.
The system is lacking conversations between doctors and patients. Tests are done and results obtained and analysed but patients are never informed of the interpretations.
Patients’ illnesses are never shown to them through a wall chart or computer program, visually in the doctors’ office. The verbal descriptions given are rarely understood.
Most doctors have limited their practice to dispensing pharmaceuticals or doing surgery. The system needs great doctors who will encourage their patients to take charge of their health by advising on proper diet and exercise.
Let us not subsist at the level of doctor-patient, but one human being to another. The former relationship is debased with dollars and cents in which one party is unsatisfied with payment and the other cannot afford. In the latter, emphasis is placed on making one’s contribution to humankind and the parties are not committed to reciprocate (to each other), but to the general welfare.
LENNOX FRANCIS
via e-mail
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"Health, the greatest gift"