Week 1 Reflection: The Name of the Disease

May 23

”Blind faith in the villages is still a big problem. They blame diseases on divine influence, for example polio, convulsions, chicken pox, measles. Blind faith and ignorance, there’s still a lot of that in the villages.” (Dr. S.K. Gupta, Chief Medical Health Officer, Udaipur in Banerjee, 2013)

Agency, access, and an asymmetrical relationship between traditional and modern healing methods collide to exacerbate suffering in the rural poor of Northern India’s Udaipur. These axes frustrate the faith patients place in the hope that an unruly melange of localized supernatural healing, distant regional hospitals, and the limbic space in which unregulated physicians operate will heal them (Banerjee, 2013). The confusion between local mysticism, unregulated communal and distant modern regional care causes those suffering from tuberculosis to often be misdiagnosed, or prioritize ineffective self-treatment.

Patients suffer from reduced agency through the structural violence of a lack of education, but also from administrative decisions prioritizing market forces over individual suffering. This is compounded by a lack of communal access to modern medicine, which drives patients towards supernatural healing methods, and where the only modern available alternative is unregulated. The faith patients' place in their localized methods of healing are often their only, uneducated, ineffective hope (Banerjee, 2013).

These social, economic and structural problems are not isolated to undeveloped countries. Britain’s National Health Service has been subject to intense politicization in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum, and before that suffered from decades of underinvestment, driving up waiting times (Rawlinson, 2024) as localized general practitioner care dwindles (Gregory, 2024) and regional hospital care comes under increasing strain. Where Brexiteers campaigned on a promise of diverting investment to the NHS as a result of European Union savings (Stone, 2018), this has not materialized, and exacerbated the suffering for both patients and caregivers in an already chronically underfunded public service.

References:
Banerjee, A. (2013). The Name of the Disease. [Video File]. YouTube.com. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOenEuclS30.

Gregory, A. (2023). Growing number of people face 18-month waits for NHS care in England. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/12/growing-number-people-face-18-month-waits-nhs-care-england.

Rawlinson, K. (2024). Sunak admits failure over promise to cut NHS waiting lists. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/05/sunak-admits-failure-over-promise-to-cut-nhs-waiting-lists.

Stone, J. (2018). British public still believe Vote Leave ‘£350million a week to EU’ myth from Brexit referendum. The Independent. Retrieved from: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vote-leave-brexit-lies-eu-pay-money-remain-poll-boris-johnson-a8603646.html.