30 years ago George L. Engel wrote a paper in Science titled "The need for a New Model: A Challenge for Bio medicine" dated April 8, 1977. In this article he argued that all medicine is in crisis and furhter that medcine crises

So what?

I was a general practitioner in Iran for a decade, at the same time I was a civil society activist with focus on Environment and Sustainable development.
Now I have a great chance to study at one of the distinguished schools in the United States. I am a student again and I appreciate this unique opportunity. The fact is that for some reason you can’t find a lot of people from Middle East in my position, studying at the Doctor of Public Health program with international health concentration.

I learn continuously at the school with friends and faculties. I think I have a responsibility to share my knowledge and understanding with interested people. Perhaps you may find a lot of people who are interested in these issues, but they don’t have chance to actually take an academic program like I did. I believe sharing information is a responsibility specifically when you have access to information in the North. On the other hand it helps me to put my understanding on window, so people can edit my learning.

I am glad instead doing practice, I work on health issues, obviously I’ll make less money, but I can help more people if I apply my learning in the right time and way.
I will try to write continuously with focus on Health Sciences with a practice based approach. Also I will write about living in Boston from a Middle Eastern angle.

Thanks for supporting me in this journey

Public Health a rationing system

The title of the course IH 704 at BU was “The Organization, Delivery and Financing of Medical Care Services: An International Perspective”. In the first session our professor Dr. Bill Bicknell gave a talk about the syllabus and the assignments and then he started talking about the health discipline’s dimensions and the definition of Public Health. During that session I didn’t feel good when I heard about his definition, but later on and after doing more discussions in the class I tried to feel better and learn more about his viewpoint.

Dr.Bicknell definition about public health was: The art and science of deciding who dies, when and with what degree of misery. He added we have very scarce resources and it means, some get and some don’t, those who don’t either die sooner and/or live in more misery. This is RATIONING - and we all hate to ration. Therefore, rather than face reality, we spend lots of time convincing ourselves that promotion, prevention, sound policies and good management can avoid the pain of explicit rationing. This is a comforting and DANGEROUS MYTH.