Appropriate Health Care

The only work I actually did today was to attend my weekly student-selected unit, on Global Health (I missed the morning lectures after my body decided to take a 5 hour lie-in). The session was based on the theory that medical care and funding is useless and cannot work unless the treatment is appropriate. Successfully transplanting a heart is a great achievement, but if 300 babies a year are dying from cholera down the road, then what is the point? The speaker's point was illustrated by a pyramid they had constructed to demonstrate appropriate care for cystic fibrosis. The stages of the pyramid rise from the cheapest, most common sense treatments like lifestyle advice and routines check-ups, to the top of the pyramid, which was lung transplant. If the system is implemented well, no stage should be attempted until the lower stage has been accomplished. In theory, this would provide a basis for appropriate health care in developing countries, and curb the vastly unrepresentative funding allocation problems that plague the third world. Countries like Nepal, which I have visited, seem far to keen to appear as westernised, and hence skip stages of the pyramid and provide ridiculously expensive tertiary treatments when none would be necessary if basic measures had been implemented. It's akin to Indian shanty towns having electricity and plumbing fitted. It may not be "sexy" medicine, but that's not the point. The most basic, monotonous things like immunization and maternal education are the most helpful in modern medicine, and save the most lives. And there isn't anything more glamorous than saving lives, as any first year medic will tell you.