Economic growth is front-page news everywhere. But experience tells us that the link between income and human development is far from assured. Worldwide, countries with similar per capita incomes have had quite different achievements in basic education or basic health. In the 1990s, the Philippines and Sri Lanka had similar per capita incomes, yet the poverty rate in the Philippines was much higher then and has remained so.
Days before the May 13 elections, President Aquino showed up in one of the Team PNoy rallies coughing intermittently in the course of a brief speech. Malacañang may not want to make a big deal out of it, but the health of the president of this country is a big deal, a concern of every Filipino, by reason of office and responsibility.
I’m sharing some of the reflections I gave in a keynote speech last week at the Philippine Nephrology Society’s annual convention, where I spoke of the challenges that nephrologists face from a medical anthropologist’s perspective.
The man next to me at the drugstore counter was very explicit with his instructions, sounding almost like a chef instructing his assistants: Cut the Enalapril tablet into four, and each Furosemide has to be divided into six paper packets.
The leading cause of preventable death isn’t tobacco or drug use. Neither is it bad diet or lack of exercise. It’s high blood pressure, also called hypertension. And it’s implicated in many of the heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases that account for about one-third of all deaths.
If the past week was one devoted to thoughts of death, of sacrifice, of transforming the end of life to the beginning of a new one, the days right after Easter are perhaps best observed by turning our thoughts to birth, to life and to preserving it.
All my life, I have never been quite normal. If you look at me from afar, you’d think that I am just a normal girl, but if you view me up close, then you’d notice how different I am. You’d notice how different my skin is compared to that of a normal person.
While visiting a remote mountain barangay in Negros Oriental, Congresswoman (and LP candidate for governor) Jocelyn “Josy” Sy-Limkaichong talked with the mother of a young child who told her that the child had missed her last two immunizations because her husband had forbidden it. “The mother told me that her husband was scared to bring the child to the health center because, he claimed, under the RH Law, once the health personnel found out that this was their sixth child, they would take the child from them and put her up for adoption.”
Politicians are going to make all sorts of promises over the next two months. In the main these will be what they think the voters want to hear—and, in the main, generalities with little sound basis for accomplishment. Let me give you a few ideas on what I’d like them to promise instead.
A writer, who is also a mother, once wrote: “To have a child is to have your heart walk outside your body for the rest of your life.”
I recently warned a class of students that I was not going to be in the best condition to lecture because I had just had a root canal. I survived the lecture but after the class, a student came up to me and timidly asked what a root canal was.
Nena rises at 4 a.m. to cook a pack of instant noodles for her four children. Her live-in partner, Jojo, has gone to ply his tricycle route. He makes only about P300 a day and is still paying for the loan he took out (at 5-6 rates) to buy the tricycle.
