Over spring break I had the opportunity to attend a conference for students passionate about becoming positive agents of change in the fight for global health equity. I spent the weekend talking to other students, established activists and advocates, and medical professionals who were all committed to fixing the social conditions that foster disease. The highlight was an address by Dr. Joia Mukherjee, a professor at Harvard Medical School who has been the medical director of Partners in Health since the year 2000. During the conference I felt inspired and excited. It was clear that achieving a universally recognized “right to health” is a movement gaining strength. A movement that I am part of!
When I returned to Whitman after break, I came down from my health equity high with the sobering realization that this movement isn’t present on the Whitman campus. It’s happening in big cities like New York and Chicago, where large groups of people can be mobilized, not on small colleges in small towns. As president of the GlobeMed club, I’ve tried to motivate my peers to challenge these issues. I know there are a lot of students here who do care about changing health care politics. I’ve also become intimately familiar and frustrated with the problems in our campus culture that hold people back.
Whitman is, generally speaking, a very healthy community. Most people exercise, eat nutritious food and aren’t noticeably struggling with diseases. Unfortunately a lot of stigma surrounds mental health disorders on campus. I think that sentiment may also be indicative of how students characterize other illnesses as well. We study diseases, but we don’t struggle with them, at least not long term. People get sick, but they always get better. Most Whitman students have probably known someone with a serious or chronic disease, but these stories are too uncomfortable to be talked about openly in our happy, healthy community. Whenever I tell people stories about the badly timed fainting spells I had for a couple months after contracting dengue fever or how crazy it was to cough up blood when I though I had tuberculosis, I always preface with “but I’m totally fine.” Not being fine is not really acceptable in this community, even if it’s due to a disease outside of anyone’s control.
Since most Whitman students come from families and communities that have access to insurance and quality health care, health problems like the flu or a bad cut are minor setbacks, not serious conditions. However, for people without good health care, small problems can escalate into life-threatening conditions very quickly. Even if problems are easily treatable, people learn to live with miserable conditions because they don’t have health insurance or they can’t afford to see a doctor if it means missing work. We don’t see this happening on the Whitman campus.
Before I started working in a county hospital, I had no idea how many sick people were out there. I now know that the myriad of cases seen by the hospital barely scratches the surface even in one city because inherent injustices in our health system means that there are so many people who do not have access to treatment. On the Whitman campus we are stuck in our sterile community, detached from the world, forgetting how much suffering happens in the world due to inadequate health care access. We also forget that we can do anything to help alleviate that suffering.
One of my big takeaways from the conference was that discussing issues is not enough. When it comes to issues that affect people’s health, there is no time to wait. It’s matters of life-or-death on a huge, global scale. Taking action is critical. At GlobeMed we’ve tried writing letters, going to protests, volunteering at free clinics, fundraising for medical supplies and youth education initiatives. The right to health needs to be a movement, even on the Whitman campus.
