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To The Minister of Health Dr the Hon Mohammad Anwar Husnoo

11 février 2017, 11:43

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Life wasn’t just a bed of thyme and olive groves in Ancient Greece. The infant and child mortality rates were high and life expectancy was little better than in modern Somalia. Where health was concerned, many superstitions persisted. Early Greek doctors, like their Indian and Egyptian counterparts, believed that diseases were caused by demons (never to be confused with daemones). Judging by the recourse to longanistes, society doesn’t seem to have advanced that much. Apollo, the Sun god, was also the god of medicine, and there was a widespread belief that his son, Asclepios, could cure diseases. Any similarities between a local father and son are entirely co-incidental. People often left a model of a sick body part at Asclepios’ shrine to ensure he’d know what needed healing. He grew so skilled in the craft that he was able to restore the dead to life. You might call on him to work on some of your colleagues, medical or otherwise.

But there were major advances in classical times. While earlier Greek healers tried to cure patients using sacrifice and prayer, a concept that still bizarrely lingers on, Hippocrates laid emphasis instead on environmental factors and living habits. Strange that recent fads about diet and exercise are trumpeted as recent discoveries. The Hippocratic School also lay great emphasis on cleanliness. Judging by the state of hospital toilets more than 2,000 years later, something seems to have gone seriously awry in the intervening years.

Because of terrorist associates, Islam is often portrayed as a retrograde religion yet, more than a thousand years ago, a philosopher and physician called Al-Razi made advances in medical practice that were to influence thinking for centuries. The Samanid kingdom, where he was born, was famous for its traders, travellers who encouraged education and the arts, thus drawing in scientists and artists. What’s gone so wrong that the public sector has no appreciation of the value of the arts and is terrified of anyone who’s studied or comes from overseas – except for very wealthy foreigners?

The health sector has limped along for decades, with just occasional tinkering at the edges. Mind you, it would certainly be good if you could tinker new cancer and ENT hospitals into existence. But what is needed is a thorough analysis and masterplan. In fact they’re what most ministries need. You’ll need people from outside to carry out the study as any radical change would affect your officials’ vested interests. Management shouldn’t be centralised in Port Louis but devolved to every institution, even every dispensaire.

A start’s been made at listing reputable medical schools but the process has somehow included local institutions. Both the UoM and UTM are recognised as degree-awarding bodies when they have skeleton teaching departments and no research activities. There’s not even a real teaching hospital where wannabe healers can practise on patients, properly supervised of course. The media publishes names of trainee doctors assessed for registration – but not the important detail of where they studied. But then papers are more interested in uncovering family ties, however distant.

You’re certainly going to need a lot more psychologists. Apart from assessing potential police recruits, they could carry out integrity checks on potential doctors, not to mention potential MPs. When they’ve helped you deal with quacks here, you could turn your attention abroad. If you can deal with marchands ambulants, you should be able to deal with anything, even a trumped-up overlord.