You Can't Ignore the Human Heart

by Alanna Shaikh · 2009-03-03 09:47:00 UTC
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(photo credit: Radio Nederland)

One last personal post. My dad's been home from the hospital for two weeks now. He's all healed from the surgery, back on normal food and in normal life. He's pretty much forgotten the whole hospital experience.

I haven't, though. And I don't think I ever will.

When we're analyzing and evaluating and looking for the public good, it's easy to forget the human impact of ill health. Isaac Holeman mentioned it in a blog post about irrational medicine. You can't ignore the human heart.

People make emotional, irrational decisions. They suffer when their families are sick. Not just the productive time lost in hospital visits, or the financial cost of paying for care. We don't have any way to factor that into our calculations, but it's true nonetheless.

And that's one more - major - reason that health matters. You don't found a community group, improve your farming technique, or repair a school if you child or your wife is sick. You just try to cure them. If you have to sell your assets, move to the capital city, or exhaust your savings, you do it.

You can't improve the world around you if your baby is sick. You can only try to save your baby. Which is why the rest of us need to make a world where babies grow up strong and healthy, and no one has to make terrible choices.

Alanna Shaikh
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