Disease care or health care: we get what we want!

Providence gives us what we want. Whether individual or collective, this edict holds. What we seek is attracted to us. However, there is a catch; what we wish for or that we desire must match our belief that this is possible. When these two aspects are aligned, then anything we want in our lives we shall have.

This truth is prevalent in all what we do in our lives. The programs we have for social, economic, technical and spiritual improvement, and the sum total of the ways in which we all live out our lives are all connected to this profound edict.

Being a health professional let me take the health aspect as an example. There is always the question of whether our health systems should be based on prevention or cure – what proportions of which, and in what balance? In Maldives - and quite so in most countries of this world, we take the medical path so naturally as the basis of our health systems because we believe in our disease condition more than our well-being condition and our wish is to have medical contexts and treatment facilities anytime we want and we believe this to be the way to health. We don't believe and perhaps don't even wish to be healthy. If we truly did, we would not be polluting our lungs with smoking, hurting our bodies with more than necessary caloric intake, opting for the perpetual comfort of a sedentary lifestyle and fill ourselves with undue worry and anxiety in our lives. Thus our opting for the medical rather than the preventive care of our bodies and our communities reveals our life desire and the belief that goes with it. Our penchant for shiny edifices of care giving institutions and sophisticated devices indicate that we don't truly believe we can have health although we may call those that deal with our health the ministries of health when in fact they are ministries of disease. And the historical fact that hospitals were first built as places people went to die, encapsulates this hidden and deep held belief.

Only when we can think of health as the absence of disease can we move our hearts to seek ways to keep us healthy. Otherwise we will continue to amass expensive medical gadgetry that benefits few and shoot our health care costs through the roof. And in a democracy, all this money comes from the taxpayers’ pockets. Can't we think of alternatives to save some of our hard earned money?