There was a boy named Sanjay, a 12-year-old orphan who was on regular anti-retroviral medication at the HIV centre I was in charge of. He lived probably the harshest life I had heard of- sleeping underneath trucks at night and salvaging food from the garbage bins at local eateries. When he would visit for his monthly check up I would share my lunch with him. After 7 months and 25 days of caring for him, he said goodbye and never returned to our centre.
Despite our best efforts to locate him, that was the last we saw of him. We had the medicines, the clinics, the staff but still could do nothing to alter his fate. It was this painful interaction with him that made me realise that health & disease were not quite the black & white picture my medical school textbooks portrayed. Instead, they belonged to a much larger, complex, evolving organism, with far-reaching effects.
As an Intern at Christian Medical College & Hospital …show more content…
I did my best to help with the relief efforts, creating a crowd-sourcing map to mark health camps as well as to identify underserved areas, and direct relief groups to areas that were severely flooded. I also compiled several pamphlets with safety instructions for volunteers involved in rescue efforts, preparing food as well as for those stuck in their homes. The pamphlets were available in English as well as in the local language(Tamil) and was disseminated through social media as well as in physical form through relief teams. An idea I developed was to use crowdsourcing as a means of studying movement patterns of diseases in a natural disaster and serve as a real-time update for evidence-based medical decisions. Although the process of collecting information proved too difficult as I lacked the resources, I believe it is an idea that has some
Despite our best efforts to locate him, that was the last we saw of him. We had the medicines, the clinics, the staff but still could do nothing to alter his fate. It was this painful interaction with him that made me realise that health & disease were not quite the black & white picture my medical school textbooks portrayed. Instead, they belonged to a much larger, complex, evolving organism, with far-reaching effects.
As an Intern at Christian Medical College & Hospital …show more content…
I did my best to help with the relief efforts, creating a crowd-sourcing map to mark health camps as well as to identify underserved areas, and direct relief groups to areas that were severely flooded. I also compiled several pamphlets with safety instructions for volunteers involved in rescue efforts, preparing food as well as for those stuck in their homes. The pamphlets were available in English as well as in the local language(Tamil) and was disseminated through social media as well as in physical form through relief teams. An idea I developed was to use crowdsourcing as a means of studying movement patterns of diseases in a natural disaster and serve as a real-time update for evidence-based medical decisions. Although the process of collecting information proved too difficult as I lacked the resources, I believe it is an idea that has some