IS POLITICAL HEALTH Recently, a statement released by the Association of Philippine Medical Colleges Student Network (APMC-SN) protesting the shutdown of a major broadcasting network drew flak from netizens and divided the medical community. While most of the commenters debated on the issues surrounding the statement itself, some medical students and even full-fledged doctors argued that the medical community should remain “apolitical”, and that such statements have no place in the field of medicine, especially during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Such sentiments are troubling, as these imply that health should be limited to a biomedical perspective. However, any medical student or doctor with a good foundation in Community Medicine would know by heart the social determinants of health – the economic and sociopolitical factors that contribute to the promotion of health, which include not just access to healthcare services but also working conditions, financial security, and food security, all of which have been severely impacted by COVID-19. Aside from these concerns, this pandemic has also exposed and aggravated health inequities and social injustices. The pasaway narrative has shifted the blame on the masses for government lapses in public health interventions and communication. Meanwhile, the rich and powerful get away with exposing entire health facilities to COVID-19 or even holding mass gatherings such as birthday non-parties, with government officials calling for “the tempering the rigor of law with compassion” in these cases. While it is true that the medical community is sworn to neutrality as per the Hippocratic oath and the Declaration of Geneva, this does not mean that doctors should be apathetic, especially in the context of social injustice. The definition of medical neutrality presented in these codes is that doctors should not allow political affiliations or social standing to intervene between their duty to their patient. Read the fine print and see that there is nothing preventing doctors from taking a stand on sociopolitical issues, especially when public health and safety is concerned. However, to be politically involved does not necessarily mean immersing in partisan politics; this could simply mean that physicians should fulfill the civic duties of a good citizen, as stated in the Philippine Medical Association Code of Ethics. Retired Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio outlined some of these duties in a 2009 commencement address: to participate in governance, to oppose oppressive and corrupt acts of those who hold public office, and to leave the country a better place than one found it.
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To be a doctor, thus, is not just to treat the illness of an individual as a provider; 5-star physicians also have to treat the illnesses of society through addressing and calling out social injustice, in their capacity as community mobilizers. It would be a travesty for doctors to “remain in their lane” even as these injustices continue to unfold. To quote Dr. Julie Caguiat of the Coalition for People’s Right to Health (CPRH), “Worsening inequities require us to look at the bigger picture and revisit government policy, for what good is it to treat patients and then send them back to the very same conditions that engendered their ill-health in the first place.” If the medical community continues to cling to the outdated and incorrect notion that doctors should be apolitical, and if doctors relegate themselves to be only healthcare providers, this new normal, just like the old normal, will be defined and dominated by politicians and economists. This is now the case as lockdown measures are eased nationwide as government leaders and economists are itching to get people back to work in order to restart the economy, despite the Department of Health (DOH) only having 20% of the target daily testing capacity as of the time of this writing. Public spaces such as malls are reopened before regional testing centers are online, and social injustices and political repression continue to occur under the guise of “strict implementation” of public health measures. While healthcare workers are the face of the fight against COVID in the hospitals, the medical community needs to step up its battles on other fronts – in addressing political apathy among its ranks, in calling for better leadership from the top, and in ensuring that public health be a priority and social injustices be addressed in newly drafted economic and labor policies as the country heads to an uncertain new normal. To quote Rudolph Virchow, “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale.”
