FOOD AND WATER
The rich can seek health care in hospitals
and also have the luxury of
visiting
their physician in private opd’s where
definitely the doctor
devotes more time
on one patient examining him/her. Rich can
also have
the luxury of calling the
doctor at home at the dial of a phone call.
So the
doctor is a phone call away for
them. Whereas for the poor, even if they
need
basic health care they have to
travel relatively longer distances, maybe
they
will have to wait a longer time in queue’s
for getting a simple
medical care,
maybe the best doctor available won’t be
seeing them in the
first instance.
Because of financial constraints, the poor
can’t afford the best of the
medicines,
hence there is a compromise when medication
is prescribed to
them. Eg a poor
patient may be prescribed a cheaper
trimethoprim-
sulphamethoxazole
combination for fever where as the rich
would be
prescribed a costly 3rd or 4th
generation cephalosporin, that would act
faster
and cover a broader spectrum of organisms.
So the chances of
recovery increase
with better antibiotic selection.
In
India a daily wage worker with a family of
10 to support, earning 40-50
rupees a
day won’t be able to afford costlier forms
of treatment for
certain medical
conditions, like thrombolytic therapy in
acute myocardial
infarction, or he
won’t go for laproscopic surgery for acute
appendicitis,
or he would decide
against seeking treatment for cancer, or he
may not be
able to afford to vaccinate
his children against preventable
diseases.
At the same time incidence of
illiteracy, overcrowding, poor hygiene,
poor
diet are seen more amongst the
poor population. These again predispose
the
poor to more illnesses and hence
increased mortality. I think more stress
needs
to be laid for government health
organizations and other non profit
organizations
to look into this problem more deeply to
narrow this gap
between treatment of
rich and poor.
