Seven-year-old Rodney, a kinetic boy with a mischievous smile and huge brown eyes, was born with clubfeet, a defect affecting 1 in 1,000 children. The condition, marked by feet turned inward, can be remedied with a simple surgical fix and, therefore, is virtually unseen today in the developed world. But because Rodney was born in the rural Philippines, where even rudimentary surgical care is a luxury reserved for a privileged few, he will likely be disabled for the rest of his life.
Access to such basic health care should not be a privilege. Rodney has the same right to heal, the same right to normal childhood and dignified existence as any of us. It’s a right as inalienable and basic as the right to life and liberty.
Rodney is one of nearly 5 billion people around the world who are denied this basic right because they don’t have access to timely, safe and affordable surgical care. A staggering 18 million people succumb each year to surgical conditions that go untreated. Those who survive are relegated to a lifetime of suffering and poverty. Nearly one-third of the global disease burden stems from surgically treatable conditions, exacting a greater toll than HIV, TB and malaria combined.
The majority of conditions claiming so many lives and robbing so many of dignified, productive existence are easy to correct and inexpensive to treat — appendicitis, hernia, broken bones, burns, clubfoot, obstructed labor, cleft palate, cataracts and the list goes on. None of these requires complex surgical repairs or space-age operating rooms. They require front-line clinicians trained to perform rudimentary procedures, simple surgical tools and basic anesthesia. Public health experts have calculated that non-surgeons trained to do simple procedures can alleviate up to three-quarters of the surgical need in underserved regions.
[See: 14 Things You Didn’t Know About Nurses .]
If the notion is tantalizingly simple, its execution won’t be.
The Lancet Commission on Global Surgery has outlined a set of recommendations, a to-do list, for achieving this in the April 7 issue of BMJ: Global Health.
Completing the list will require the synchronized efforts of governments, advocacy groups, local and international public health authorities, philanthropies, the medical device industry, academic medical centers, high-school and college educators and the public. Above all, it will require us to break free of the toxic, parochial attitude that what happens half-way across the world is not “our” problem. It will require the realization among the powerful, the influential and ordinary people alike that no matter where we live, we are part of the same living, breathing organism.
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Admittedly ambitious, our goal is within reach. We’ve done it before. The HIV pandemic in the 1980s sparked an unprecedented global collaboration that transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition. We need to galvanize the global community to come together in much the same way for surgically treatable diseases. And this time around, we need not solve any scientific mysteries or even develop new drugs. We already have at our disposal the tools and know-how needed to ease the burden of human suffering. In doing so, the scalpel is now as critical as vaccines and pills.
When a baby’s congenital cataracts — an easily correctible eye condition — are left untreated, darkness grows deeper for all of us. Multiplied by the millions, each life marked by disability, pain and poverty can further destabilize already fragile economies. Poverty, pain and hopelessness are the roots of social and political upheaval. In the end, we all pay the toll of preventable suffering.
A simple surgical repair that costs as little as $500 can prevent hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity and a lifetime of pain and suffering. Lack of access to surgical care will render 33 million people destitute. The collective economic cost we will all pay over the next 15 years is estimated at more than $12 trillion in lost productivity. It’s a debt we can ill afford to incur.
[See: 5 Common Preventable Medical Errors .]
In chaos theory, the flap of a single butterfly’s wings can set of a cascade of motions that culminates into a hurricane. A child’s suffering thousands of miles away can affect our collective human experience.
Easing suffering is not only the morally right thing to do. It’s also the smart thing to do.
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The Human Right to Heal originally appeared on usnews.com
