Activist >>>> Public Health Practitioner

For a large number of people the label “activist” is an insult in itself. They look at activism the way Surya Kant looks at activism.

But then there are more sensible people. They think of activism in a better light, as essential work for a fairer world. For example, among progressive public health practitioners.

But even within such public health circles, there’s sometimes an opinion that activism is just another type of useful activity, like public health research. That they are somehow on equal footing.

Take this message from a friend for example:

There is a polarity or what we could call parallel tracks in the archetypes […] – one of the political, rights based advocating common sense activist. The other of the researching evidence generating, publishing or even service providing public health practitioner …

My feeling is they don’t see eye to eye because of perceived fallacies in modus operandi …

In this message, there’s a particular judgement implicit that public health practitioners do equal amount of service as activists do. That the work of generating “evidence”, disseminating, etc are as important as activism. That it is a mistake for activists to not see the importance of the work of public health practitioners.

When equation of activism and public health work is right

There are a few places where this equation is useful.

One, when an activist is making this statement (like my friend above) and they want to project an image of humility and “respect” towards others’ work, then they can make such an equation.

Two, when the public health work in question is itself activism, just disguised as public health work for practical purposes, then it is both the same.

Three, when talking to activists who are doing something obviously wrong and not listening to the science, it is useful to bring this perspective and humility within those activists.

Most public health practitioners are not doing anything useful

If you haven’t read it, read what I wrote in Public Health is Bullshit.

If you think I’m too arrogant to trust my words, here’s the excrept from an event invite from JNU CSMCH:

The Oration will be delivered online by Dr. Seye Abimbola, Professor of Health Systems, School of Public Health, the University of Sydney, and founding editor of the BMJ Global Health. He is well known for his writings on decolonisation of health knowledge and public health practice.

His talk is titled: ‘Ignorance Allied with Power: How to Overcome Epistemic injustice in Public Health’. There’s often a “we need more evidence” appeal in public health which is sometimes genuine, but is often not innocent, especially when it is an excuse for inaction, a distraction, or the powerful’s invitation to a wild goose chase made possible by epistemic injustice. The more we’re able to ignore knowledge, learning, and sense-making that already exists, the more we are able to claim ignorance of what we have reason to know and act upon, and then repeatedly proceed to set up studies to find. This oration will explore this problem and ways to overcome it.

Why activism should be explicitly recognized as being more important than public health practice

It is natural to ask “why should we be so explicit in dissing public health?”.

It is about the urgency of how many activists we need today. Activism has a very bad rep, that even people who might be activists themselves don’t want to be called an activist.

When activism is equated with more socially accepted things like public health work, it is much easier for people to choose those other careers and ignore activism. Those who do take up activism then start feeling like they have made a mistake. Slowly activism becomes unacceptable to even progressive folks.

And that is why I declare with no doubt that activism is better than public health practice (until the day public health becomes political and merges with activism).

Any suspicion that activists hold about public health practitioners is 100% right. There is enough evidence for everything that we need to change in our society. What is lacking is enough activists to cause such change.