Author: akshay
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Personal Is Political in Professional Practice
“Should a doctor treat an alcoholic who is injured due to drunk driving? Would your opinion change if it were just a solo accident v/s injuring/killing other people on the road?” asked @arshiet. The regular controversy. Should doctors judge their patients? Is it ethical to even ask the question of whether it is ethical for…
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History is to Practice
I’ve been in many debates where “science” is accused of being wrong. As if science is a set of things written down in a book or a set of ideas that are arrived at by a group of people. Something that has to be consumed by others. I’m baffled by this argument because, to me,…
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The Overcompensating Sociologists of Public Health
Reflexivity. That’s a word very dear to sociologists. It just means how we look at the world is influenced by who we are. But like many things sociology, you give it a word and then you make a big deal out of it. So much that some of the sociologists reading this post are already…
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Does Medicine Need a Paradigm Shift?
Let’s start with physics As my brother’s T-shirt says “The Pulse of the Earth is in Physics”. Physics is a fundamental science. Also called “pure” science. That is a fancy way of saying it is reductionist. When you think of an apple falling to Earth in physics, all you think about is its mass and…
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Money Matters
Warning: This post discusses money. Like, it’s going to talk about my account balance. Now, for some of the people reading this, their account balance might be much lower than mine. And for others, vice versa. So, if you don’t want to compare lives, you’re better off not reading this. *** Like I said when…
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By Doing “Government’s Work”, Are We Making It Easier for The Government and Worse for the People?
At the end of the CHLP session today Akshay (not me) asked something like: “When we do work that the government should be doing, are we making it easier for the government in some ways, and also making it more difficult to hold the government accountable?” This is a question that only someone who is…
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What Can An MBBS Doctor Do?
In the protest surrounding suspension of Dr Saibal Jana and Dr Dipankar Sengupta, a debate has emerged around what an MBBS doctor can and cannot do, especially in rural settings. This is a very complex question that requires a complex legal answer. There are several relevant case laws and even acts like Clinical Establishments Act…
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Essential Digital Literacy for Community Health Folks: Part 1
Whether one likes it or not, everything is getting digitized. And it is often a good idea for human beings to keep abreast of changes. This is a series of posts designed with community health folks in mind to help them develop mental models around the technologies that make up the digital world. In this…
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Analysis of v-safe response data
Amar Jesani shared in mfc group link to an article about v-safe data release. The actual data could be downloaded from this website called icandecide. The 5GB file can be extracted with p7zip to a 25GB CSV file. $ md5sum consolidated_health_checkin.zip 53ff7a8153f44eaab4166f722b726fe1 consolidated_health_checkin.zip$ md5sum consolidated_health_checkin.csv345cf6ca148832141260aab8638bf0dc consolidated_health_checkin.csv $ wc -l consolidated_health_checkin.csv 144856044 consolidated_health_checkin.csv (That’s 144 million…
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Intersectionality, Queering Science, Lived Experience, and Rationality
Plenty gets written about intersectionality. I have a feeling that my repeated use of the word might be giving some of my readers nausea by now. Yet I feel like there’s plenty that’s not written about intersectionality. Questions like the following: What’s the relationship between intersectionality and science? How does intersectionality validate lived experience? And…