Category: mbbshacker.blogspot.com

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…

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…

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…

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…

 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…

If you look closely, many theories of change in public health where technology is involved has, at its heart, the following idea: Adopting Technology -> leads to -> Better Health This is a meaningless assumption guided by the hype around what technology can accomplish and the wishful thinking on solving large problems. Firstly, technology is…

At least 300 million people in India live below poverty line. And that line is drawn somewhere around an income of ₹1000-1500 per month. If we draw the line double that, the number of poor also doubles. That’s the bottom of the bottomless pyramid. Half a billion people who earn less than ₹3000 a month.…

In our primary healthcare leadership fellowship that’s been running for 2 years now, we’ve only used self-assessment by fellows as a measure of impact till now. While self-assessment is the easiest to perform and also gives a good sense of subjective measures like confidence and readiness, bringing objectivity to the measurement of impact is important…

Where should the line between ‘doctors should be held accountable for medical malpractice’ and ‘doctors are humans and they can make mistakes’ be? [Source] There is a world where this dichotomy/binary is not entirely false – medical negligence/malpractice jurisdiction. And the courts in such cases have a very nuanced approach to this question. For example,…