5 apps offered by Richard Horton while facing COVID19
Richard Horton, Editor in Chief of The Lancet recently published a timely prescription for us to rethink the essence of global health. Full text is available here:
And here are the five “apps” Horton offers:
- [W]e should consider liberty an equally fundamental value. Without liberty of expression — for health workers, policy makers, the public, and media — there is no means to forge a common view about the future (including the future health) of a society.
- Second, how important is the political system for health? Global health is typically agnostic about the kind of political system a country chooses to adopt. Global health and its institutions see health systems as separate — technically, socially, economically — from the political ideologies of nations. This view is not sustainable. We cannot say that the terms of political engagement within a country are irrelevant to our hopes for health.
- Third, what is prosperity? Conventionally, prosperity means monetary wealth. But could we redefine prosperity to mean something else, something more? Prosperity as the wellbeing of the community in synchrony with its environment.
- Fourth, how should we consider the place of the human body in society? How do we better connect the social to the biological? How do we incorporate the world in which we live into our biological selves? Our bodies and the illnesses they express tell stories about our lives. Our task is to uncover those stories and to link them back to our bodies and our health.
- Fifth, what do we mean by health anyway? Whatever we say about the absence of disease or a state of complete wellbeing, the idea of health is also related to our sense of what our lives have been and what they might be in the future.