Wouldn’t it be nice if patients could afford anything. Reality doesn’t work that way though, and some first world people just can’t imagine what real poverty is like (I can’t either).
> When Mr. Jalbani protested, he said, Mr. Ghanghro snapped at him and told him he was using an old syringe because Mr. Jalbani was too poor to pay for a new one.
> “He said, ‘If you don’t want my treatment, go to another doctor.’” Mr. Jalbani said. “My wife and I had to starve ourselves to pay for the medicine.”
Perhaps there are more people that would prefer to watch the world burn than we think
In theory, such a treatment is possible, but in reality, they're just making everything worse.
What would be nice is if someone tried to find a viable solution for this issue, something that actually worked and was affordable.
"Affordability" makes no sense when these families (families, not individuals) are earning a few pennies a day. The only solution is to give stuff away for free at a loss. No amount of innovation or cost savings can fix the fact that people (and even institutions) cannot afford syringes.
The only real issue in the third world is none other than lack of capital generating opportunities. Anyone who has capital can participate in the global economy and fix their own problems. Anyone who has a job can perform daily labor to earn capital that can fix their problems. The people who get lost - the people stuck in the third world - are offered no opportunities that would enable them to trade their labor for capital. If there were enough of these opportunities, all of these problems would go away.
I did it once for one of my children. He was four and I didn't want him to be subjected to an IV.
Possible solutions include an oral or topical medication to replace the injected medication.
The poor in the US often also need actual affordable solutions that work. That seems to have improved some in recent years.
It won't exist if no one even bothers to try.
If money alone were all that mattered, you would think a country like the US wouldn't have thousands of homeless, etc.
>According to a 2015 assessment by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 564,708 people were homeless on a given night in the United States. At a minimum, 140,000 or 25 percent of these people were seriously mentally ill, and 250,000 or 45 percent had any mental illness.[1]
The homeless problem is a mental health problem. Sure, people can fall into hardship and get e.g. their houses foreclosed on and go bankrupt - but those same people generally are back on their feet a year or two later. Basically everyone who does not suffer from severe mental illness has the capability to raise enough capital on a monthly basis to put a roof over their heads. Now, they may have to work hard, and perhaps unreasonably hard in a sadly large amount of cases, but they can still do it and still do do it given that 99% of the country is not homeless.
[1] https://www.bbrfoundation.org/blog/homelessness-and-mental-i...
There are many factors that contribute to homelessness. Physical ailments can help lead to homelessness, but so can the high cost of housing:
Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-20/the-homel...
The story is gut wrenching. Children in poverty need free basic health services everywhere.
The doctor says he was too poor to afford syringes! So reuse of syringes is the solution? Bill the cost of the syringe to the patient. Ask for donations. Do whatever it takes but never reuse a syringe. How can a doctor find reuse of syringes remotely acceptable?