Health Services

This is straightforward: if you can see a doctor or another health professional when you need them you will be healthier. This folder can help you to learn about different aspects of health care system, including different health conditions.


The Future of Medicine and Health

“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.” – Mother Teresa

I just read a newspaper article about dehumanizing experience a couple had in an emergency room. When we go to hospital, we are conditioned to being treated as a ‘diagnosis’ rather than a person. But simply because ‘it is’ doesn’t mean ‘it has to be’ like this.

Things must change and they will change for the better. Some things that we can not even imagine will be a reality in ten or twenty years. Humane treatment of patient will be a new norm.

Think about this, two hundred years ago people with mental disease were treated as wild animals without soul. They were often kept in chains to ‘keep in check’ their animal instincts. You might be surprised but even today mental patients are kept in chains in some places.

Another example of how medicine improved is that all the way up until late 19th century bloodletting was a massively popular medical practice. In most of cases the use of bloodletting was harmful to patients.





As you can see medicine has changed. But what will be the future? Today most of the buzz is about cloning and DNA techniques that will surely provide much needed relief for such diseases as diabetes, Parkinson’s and other.

But I think it is equally important to return to seeing a patient as a ‘person’. Years ago doctors used to know their patients. And today many doctors still know members of their community. But in some places, especially inside big hospitals, people are seen as ‘cases’: cases of heart attacks, asthma, cancer, or depression.

That is why I, when I read an article recently about a new program at McGill University I was very excited. Dr. Thomas Hutchinson, Nora Hutchinson, and Dr. Antonia Arnaert are talking about a scientific centre at the Faculty of Medicine of McGill University called the Whole Person Care centre. After I read the article I sent them an email to congratulate their work. But isn’t it tragic that we have to relearn to treat person as a person? Who do you choose to see in this video: a case of mental disease, or a person with a soul?





I believe that people deserve much better health than they currently have today. Soon medicine and health will be very different. I am very excited about this. The new medicine, of course, will use all the advances of modern molecular science, but first and foremost it will return to the new-old tradition of seeing a person behind every patient.

And I know that this change will happen. How do I know that? I know that because people like those at the Whole Person Care centre are working hard every day to make it happen. I know that many other people are working hard everyday to make it happen. I also work to see it happen.





If you are working in this direction, come forward, contact us and let’s work together. Let’s design the new medicine or better, as Gandhi said, let's become the change that we want to see in the world.