Shortages of health care professionals for a countries main populace are an increasingly common occurrence. In fact there are countries that have as few as 10 doctors for every 100,000 people, and I won’t even begin to expound upon the fact that in some countries the only reason people cannot get health care is because they are low income or uninsured. Decades ago, when China faced the problem of health care not reaching rural areas, their solution was to train the "peasantry" to treat the "peasants." Thus were born the "Barefoot Doctors" of China, way back in the 1960's.
Despite some coordinated efforts in their past, medical care wasn't reaching the rural areas of China. The fact that urban trained doctors didn’t settle in rural areas only exacerbated the problem. In China the ball started rolling in 1945, on the eve of the communist revolution. Party leaders, including Mao Zedong, knew that improving the health of peasants was integral to increasing agricultural production. Mao Zedong, the then Chairman of the Communist Party of China, was a critic of the urban bias of medicine and said as much in a Health Care speech he delivered in 1965. Mao's revolution was struggling in 1965 and with his launch of the Cultural Revolution he expanded the idea of health for the masses, ordering that, "In health and medical work, put the stress on rural areas." Brilliant? At any rate, with that, China's "barefoot doctors" were brought to light.
By 1968 the Barefoot Doctors program was integrated into public policy. Barefoot Doctors were farmers who received basic paramedical training and worked the rural areas of China. The name stems from the fact that southern farmers would often work barefoot in the rice paddies. In the spirit of community and with the interests of good health, both mentally and physically, the Barefoot Doctors of China were part of a cultural revolution. Serving rural communities in China this way even lowered health care costs. Of course there are times when western medicine is really the only option there is, but there is much we can learn about attending to ourselves when it comes to the more acute health conditions. It is also fairly easy to treat oneself using herbs and other things that are easy to come by, like a potato or even a spiderweb among other household things. You'd be surprised how many healthy and healing things are all around you, all the time. "It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has." ~Attributed to Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.)
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Hanna Maxwell
All knowledge starts with self knowledge. Archives
July 2021
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