Public health often feels abstract to medical students, yet it shapes whether people live with dignity or despair. This story reframes statistics as human struggles, urging us to see healthcare as fairness, not charity.
Public Health isn't a subject that excites most medical students. Maybe it doesn't generate the same awe-struck moments as cracking a rare diagnosis or the thrill of performing a life-saving procedure. And thus for many, it ends up being learning about topics like various health indicators, vaccine coverage, and sanitation programmes as distant, dry concepts.
Well, most of us medical students also haven't lived through a cholera outbreak or seen a child die of measles in a health system that failed them. We haven't had to walk 100 km to find a good hospital where we can be treated or fight to access clean drinking water.
But many people do. Even today. Every day.
And their lives — their survival — depend not just on doctors, but on how well society meets its most basic needs: water, sanitation, nutrition, safe childbirth, and disease prevention. This happens not just in remote villages or faraway rural pockets. Even in cities, behind glass buildings and metro lines, in cramped slums, on construction sites, in the invisible corners of urban life, people wait for the healthcare that never reaches them the way it should.
And it’s not just about being born healthy or surviving an outbreak. It’s about what happens after.
It’s about a person recovering from a stroke, who gets physiotherapy and support, maybe ramps at home, compared to someone stuck in poverty, without a wheelchair, without even a toilet they can reach, with no job to return to.
It’s about how differently depression is treated when you can afford a psychiatrist in a metro city, when help is a phone call and a consultation away, compared to someone who can’t even think of paying those fees, who lives with their illness quietly, unseen, untreated, carrying it alone. Unless community-based rehabilitation programmes reach the masses and mental health care becomes something that doesn’t hide behind closed clinic doors and price tags.
So when we learn about disease surveillance systems or reproductive rights in textbooks, it feels abstract. When professors talk about John Snow or Cholera, they seem like one more MCQ question. When they talk about National programmes for Non Communicable Diseases or Tuberculosis or about how India successfully eliminated Trachoma and Polio and Yaws, these seem just a few more facts to learn because we are privileged enough to have a General Medicine specialist or an Endocrinologist in our vicinity.
But in contrast to the common notions held by many medical students, Public health isn’t charity. It’s not a favour done for the poor. It’s what fairness looks like, or at least what it should. It’s the quiet promise that your illness, your disability, your suffering, shouldn’t decide whether you live in dignity or disappear in silence.
We can choose to stay blind to it. Many do. It’s easy.
But the moment you start noticing — really noticing — that family carrying a sick baby on a two-wheeler, that woman walking with a pot of water for miles, that child too small, too thin, with eyes that say more than words —It stays with you.
It makes you uncomfortable. Maybe that’s the point.
Try shifting your perspective once from data to stories. Every graph on malnutrition is a child’s stunted life. Every statistic on maternal mortality is a woman’s death that could have been prevented. Numbers are just stories waiting to be heard — waiting for you to find the people behind them.
Instead of rote learning the WHO health system building blocks, let us ask ourselves — what happens when one block fails? Suddenly, the system map becomes a living organism with pressure points and vulnerabilities.
And let us try asking ourselves uncomfortable questions-Why do patients keep returning with preventable illnesses? Why do policies exist but fail? Why does poverty still determine health? These are public health questions — and they’re deeply medical.
And public health is just one part, a part that quietly builds a world where health isn’t a privilege for the few, but a right for all. And whichever path we take, the least we can do is care enough to notice when that isn’t happening — and refuse to look away.
Ending with a note from Dr.Paul Farmer,
“The idea that some lives matter less is the root cause of all that’s wrong in the world.”
Originally published on the author's Substack here
Edited by Christianez Ratna Kiruba
Image by Gayatri
