https://rupamarya.substack.com/p/the-fall
"As I stand here at the precipice of a cliff that spells career suicide as an
academic physician, I pause to wonder how I got here.
A professor of medicine at a university known for its excellence, with over two
decades of service and awards for my work, some of which I accepted and others
I rejected for their performativity, I never put “health equity” in my job
title and never got paid to specifically work for it. I got the sense early on
that any career branded with the label “health equity” would require an
allegiance I would never be prepared to give. Health equity is a part of the
landscape of being a physician committed to health for all, just like source
control of an infection or pain management. These are expectations of our
professional duty.
Used as a poster child for health and justice in the academy when it was
politically convenient, I am now facing intense repression for speaking up for
health justice. As institutions across the US pursue broad criminalization of
dissent, the flow of weapons to Israel and the mass murder of Palestinians
continue unimpeded. The point of this repression is to silence me, to make an
example out of me and to cast me as out of favor, “unprofessional” and an
outlier.
But my work is, always has been and always will be the moral center of gravity
of medicine. What I did not realize when I embarked on this path that would
lead me here to this point of no return was that this moral center was the most
dangerous thing you could assert in academic medicine. Because what logically
flows from this center is the following: the right of all people to have the
opportunity to be healthy and the responsibility physicians carry to create the
conditions for health to be possible–for all.
Of course, many people like to speak about these things, but no one actually
likes to do anything about them. To act in accordance would require a
reallocation of power from those who hold too much of it to those who hold very
little. And when it comes to disease, the abundance or lack of power dictates
who lives, who dies and how. To disrupt dynamics of power–or to even name
them–would damage one’s personal aspirations, one’s reputation and one’s
career."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: September 12, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-111900852
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
