Global Pulse Blog

This month’s issue of Academic Medicine includes a series of essays addressing the question, “How should academic medicine contribute to peace-building efforts around the world?” This timely question is especially compelling in the United States, as national discourse continues about troop levels in Afghanistan, military strategy in Iraq, and whether and how the US should help stop the genocide in Darfur.

Steven Kanter presents the series by echoing the World Health Organization’s definition of health as more than the absence of disease and noting that “peace is not simply the absence of war.”

Ali Khan and colleagues point out that “Violence, manifest in myriad forms, exists in our own backyards and clinics. Just as international conflict zones provide an entry point for physicians to rebuild health systems and societies alike, so too do low-income urban neighborhoods, the halls of Congress, and the steps of the United Nations.”

Barry Levy and Victor Sidel, veterans of organizing physicians in support of peace through the group International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, argue that the medical establishment should begin building peace at home by “(1) fostering cooperation in relationships among themselves and others, (2) preventing conflict by promoting transparency and ethical behavior, and (3) promoting mediation and arbitration to resolve conflicts before they result in serious adverse consequences.” These suggestions may seem far removed from what most of us think as preventing violence, but as peace scholars have pointed out for decades, efforts to construct and sustain peace must begin long before we reach the cultural and societal breaking point of war.

In a another essay, Hagopian and colleagues call on health and medical associations to “change the dominant framework so that failing to act against war would be the more peculiar act of health professionals, rather than the opposite.”

My favorite quote, however, is in Seiji Yamada’s essay, “Academic Medicine Should Start at Home”, in which he exhorts American academics to quantify and expose the morbidity and mortality caused by military, diplomatic, and economic actions of our own government. Yamada writes about some students, “At the mention of history or political economy, our learners groan. We are not interested in politics, they say. But unreflective learners repeat the blather that they are fed by the corporate media. Their interest in politics extends only as far as protecting physician reimbursements. But academic medicine has the responsibility to produce physicians who advocate for the cause of health – in particular for the health of those whose voices are otherwise unheard, whose deaths are otherwise uncounted, unmourned, unopposed, and unorganized against.”

As health professionals, it is our responsibility to raise our voices, to count and bear witness to the deaths and injuries, to mourn with our patients and their loved ones, to oppose injustice, and ultimately, to organize a system that better builds peace.