Plague Of Paradoxes Summary

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I just wanted to make some final thoughts on my trip to Tanzania and about the book Plague of Paradoxes. I’ll jump into “Paradoxes” first, it was terrible, whatever rapport the Swiss anthropologist made in the first chapter was completely destroyed in the second chapter, and consequent chapters only served as insults. The book while it made great arguments and contentions it sounded like a preening fledgling graduate student who felt the only way to prove his pseudo-intelligence is with psycho-babble. I found myself as a writer annoyed with the author because the author forget that beyond everything else the most important element to good work is communication, you must connect to readers before you convey any large amount of information. Great …show more content…

I believe Tanzania needs to scrap the Western health system in its entirety, and to inundate its populace with information. Tanzania is struggling to fight a Health Care Worker shortage because it ascribes to a Western healthcare system model that has never been proven to work in the African context. The Western healthcare model works on a hierarchical pyramid that requires an infinitum of personnel and technologies to maintain coordination and efficiency, the personnel and technology required to create an national system of real-time health information transfer and transactions is costly even for western nations and usually lack the cultural medical holistic approach African cases need. Although western doctors are seen as more caring than African doctors they are both in a dispassionate system that values numbers over the individual. African patients require a more holistic approach that values treatment success over numbers, doctors have to be trained to be sensitive to cultural norms and community interventions and view their patients with more of a community health outlook than western doctors. Because they’re not only treating this individual’s health including genetic predispositions, lifestyle habits, and risks, but, the greater structural forces that create poor health in this individual’s life and the countless others related to this individual who may be unable to get healthcare due to resources, stigma, or

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