| Questioning the Solution
analyzes why 13 million children still die every year
from preventable causes, and challenges conventional
Primary Health Care and Child Survival strategies. Too
often, health and development planners try to use
technological fixes rather than confront the social
and economic inequities that perpetuate poverty, poor
health, and high child mortality. As a case study, the
authors show how marketing Oral Rehydration Therapy
as a commercial product, rather than encouraging self-reliance,
has turned this potentially life-saving technology into
yet another way of exploiting and further impoverishing
the poor.
The book explores the history of medicine and public
health since colonial times, and shows that health
is determined more by the equity or inequity of social
structures than by conventional health services. It
reveals how structural adjustment policies and the
globalization of the economy diminish the health and
quality of life of vulnerable people, especially women
and children. Examples from many countries (including
Mexico, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Nicaragua) illustrate
instructive approaches to health and development that
put human needs before top-heavy economic growth.
The four major parts of the book are:
- Part 1: The Rise and Fall of Primary Health Care
- Part 2: Oral Rehydration Therapy: A Solution
to Death from Diarrhea?
- Part 3: What Really Determines the Health of
a Population
- Part 4: Solutions That Empower the Poor: Examples
of Equity-Oriented Initiatives
David C. Korten
President, People Centered Development Forum;
Author, When Corporations Rule the World |
"Questioning the Solution cuts
like a precision laser beam through the self-serving
myths and misguided policies propagated by official
aid bureaucracies and by profit-seeking corporations
from the baby food and pharmaceutical industries.
With extensive and authoritative documentation,
Sanders and Werner pull no punches in their deeply
troubling account of how greed and official complicity
are spreading death and suffering in a human tragedy
that need not be. Essential reading for every
aid worker and responsible citizen." |
Norbert Hirschhorn, MD
International consultant in Primary Health Care
and diarrheal disease
control |
"David Werner and David Sanders
are truth-tellers who force us to confront
essential and difficult questions. They insist
that technical solutions to illness must be insufficient
if humans lack power to determine their own physical,
emotional and spiritual destinies. Anyone who
is not uncomfortable reading this book has simply
missed the point." |
Mira Shiva, MD
All India Drug Action Network |
"Questioning the Solution is
a labour of love: a product of experience,
research and decades of deep involvement of the
authors with the health concerns of the poor.
This powerful book inspires health action for
change." |
David Morley, MD
Emeritus Professor of Tropical Child Health, University
of London |
"Diarrhoea still accounts for
three million deaths a year. The international
goal to make packets of Oral Rehydration Salts
universally available could never be achieved.
Questioning the Solution, I hope, will speed the
involvement of communities to understand the problem
and develop their own 'solution.'" |
Michael Tan
Health Action Information Network, Philippines
Author, Dying for Drugs |
"Questioning the Solution is
a timely book. It shows the way 'solutions'
are formulated by so-called experts and imposed
not just on villages, but on entire countries.
It helps us understand why even the World Bank
can now talk about the relationship between poverty
and ill health. 'Poverty' is a safe word, skirting
the underlying gross inequities in power and access
to resources. One word continues to be rare in
most mainstream documents: justice." |
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