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Biomedical subjects

T N Madan

Publications and source records attributed to T N Madan.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Dying with dignity.

Death is a theme of central importance in all cultures, but the manner in which it is interpreted varies from society to society. Even so, traditional cultures, including Christian, Hindu and Jain religious traditions, exhibited a positive attitude to death and did not look upon it in a dualistic framework of good vs bad, or desirable vs undesirable. Nor was pessimism the dominant mood in their thinking about death itself. A fundamental paradigm shift occurred in the West in the eighteenth century when death was desacralized and transformed into a secular event amenable to human manipulation. From those early beginnings, dying and death have been thoroughly medicalized and brought under the purview of high technology in the twentieth century. Once death is seen as a problem for professional management, the hospital displaces the home, and specialists with different kinds and degrees of expertise take over from the family. Everyday speech and the religious idiom yield place to medical jargon. The subject (an ageing, sick or dying person) becomes the object of this make-believe yet real world. As the object of others' professional control, he or she loses the freedom of self-assessment, expression and choice. Or, he or she may be expected to choose when no longer able to do so. Thus, not only freedom but dignity also is lost, and lawyers join doctors in crisis manipulation and perpetuation. Although the modern medical culture has originated in the West, it has gradually spread to all parts of the world, subjugating other kinds of medical knowledge and other attitudes to dying and death.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Attitude to Death↗
PubMed1987

Community involvement in health policy; socio-structural and dynamic aspects of health beliefs.

The notion of community involvement in health, as in fact in schemes of community welfare generally, has found wide acceptance in all kinds of political regimes and particularly in the Third World countries. Such involvement is expected not only to be cost-effective but, more importantly, the best way of providing comprehensive solutions to public health problems. More than 50 years of experience with schemes of community participation in India, however, show that the enthusiasm of the people generally tends to wane after a short period of time. Nevertheless, efforts at community involvement in health continue to be made. Governmental and non-governmental organizations and UN agencies, notably WHO, have been active in promoting the concept. The 1978 Alma Ata declaration on primary health care strongly emphasized the right and duty of people to plan and implement health care programmes. Even so, many operational problems remain and these are perhaps related partly to a lack of conceptual clarity. Ideally, community involvement should mean that the initiatives come from the people and the government and other agencies provide assistance. In reality, however, this rarely is so. The best that may be expected is that people will come forward voluntarily to participate in public health programmes. Generally, however, their co-operation has to be sought and they have to be motivated to participate in health schemes. Involvement could also be brought about through coercive measures but there is little support for such an approach, though many health programmes (such as that of small pox vaccination) have been known to have depended upon compliance for their success.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Attitude to Health↗