Global Health: A systemic approach at the local level.

Well... the idea of creating a Blog about this burning issue was (and was not) mine... I'll explain myself:

I'm attending the Global Health Diploma in the University of Tampere, in Finland, during June 2010. All the students of this course must write, every day 'till the end of June, a brief text regarding our observations and reflections in relation with different aspects of the particular structure and organization of the Finnish Health System.

The first part of the course, which has already concluded, was mostly theoretical, but allowed me to get an idea about what Global Health is. There is strong discussion about to what extent we can talk about Global Health as an independent discipline. Some people argues that is just Public Health at a Planetary Level, and others think that it is a different name for International Health. But, what are we talking about when we distinguish different disciplines?

I think that each scientific discipline defines itself (and its field of interest) by the kind of research questions it address, in one hand, and by the research methods and validation criteria for the correctness of the explanations it accepts as valid, on the other hand. That's why we can distinguish clearly different disciplines, while, at the same time, there is room for trans-disciplinary cooperation. Superposition among disciplines occur when their domains of questions overlap among them and/or there is convergence in the methods accepted as valid for answering that questions.

Considering the arguments mentioned before, I think that what defines Global Health, is both, the fundamental question about Human Health at the level of the Antroposphere-Biosphere, and its strongly systemic approach to find diferent answers or solutions to the problems it deals with. It also establishes a clear distinction between the systemic thinking needed for getting comprehension of the big issues at the global level and the causal understanding required to generate effective action at the local level.

This kind of approach is not new. Indeed, it is astonishingly similar to the natural wisdom of our ancestors. Maybe they didn't have our thecnical knowledge, but they surely did comprehend the interconnections and interdependence among all living beings in the Earth (In other case, humans wouldn't have survived).

The arising of Global Health is simply a contemporary expression of that very same kind of wisdom in our current time, that has never been lost, but we now realize that it is necessary and desirable for us and our future generations.