Public Access to Information

I had a strange moment today, when, while reading the first chapter of Global Health and Global Health Ethics, I felt compelled to look up one of the sources of a most interesting quote. Seems simple enough, I switched on my University Virtual Private Network, opened the library website, and searched the article name. No hits. Strange.

On a whim, I decided to “google” it, the article, called “Moral Imagination: the Mission Component in Global Health” by the editor of the book, Solomon Benatar. Surprise! It was available, and not only that but available publicly from the FLoS Medicine Journal (Peer-reviewed open access journal published by the Public Library of Science).

This had me wondering a few things:

Why aren’t publicly posted articles available on the university library article search engine?

Why is access to scholarly articles not public information in the first place?

How are professionals supposed to maintain their registering body’s requirement to stay up-to-date when they are cut off from information drinking hole?

(I won’t even begin to ask why I still have access, given the threats of cut-off within 6 months, but let’s assume it is because of some work I did for the University post-graduation)
(also, not even delving into the fact that scholarly articles are not written to be readable by the average person)

All those questions in mind, here is the quote from “Chapter 1: What is Global Health?” which had me thinking of all this in the first place. To give some context, the book was discussing the medicalization and monetization of health, specifically the lack of consideration for basic factors such as “food security, clean water, sanitary measures or gender discrimination” and “universal access to basic health care”; and the attention that is instead drawn to “aspects of health that can be classified medically and treated with medications.”

This is just one of many examples of the medicalization of global health, increasingly associated with money as the most important bottom line in medicine. While such an approach has great potential to relieve the suffering of many individuals, it neither reveals insight into the extent more technology and drugs fail to necessarily improve the health of whole populations, nor into knowledge that the global economy is structured to maintain the wealth and health care (often wastefully provided) of those with resources, while extracting human and material resources from poor countries and thus sustaining impoverished lives with little access to health care other than that provided philanthropically.

You can read the concise and interesting article that is referenced for this passage here.