On Health

Boston, early December 2021.?It had snowed the night before. From the 15th floor, the scene looked magical.?The white snow seemed manicured into the black tar/green lawn grid of Cambridge.?Broad Street and MIT were behind me.?The rest of Boston glowed into the night across Main Street in front of me.?It was zero degrees outside, the wind stabbed the chill right through every pore not covered by warm clothing till the eyes watered… but inside the four star room, it was toasty warm.?

Downstairs in the restaurant, my Uncle Russ and Aunt Ruth sat waiting for me to get back.?They had driven over from New Hampshire.?We had been sitting and chatting?for two hours, but it seemed like 2 minutes.?It was the first time we were meeting in 5 years, but love really does this time travel trick.?Those close to our hearts never really fade away with the ticking seconds.?True bonds prevent the absence that life and geography make inevitable, from closing the doors that only love opens.?It seemed just like yesterday that I had chewed my chicken bones with them at Hans Cottage Hotel 25 years previously.?Here on a cold Boston night, 25 years had flown by, but the joy had not faded one bit.

It had been an interesting day, which started in the halls of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Legatum Institute.?The Round table on Health Innovation had amazing voices from around the world.?There were academics, entrepreneurs, medics, politicians… just fantastic humans gathered in this large hall, with thoughts and inspirations colourfully populating the whiteboards, both digital and analogue. ?Here all the voices rang out same.?It did not matter whether the entrepreneur was from Nigeria or the Minister was running Health in the UK. Here it was just health we kept our eyes on.?And new things came out, that I had never thought about. There is a special thing about putting intellectuals around a table, in front of common challenges.?Brainstorming happens.?Paradigms shift, the problems do not disappear, but the solutions deepen. ?

I did leave the Round Table with one clear shift in mindset.?My preexisting concept of health care was inaccurate.?Good health is an aspiration to which a social commitment is made.?The concept of health provision and consumption is inaccurate, because every one needs good health, for everything else to happen.?Good health therefore is not a commodity to be produced and used, but an integral component of society around which everything else should revolve.?To claim it, without the social commitment to its manifestation, is a waste of time.?

It is one of the oddities of life, that in the innards of a Mecca for health innovation, a global roundtable navigated the difficult course of better health for the future.?It did seem like bringing the gold to the goldmine, but it also was testament to that well-known truth… the rich do the things that increase wealth.?In the countries where such roundtables are really needed, intellectuals operate in silos, individual progress is made along such disparate, insular tracks that there is little progress overall.?The future awaits, claimed only by cross-fertilisation of ideas, and integration of thoughts. Anything else is damnation to progress akin to running top speed on a treadmill, going nowhere. ?

A few hours later, I was on my way out through New York, a place that is increasingly becoming a home because so many great people take care of me there: Uncle Ben, the Montefiore team, and the MSK family.?In the safety that these different people provide, I have always found a city that is vibrant, with varying facets that still complement each other.?And walking along streets with Spanish names on one side of town, with items for sale on the pavement identical to Kantamanto, or gazing wide-eyed at the gargantuan lights of Times Square, or window-shopping in the luxury of the 42nd street - it is truly a city that never sleeps. It’s also a city that offers free COVID PCR tests in emergency rooms and on special trucks at street corners. It has learned a lot from its suffering from the previous waves of COVID.?Life continues, but you have to show you’re vaccinated, to eat in doors.?They have learned one aspect of communal commitment to good health

The COVID numbers here are beginning to soar.?I am not sure what we have learnt, yet.?