The Unjust Judge
The widow begging the judge “who neither feared God nor respected any human being” for a just decision in her case (Luke 18:1-8), reminds me to persist in our what often seems to be fruitless global advocacy for publicly funded palliative care. Luke tells us “for a long time the judge was unwilling, but eventually he thought, ‘while it is true that I neither fear God nor respect any human being, because this widow keeps bothering me I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and strike me.” The governments are still unwilling to fund palliative care because the people they need to hear from are not bothering them enough!
This week, I am in Geneva with other palliative care advocates, mostly physicians, for a Special Session of the World Health Organisation Executive Board. We are asking the WHO to add a palliative care indicator to the new General Program of Work, to measure whether governments are providing the programs the committed to in a 2014 World Health Assembly Resolution.
Although it’s unlikely the WHO Executive Board delegates fear we’ll strike them, it’s challenging to keep pestering them, to repeat over and over again our message that seems to fall on deaf ears. Maybe their ears will be more open to their own citizens begging them to render a just decision to fund public palliative care programs for the patients and families in their own countries struggling with life limiting illness, poverty, and pain. WHO is focusing on TB right now, and anti-microbial resistance, as well as on cancer and chronic conditions such as diabetes, all conditions that call for community level palliative care.
Most people are used to thinking of palliative care in terms of cancer and end of life, but it is time to inoculate policymakers, as one colleague in El Salvador puts it, with the virus of palliative care for all serious conditions before immanent death. With palliative care people can enjoy their lives and families again; many can continue to work and contribute to society.
When I was in my early twenties, I worked on the Nuclear Freeze, which was considered pie in the sky and a long shot, given that the US and USSR had inter-continental ballistic missiles targeting one another’s major population centers during the Cold War. The Union of Concerned Scientists had set the Doomsday Clock at four minutes to midnight in 1981, meaning they expected the world to blow up at any time. It never occurred to me that I would grow old, let alone have children and grandchildren! This summer, the UN signed a nuclear freeze treaty, and while the world is still not safe from nuclear holocaust, what was once totally outsider language is now mainstream and a common goal.
We need to do the same thing with palliative care. Will it take another forty years and the suffering of millions, abandoned by a medical system bent only on cure, denying strong pain relief to the dying for fear of addiction? True, a broad based, often militant, popular movement demanded that production of nuclear weapons cease: some of my hard core religious friends were sentenced to prison for non-violently resisting the nuclear industry, while top physicians from around the world lent scientific authority to the popular movement. This is what we need now to make palliative care a household word: citizen physicians, academics, nurses, social workers, chaplains, patients and families, all clamoring for publicly funded palliative care.
Perhaps it is easier to dismantle wicked policies such as nuclear deterrence than to build new, more humane, ones such as public health palliative care. To the contemporary, market-oriented sensibility, using public funds to care for the most vulnerable, those who are “useless” — is irrational, an anathema. Yet care for the incurable has been a concern of medicine since ancient times, and is central to both the old and new Testaments. Jesus was even called The Divine Physician. The faithful of all creeds care for the widow and the orphan, the halt and the lame, the hungry and the imprisoned, and of course the sick and dying.
Faith-based and charity funded organisations still provide the lion’s share of hospice and palliative care services in the world, but are a drop in the bucket relative to need. It’s time for governments to start shouldering the load. They won’t, though, until a movement of citizen physicians and patients pesters them to give in, like that persistent widow, my very own role model for the work this week in Geneva.