I found this little excerpt I wrote a while ago about what I think about Global Health:

My interest in Global Health began with a desire to live my life empowering others to begin to help themselves. The pursuit of securing adequate health became my outlet in achieving this goal, as no individual can begin to help themselves without their health. Through my studies, I realized that Global Health was much more complex than the biomedical model of health. If ‘poor health’ was a tree, and its many branches and leaves were its countless negative effects on a community, the root causes of poor health stemmed from a variety of issues such as a lack of adequate resources and property, poor income, and societal inequalities. These roots among many others were hidden deep in the soil, often not addressed by pure biomedical models of common Global Health interventions. Thus I stretched my studies further into International Development, travelling as far as Norway in order to better understand these social, cultural, and economic root causes so ingrained in the Global Health discourse.

I have come to understand that in the field of Global Health, there is not one but an entire forest of ‘poor health’ trees, one for each regional context worldwide. One solution in one place may not be appropriate in another region of the world. Thus, local-based solutions are crucial in tackling the roots of ill health and development. I experienced this local context first-hand through an internship with a local NGO based in India. The organization’s holistic model of empowering the local populace through programs such as education and health was inspiring. However, I often questioned my role as an intern: even with my knowledge, what could I offer to local NGO, if I was ultimately a foreigner? How did ‘health’ and ‘development’ become ‘global’ and ‘international’?

Many Global Health interventions tend to log down an entire forest of ‘poor health’ trees with a cure-all solution into a field of stumps and invisible roots. Such measures have resulted in unintended consequences due to a lack of local context. The concept of ‘health’ differs around the world and this diversity is one that Global Health practitioners should acknowledge in greater capacity. In order to be truly ‘global’, knowledge and innovation on a worldwide scale should be pooled together to foster nuanced local interventions. Global Health is, therefore, not a universal concept but a fluid discourse that is heatedly debated, compromised over, and created through transnational cooperation between an interdisciplinary body of individuals.