Sofie_unlabeled<p><a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Medicine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Medicine</span></a> <br><a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Activism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Activism</span></a> <br><a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Healing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Healing</span></a> </p><p>>The Fall</p><p>Some Things are Worth Losing for the Greater Things We Gain</p><p>Rupa Marya </p><p>"As I stand here at the precipice of a cliff that spells career suicide as an academic physician, I pause to wonder how I got here. </p><p>A professor of medicine at a university known for its excellence, with over two decades of service and awards for my work, some of which I accepted and others I rejected for their performativity, I never put “health equity” in my job title and never got paid to specifically work for it. I got the sense early on that any career branded with the label “health equity” would require an allegiance I would never be prepared to give. Health equity is a part of the landscape of being a physician committed to health for all, just like source control of an infection or pain management. These are expectations of our professional duty. </p><p>Used as a poster child for health and justice in the academy when it was politically convenient, I am now facing intense repression for speaking up for health justice. As institutions across the US pursue broad criminalization of dissent, the flow of weapons to Israel and the mass murder of Palestinians continue unimpeded. The point of this repression is to silence me, to make an example out of me and to cast me as out of favor, “unprofessional” and an outlier. </p><p>But my work is, always has been and always will be the moral center of gravity of medicine. What I did not realize when I embarked on this path that would lead me here to this point of no return was that this moral center was the most dangerous thing you could assert in academic medicine. Because what logically flows from this center is the following: the right of all people to have the opportunity to be healthy and the responsibility physicians carry to create the conditions for health to be possible–for all. </p><p>Of course, many people like to speak about these things, but no one actually likes to do anything about them. To act in accordance would require a reallocation of power from those who hold too much of it to those who hold very little. And when it comes to disease, the abundance or lack of power dictates who lives, who dies and how. To disrupt dynamics of power–or to even name them–would damage one’s personal aspirations, one’s reputation and one’s career. </p><p>As I shift my weight and peer over the edge of the cliff, squinting my eyes to try in vain to make out the distance to the bottom, I can hear the thousand shards of my shattered heart move. They poke me from the inside. The welling salt water stings my eyes. The images of doctors a half a world away pleading for humanity to care as their hospitals were bombed into oblivion. The sound of their voices as they sang their commitment, refusing to leave the bedside of their bedridden patients. We will remain. Their handwriting scrawled on the mangled white board was all that was left after Israeli forces bombed, shelled and raided their way through the sacred space of healing: We did what we could. Remember us. "</p><p><a href="https://rupamarya.substack.com/p/the-fall" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">rupamarya.substack.com/p/the-f</span><span class="invisible">all</span></a></p>