3

Basic respect and appreciation of and love for the natural environment

Deeper Eco-Spirituality

Comprehension and respect for biodiversity in stability of symbiosis

Comprehension and respect for ecosystems as fragile habitats

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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Handling of Cancer in the Philippines

Health and Human Rights

By Paula Carolina Malay and Cita S. Soriente-Reyes

Malay and Reyes are the founding President and Founding Executive Secretary, respectively, of  LABAN SA KANSER or LAKAS (Philippine Cancer Fighters). Malay eventually succumbed to Hodgeskin's lymphoma and Reyes to melanoma. 

This is based on a paper submitted in a workshop at the UN-sponsored human rights conference in Vienna, Austria in July 1993.

HEALTH is a basic human right.  For without health, peoples cannot enjoy life and develop as persons and as nations.

The right to help or freedom from sickness is as basic as freedom of expression and choice (from which descend the freedom of speech, press, assembly, the right to know).  All these rights are derived from the basic human right to life.¹

 The right to appropriate, adequate and affordable health service is basic to the right of a people to survive and attain development and progress.²

Like several human rights, health rights are not enjoyed by the majority of the Filipino people.  Seven in ten children are malnourished.  Most of the ten leading causes of death are communicable diseases that have not been prevented because of inadequate public health care.   Human health resources in the country continue to be rapidly depleted with many health professionals leaving the country to work abroad with government encouragement.  Most barrios receive very little medical and dental services.³

Health services are neglected because public funds are allocated to paying billions of dollars for lopsided loans incurred by erring government officials.  Approximately, only P7 billion was approved for health this year. This is approximately $4.20 for every Filipino.  (in 2992, the Dept. of Health Budget was P11 billion.)

And, releases of these meager funds have been delayed.  For medicines alone, for the P1 billion approved, only P100 million has been released as of September 1993.⁴

The public health problems are looming to go from bad to worse with the policy to privatize public health services. ⁵ 
Instead of increasing the badly needed expenditures for health, the government has opted to hand over to the private sector the responsibility for delivering most of the services it should itself deliver.  (Private health care in the country is so expensive that even the rich are complaining.)

This is an abdication of its basic duty to safeguard health for all Filipinos, the overwhelming majority of whom are poor.⁶  This means more Filipinos will die because health services will be more inaccessible to them.  This also means displacement of public health workers.

In life-threatening diseases like cancer, this overall situation is very much mirrored. 

Only the wealthy can afford cancer care in the country. Subsidized cancer care is very inadequate, being provided mainly by a handful of government-operated cancer wards in the National Capital Region.

Evaluation of the efficacy of cancer care, specifically cancer treatment is complicated.  But the sad fact is most cancer patients being treated die.

There is little observance of the patients' right to know and to adequate information.  Many patients cannot or are afraid to discuss with their doctors.  It is common for them to be rushed into radical treatments without fully understanding these and without being prepared for the risks and consequences.  The quality of life of many cancer patients have been put at risk, often without their knowledge and consent. 

There are many cases also when relatives of cancer patients conceal from these patients the latter's having cancer for fear that they may not be able emotionally to take the truth.   And this complicates the complex crisis all the more.

Failing to serve the cancer patient's right to adequately know and to respect their right to an informed choice deprive them of control and of taking charge.  Without control, and with a lot of physical suffering and disability, the situation becomes truly oppressive to the cancer patient.   

There is also the particular situation of cultural alienation.  Society has equated cancer to death.  And so, most patients are given up on and are expected to quietly rest and retire in the privacy of their homes.  Cancer becomes a private problem of the disease-stricken family.  Thus, cancer patients receive little public support.  Social alienation makes having cancer more oppressive.

Another factor serving this alienation is the overemphasis on the personal causes of cancer --- psycho-emotional state, diet, lifestyle, heredity, etc.  While these recognize these factors, equally determinant are environmental factors (chemical and physical agents) that cause cancer. 

More cancers are occupationally liked.  Carcinogens are everywhere-- in food and drugs, in land, water and air, or in homes, offices, factories and fields.  And we are unaware of most of them.  There are thousands of man-made chemicals in our midst, less than 500 have been classified as carcinogenic.  But we  only know of these cancer-causing/cancer-promoting substances.

Very few patients whose cancers were occupationally-linked are compensated for this.  Most laborers are not even informed of their cancers and are merely advised to retire.⁷

Another particular aspect is the differential effect of cancer on men and women. Some examples are: men with cancers have more available caregivers (automatically their wives, mothers or sisters) than women with cancers, especially women living alone or the caregiver of small families or a few women cancer patients are taken cared of personally by their husbands; many poor women with carvical cancer are abandoned by their husbands; there is a very high incidence of cancers in reproductive organs among woment than in men (breast cancer ranks No. 1 among women and No. 2 among all types of cancers.)

In the past years, support groups and concerned health professionals, especially doctors and nurses, have tried to  address aspects of these conditions.  There is now a strong impetus to form many support groups for cancer patients and intensify public information efforts.  But given the magnitude of the problem, increased government intervention upholding public health remains indispensably very much a part of the urgently needed solution.