Free Health: From conceptual essence to practice.

Dr. Alberto E. Menini

Medical Issues Coordinator. Biolinux Group.
Buenos Aires, Argentina

 

Copyright (c) 2005. Alberto E. Menini aemenini@yahoo.com
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Introduction: Digital and Social Gap
The steady advance in informatics, applied to all fields, such as economics, social and political life of every individual, allows creating a means of content for any kind of information. This content, jointly with the means of communication, i.e. what is normally called the “information highway” or the combined use of Communication and Information Technologies (CIT), allows sending information from one place to another, modifying habits, concepts of distance, time of execution for each activity, knowledge, and all productive economy. In brief, it would be a modification of society introducing it to the new “Information Society” (IS) within the concept of harmonious universal globalization. This process of transformation of society towards a presumed fraternal evolutionary model has adepts and skeptics. The latter maintain that these changes, instead of leading us to a Globalized New World, decreasing inequalities among rich and poor countries, will emphasize the division between them in every social level, stimulating an increase in the Social Gap.

One of the main doubtful points is based on in the big difference between people regarding access to the CIT, which directly influences on their immediate chances to join or not, this Promise Land. This is what we know as Digital Gap and includes all areas of application of these technologies, among others, to most health fields.

Although this Digital Gap is similar to an immediate indicator of current digital poverty or wealth, we can take all its potential as a projection index for the future, generating an increasing disparity that affects different social levels with less technological resources available, starting a new way of subordination of this societies by being excluded, due to the unification of the Social Gap and the Digital Gap, from the knowledge society, which is the main foundation of wealth and power of the richest countries on Earth.

 

Free Software: A Bridge to Shorten the Digital Gap.
Open source free software, under a vigorous constant and unceasing development and advancement since mid-80's, is being established as a real and fundamental foundation and as a linking bridge to diminish the Social and Digital Gaps.

The intrinsic philosophy that characterizes the freedom [Fig. 1] that the free software offers, establish the latter as the most promising path to reach that Globalized New World. Such philosophy brings to the user a chance to abandon the simple role of tech consumer to become an active member of the society of knowledge, providing one opportunity to achieve equality of rights in the technological field by diminishing the digital gap, and likewise, preserving and being respectful of multilingual and cultural identities in cyberspace. On the other hand, the development attained by free software and the potential it represents is a clear proof of its strategic role towards a society of information and knowledge, thus prompting the construction of a fair, ethical, integrating and inclusive society, contradicting social and technological gaps in countries with fewer resources.

All this philosophy involves a series of advantages, which are materialized with a lower cost, higher flexibility of software use by having the code source available, better reliability and stability, considering it does not depend on a single developer because it is under constant reviewing and testing. The latter provides a quick process of innovation and security, especially to the systems exposed to public networks.

All that has been mentioned gives the user an economic independence, because there is no need to pay for licenses as it happens to the owner software and, at the same time, independence to use it as well as the possible software modification according to the needs for his own benefit and for the benefit of society as a whole.

•  La libertad de usar el programa, con cualquier propósito (libertad 0).
•  La libertad de estudiar cómo funciona el programa, y adaptarlo a tus necesidades (libertad 1). El acceso al código fuente es una condición previa para esto.
•  La libertad de distribuir copias, con lo que puedes ayudar a otros (libertad 2).
•  La libertad de mejorar el programa y hacer públicas las mejoras a los demás, de modo que toda la comunidad se beneficie. (libertad 3). El acceso al código fuente es un requisito previo para esto.

Figura 1. Libertades del Software Libre

 

Health: Definition and Paradigms
World Health Organization's 1946 Constitution, defines Health as the complete state of social, mental and physical well-being, and not only the absence of illnesses or affections. Health implies that all people's basic necessities are protected: affective, sanitary, food, social, and cultural conditions. This is a utopian definition, since the estimation of completely healthy people around the globe is only a 10% to 25%.

A more dynamic definition of health is the achievement of the highest level of physical, mental, and social well-being, and the capacity of operating, which social factors in which the individual and the collectivity are immersed would permit.

Health and illness are part of a continuing process, where in one end there is premature death, which could be prevented often times, and in the other end there is a higher level of health that can hardly be reached by everyone. In the middle part of this continuous or homeostatic balance, we would find most of the population, where the division between health and illness is not absolute, since it is very difficult to distinguish between the normal and pathologic.

It is hard to define health, being more useful to recognize and analyze the determining or conditioning factors of health.

Health, in physical terms, is one of the foundations of quality of life, well-being and finally, happiness.

Achieving healthiness belongs not only to medicine but also to politicians, the society, and the individual. In developing countries, e.g. Latin America, there are several socioeconomic factors that characterize the area, such as: an unstable economy, unfavorable currency change, growing poverty and deep social differences, economic and technological dependence, a higher and progressive population percentage that does not have access to an appropriate health care since public health care systems are collapsed of disarticulated. Therefore, health would be attained when food needs, infections, housing, jobs, diminished high rates of poverty, and finally economic problems are solved. This entire context, connected to an appropriate health system, will contribute to improve the harsh indicators of health ( mother-child mortality, life expectation at birth, general morbidity and mortality) closely related to socioeconomic indicators so different from developed countries.

Free Health: Conceptual Essence. Enlightenment on Paradigms.
From the conceptual point of view, Free Health means the one that reaches all citizens of one country without origin, ancestry, racial or age distinctions, nor social differences, namely, without any discrimination at all. As to health care professionals, it would allow accessing, developing, and sharing the health care-scientific information as well as professional continuing education, overcoming any border by using different tools of communication and information, offering in this way, constant, progressive, and interactive growth in the health care and scientific professional activity. Whereby, it produces a community of physicians interlinked to each other by means of the CIT, with inestimable scope that may build a vehicle of communication overcoming hospitals, city, province, region, country or continental limitations.

The usefulness and application of technologies in hospitals for different areas and specialties is inescapable nowadays, as well as its constant development and progress, with informatics being, as we said at the beginning, one of the main exponents of this characteristics, in addition to becoming a basic tool for the development of health care, administrative and medical management systems. About this last issue in developing countries, just as it happens in Latin America, there are several obstacles to get the technology within the socioeconomic reality mentioned above, to which the high duties on technology import, licensed informatics systems, low degree of informatics implementation in hospitals and an irregular degree of computerization must be added, as well as a reduced degree of use of resources in networks (Internet, intranets, etc.)

Regarding all this, health is a fundamental right that must lie in an equal way in all the inhabitants of a given country; and society as a whole must fight to maintain and preserve this right. Free software, as an informatics tool with ethic and morals principles completely different from owner software, is identified with this concept of defense and preservation of the citizen's right. Whereby, we believe and maintain that free software application in the health care area arises like an unrivaled foundation to carry out the realization of the Free Health concept. It is like this, since it allows producing not only informatics standards in hospitals, but low costs informatics systems, distributable, scalable, and that can be shared in the community overcoming the social and digital gaps, as well as any kind of frontiers, all of which were presented previously. To all this we should add the stimulus and development of local abilities, communication and information technology and knowledge improvements, with the addition of an important economic saving that may be invested in technology and human resources in the health care area.

Finally, Free Health has a wide sense that communes with the philosophical concepts of free software, where the whole society and health care professionals obtain huge benefits, thus constituting a community closer to the Promised Land of the Globalized New World in a real sense of solidarity for common well-being.

 

Bibliography  

 

GNU Free Documentation License
Version 1.2, November 2002Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
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Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
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- Médico.
- Coordinador Medico del BioLinux. Argentina.
- Coordinador del Proyecto SaluX.

 

 

 

This document is published under the FDL license
(GNU Free Documentation License, by its Spanish acronym. Version 1.2, November 2002)
of the Free Software Foundation. The copyright belongs to the authors. For further
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