Medication and Treatment of Diseased Patients
The government of North Korea spends the least of their earnings on health care or less than $1 per person. Patients usually have to pay in cigarettes, alcohol or food for the most basic consults, and takes cash for tests or surgery; because of this most North Koreans resist going to the doctor. Instead they go directly to the market where they purchase medicine and painkillers, even though doing so is potentially dangerous, as North Korea is undergoing a tuberculosis epidemic, because of food problems North Korean's revert to eating grass, tree bark and roots. Most North Koreans are too poor to pay for treatment. North Korea's health care system is unable to provide sterilized needles, clean water, food, and medicine. Most hospitals operate without electricity or heat, and doctors are forced to work by candlelight. Hospitals no longer stock medicines because staff sell them on the black market.
Read more about this topic: Healthcare In North Korea
Famous quotes containing the words treatment, diseased and/or patients:
“I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly, I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art.”
—Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.)
“Don’t you know this, that words are doctors to a diseased temperment?”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)