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:
“Ambivalence reaches the level of schizophrenia in our treatment of violence among the young. Parents do not encourage violence, but neither do they take up arms against the industries which encourage it. Parents hide their eyes from the books and comics, slasher films, videos and lyrics which form the texture of an adolescent culture. While all successful societies have inhibited instinct, ours encourages it. Or at least we profess ourselves powerless to interfere with it.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Don’t you know this, that words are doctors to a diseased temperment?”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)