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Joia Mukherjee
Physician and Activist
Joia Mukherjee Puts Health in a Social Context
Dr. Joia Mukherjee can trace the roots of her activism on public health back many years and across continents. When she was eight years old she traveled with her parents to India— her father's homeland—while it was in the midst of a national emergency. At that time, in 1972, nearly 10 million East Pakistani Bengalis were forced to wander the streets of Calcutta due to a devastating civil war in Pakistan.
Dr. Mukherjee vividly remembers seeing throngs of people dying and suffering. The image of one became etched in her social conscience.
"This woman put her hand in my face, basically begging. And she was missing several of her fingers. And I looked up and her nose looked like it had been erased with a pencil eraser. I started crying and my parents took me aside. I said, 'What's wrong with that lady?' And they said, 'Well she has leprosy.' And I said, 'Can I catch leprosy?' And they said, 'Well, no, only poor people get leprosy.'"
Years later, as a medical student at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Mukherjee, was still searching for answers, beginning to focus on understanding disease within a biosocial context. This is why she was particularly drawn to studying pediatrics and infectious disease, two branches of medicine that are virtually inseparable from the social contexts in which they occur.
"You can't look at a five-year-old child who's being abused and comes into your clinic and is dirty and hungry and say, 'Oh, it's the fault of the kid.' Everyone can say, well this is a terrible environment. But that same child grows up and is 40 years old and living under a bridge and using heroin and people want to blame him."
"But in fact it's the whole context, the broader context of their life. HIV, right now, is heavily concentrated among people who are poor, in the US, but also overseas. Often the focus on prevention programs is based on the idea that people can just say 'no' to sex or women can just ask their partners to wear a condom, but these are unrealistic expectations when many people are just day-to-day surviving."
Dr. Mukherjee hopes that PHR's Health Action AIDS campaign will help shift medicine's paradigm from a disease-based model to a biosocial one, where epidemiology and human rights can successfully work hand-in-hand. "Hopefully we can get people in medicine to understand the biosocial paradigm and make it part of the way they think about medicine." Dr. Mukherjee pushes her medical students at Brigham and Women's Hospital to think both creatively and contextually. She feels that understanding health as part of a larger picture will make a difference for generations of patients.
"I'm optimistic because I believe in dignity and think the human rights framework is the right platform," Dr. Mukherjee said. "Understanding the social context is critical, very critical, particularly the social and economic rights of people living in poverty—to have a decent house, to have decent food, to be able to access the health care system."
She believes it takes collective action to make key policy makers pay sufficient attention to poverty and health issues, particularly AIDS.
"The Health Action AIDS campaign has been one of the main US-based vehicles for this collective action for the past three years," she said. "But the battle is far from over, and we need everyone's support."
"What I tell my students all the time is, you speak English, you have a passport, you have a responsibility to use those tools," Dr. Mukherjee said. "Go see these places and talk about them. Write about them. Be an advocate. It's a huge job, but the coolest thing ever is to change the world."
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