Poverty medicine: how we are failing poorer and isolated patients – Zara Aziz

Full story in The Guardian, 8 March 2018

Poverty medicine is a term coined by US physician Raymond Downing in 2001 on his travels through rural east Africa to mean “not just what our patients lack but also what we [the doctors] lack in trying to treat them.”

No one specialises in this area of medicine expanding here in the UK, but I am now practising it. Patients are turning up to the surgery with pain, headaches and depression. Many are isolated and feel a general sense of malaise.