" bioethics is confronted with an extraordinarily difficult quandary: how to reconcile the clearly immense differences in the social and personal realities of moral life with the need to apply a universal standard to those fragments of experience that can foster not only comparison and evaluation but also action."" (Kleinman, pg. 70).
In understanding the moral realm of health systems and their implications, we as ethnographers witness a compelling struggle between immediate, local, and personal continuities and a global force that which tries to shape and tween them. This global force that continually attempts to reformat and formulate local histories and inherent traditions (separated often times geographically and elsewhere culturally) through the medicalization of illness and disability, are met with a reciprocal opposition from the subjected individuals. It is a rigid political paradox which puts us at ends with creating a system of health care for the betterment of all of humanity but also one that which is ultra-sensitive to local/personal continuities. And within the highly charged political arena of "universal- health care, it often calls for inquiry into the national and international context which it is placed.
It is true that we all exist in a world with gross inequities and inequalities. While the economically privileged societies benefit most from material wealth, availability of information, and accessibility to health care, those less economically privileged of other parts of the world have suffered setbacks in all these areas. This has left them in unfortunate positions in which tuberculosis runs rampant, malaria still kills millions, and the rate of death at birth is disproportionately higher than of neighboring areas.
We are continuously at odds with ourselves to further humanity through breakthroughs in medical technology and to protect us all by making every human the beneficiary of these advancements.
