Medicine and health in Ecuador after the pandemic

The pandemic that in Ecuador produced international news in all the global media. This was due to the spectacular way of dying in the streets, hospitals and houses, especially in Guayaquil, and the large number of sick and dead in Quito. This was a tough test for scientific medicine and public health in the country. Scientific medicine is responsible for the almost immediate recognition of the virus, and the very rapid manufacture of vaccines. To Public Health, the vaccination campaigns, which were an undoubted success for the government of Guillermo Lasso, after the deadly clumsiness and corruption with which it began in the government of Lenín Moreno, his predecessor, The vaccines and the vaccination campaign became the country's lifesaver, but also an extraordinary business for the laboratories for the 4 doses of vaccines, the tests, the manufacture of medicines, equipment, especially beds for the units of intensive care, for providers of oxygen tanks, retrovirals, ambulances, masks, suits, gloves, etc. But it showed that the doctors, and all the health personnel, the policemen, soldiers, cleaning personnel and those who had places to sell food, the informal ones in the streets, the beggars, the displaced persons who left Venezuela or its provinces, were easy victims of the virus, like the elderly, those with previous illnesses, or those with disabilities, except for President Lenin Moreno, who was saved. This pandemic allowed the media, the internet and the rulers to play a fundamental role. This became an experiment and exercise in media manipulation, which multiplied the power of TV channels, radio, newspapers, and especially the Internet. Governments were able, as never before in history, to tell the inhabitants of a country what they should and should not do, not forcing them to be submissive to the police, the army, or the vaccination brigades. The military and police also managed to have more power over the population, weapons, salaries, and other advantages, when due to the economic catastrophe caused by quarantine, social distancing, the closure of airports, roads, shops, confinement in their houses of the population, a wave of bankruptcies was unleashed, indebted, hungry, unemployed, acutely and chronically ill, shortages of everything, which has led us to now have insecure cities and provinces such as Esmeraldas, Manabí and Guayas, over which there has been of exception, a curfew, due to the unbridled criminal violence they experience. With the economic reactivation that we are experiencing, the poor became thieves and dirty-collar criminals with bloody hands, the middle class and professionals, as well as the rich, became thieves or white-collar criminals, who became assembly members, public officials Rapists teachers again, mercenary doctors or journalists, veterinarians, dentists, lawyers, merchants who only work like whores for money or salary, trying to squeeze other Ecuadorians, or let them die if they can't get money, goods, favours, advantage The pandemic made us neighbors in this country miserable, unable to recognize the good and the bad of our actions, even at the time of voting in the elections. This gave way to medicine and medical practice becoming a brazen mechanism of exploitation, flooding the media with advertising, offering the impossible. The political lie became publicity, the publicity lie in the politics of the government, the companies and the merchants.The war between Russia and NATO over Ukraine has now triggered an inflationary wave. This causes the prices of everything to rise, starting with the price of fuel, followed by food, medicine, and medical services. The prices of medicines and medical services have unleashed a fever for natural products, alternative medicines, which do not need a medical prescription, that nobody can know what they really contain, that undesirable effects cannot be recognized either, where the value and assumptions Benefits of medicines from health food stores are given by advertising costs, not by their curative effects. In both the countryside and cities, preventive medicine came to take precedence over curative medicine. Since the 1960s, the rural medicine of the Ministry of Health, and the Peasant Social Security, and the urban medicine of the health centers, have served to expand the drug market to convert the Ministry of Health, the Social Security, the Peasant Social Security, insurance for the police and the armed forces are the most important clients of the pharmaceutical companies. To avoid overpricing and kickbacks, a purchase mechanism was created through a reverse auction, in which state health institutions present the amount of their requirement, and depending on the volume of sales, pharmaceutical companies can lower prices. , saving the government hundreds and even billions of dollars in drug costs. The necessary medications vary according to the area. The Coast and the Amazon, which are tropical, demand more antibiotics, the Sierra more antispasmodic analgesics, vitamins, because there is chronic malnutrition in the Andes that affects children, or pregnant women. But in the fields, official medicine is not scientific medicine, but political medicine, since the function of health centers is to reassure or sedate the population, so that death or illness does not arouse protest, nonconformity with the ruler of the day, and avoid emigration to the cities, based on this the doctors have the obligation to prescribe not what the patient needs, but what the government decides that it can and should give him. This rural and marginal urban medicine coexists with traditional medicine, where healers are the ones who provide, above all, psychotherapies, which the government does not provide, or care for pregnant women that the government provides in an industrial, insensitive way, where treatment prevails. brutal on women in labor, who in moments of pain are victims of insults, screams, unnecessary painful maneuvers and newborns, come out of the warm and soft uterus to be injected, their skin is irritated by fabrics that scratch them to remove the vermix caseosa, and they have a visual auditory attack and finish that arouses their fear, pain and terror before the extrauterine world. The costs of medicines and consultations make medicinal plants and the experience of healers once again the center of healing practice in poor places and fields. Health became the objective of political campaigns, since it was the offer to vaccinate 8 of the 16 million Ecuadorians in the first hundred days that gave candidate Guillermo Lasso victory. Surely the one that wins in the next elections will be the one that offers medicines and free medical care, fights against malnutrition, through breakfast and lunch to all preschool students, schools, colleges and even universities in Ecuador, because malnutrition , malnutrition, alcoholism and drugs have become the main causes of physical and mental health problems for the inhabitants of Ecuador, and even of the violence we experience.