{"id":156,"date":"2021-05-08T14:18:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-08T12:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/?p=156"},"modified":"2021-05-10T14:24:44","modified_gmt":"2021-05-10T12:24:44","slug":"dolly-arjun-tries-to-help-indias-covid-patients-specially-the-dalit-or-untouchables-and-others-without-health-access-over-the-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/2021\/05\/08\/dolly-arjun-tries-to-help-indias-covid-patients-specially-the-dalit-or-untouchables-and-others-without-health-access-over-the-phone\/","title":{"rendered":"Dolly Arjun tries to help India\u2019s Covid patients specially the Dalit (or &#8220;untouchables&#8221;) and others without health access over the phone."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">As <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/indiacovid?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#indiacovid<\/a> rages, Dolly Arjun, a physician&#39;s assistant in the US, has set up a telehealth service for the lowest Indian caste &#8211; the <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/Dalit?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#Dalit<\/a> (or &quot;untouchables&quot;) and others without health access.   Now, she treats <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/COVID19?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#COVID19<\/a> patients in the US, and helps dozens a day in India. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/xveyC5c0YD\">pic.twitter.com\/xveyC5c0YD<\/a><\/p>&mdash; Michael Holmes (@holmescnn) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/holmescnn\/status\/1390929572523347968?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">May 8, 2021<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>By&nbsp;Dan Levin<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Members of the&nbsp;global Indian diaspora, nearly 17 million, have&nbsp;mobilized from afar&nbsp;to help back home, where the&nbsp;Indian health system&nbsp;is buckling under the weight of a devastating coronavirus wave. Here is one U.S. resident\u2019s story.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The calls come at all hours, sometimes 15 a day, from some of India\u2019s most oppressed and severely ill people, buzzing a cellphone that belongs to Dolly Arjun, an Indian-American physician assistant in Boston.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A few years ago, Ms. Arjun founded a telehealth program to provide free health care to members of India\u2019s Indigenous tribes and to Dalits, who are at the lowest rungs of India\u2019s entrenched caste system and have long faced discrimination. Dalits are typically the&nbsp;last to receive assistance in humanitarian disasters&nbsp;and often live in impoverished rural villages with no hospitals, medical care or schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, with a devastating wave of coronavirus infections surging across India, Dalits are facing a new peril, Ms. Arjun said. She said she\u00a0was desperate to help, even though she is emotionally exhausted after a year of working with Covid-19 patients in Massachusetts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cTons of people are dying,\u201d Ms. Arjun said. \u201cThis is just a human to human need.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Her focus is not just Hippocratic. She is Dalit herself, a rarity among Indian medical professionals in the United States, most of whom come from upper-caste urban families. \u201cThe only reason they might know a Dalit person is because it\u2019s their servant at home,\u201d Ms. Arjun said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Her telemedicine program has health workers in India who can translate for patients in local languages, but finding medical professionals in the United States to join the effort has not been easy, she said. Still, Ms. Arjun has recruited two physicians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Patients contact the group through WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube, and the medical professionals call back on video. Often their first task is to reassure patients who have little understanding of the coronavirus or the appropriate medical treatments, Ms. Arjun said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cPart of what\u2019s happening now is patients are being told Covid is going to kill you, so they are panicked,\u201d Ms. Arjun said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She noted that in one Indian state the government has been broadly distributing packets of medications \u2014 including 25 days-worth of antibiotics, which cannot treat viruses \u2014 to residents, regardless of whether they have tested positive for Covid-19 or show symptoms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sometimes, however, the telehealth calls detect life-or-death emergencies. In late April, Ms. Arjun logged onto a WhatsApp video call with a young Dalit man and his 60-year-old father, who was at home with breathing problems in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, where it was around midnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThey didn\u2019t know what to do,\u201d she said. \u201cThey told us there were no hospitals or oxygen available, and they hadn\u2019t seen a doctor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After assessing the man, Ms. Arjun urged the family to check to see whether any hospital beds were available instead of assuming that they were full. \u201cIt took a lot of convincing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The next day, he was admitted and began to improve, but the hospital was running out of oxygen. Ms. Arjun put out a call on several WhatsApp groups for an oxygen cylinder, though the family did not know the name of the hospital and then fell out of contact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Days later, she learned that the man had died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Source: Boston Health Worker Helps India\u2019s Covid Patients Over the Phone &#8211; The New York Times (nytimes.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By&nbsp;Dan Levin Members of the&nbsp;global Indian diaspora, nearly 17 million, have&nbsp;mobilized from afar&nbsp;to help back home, where the&nbsp;Indian health system&nbsp;is buckling under the weight of a devastating coronavirus wave. Here is one U.S. resident\u2019s story. The calls come at all hours, sometimes 15 a day, from some of India\u2019s most oppressed and severely ill people, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":158,"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions\/158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/associationthankyou.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}