Partners In Health

There is a tradition that, when learning a new computer programming language, the first thing you should do is write a program that outputs the text “Hello, world” to the screen. I wrote one of these programs last fall using MAGIC, a proprietary programming language developed by and for MEDITECH, the medical software company at which I had just been hired. I had no previous experience in computer programming when I began at MEDITECH, so my “Hello, world” program was not only saying hello to a new language, but to a new skill set and a new career.

This blog is my “Hello, world” for a new skill set that I’ve been starting to acquire for a few years now—fluency and comprehension of the issues and challenges that face Earth’s poorest people, the least fortunate economical and social subset of humanity that Paul Collier calls the “bottom billion.” Although I have always cared about issues of global health and social justice, my goal for this blog is to document my own growth in learning about the causes and proposed solutions to these monumental problems, and perhaps eventually contributing to the latter in some meaningful way.

I approach these topics as a layman—I have no formal training in medicine, public health, politics, economics, or any other obviously related field. My background is in music; I’m a graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy and the New England Conservatory of Music and have worked as a professional musician and music historian. I have also organized somewhat-annual benefit concerts for Haiti beginning in 2007—in addition to raising money for a worthy cause, these concerts have been incredibly rewarding and have given my music-making an added significance as I slowly begin to shift my focus away from performing and writing about music and towards the things I will discuss on this blog.

A few words about this blog and what I would like it to be:

• I would like this blog to be as polished and as well-written as possible. I am a musician who would like to be taken seriously on issues of public health, and it will only help my cause to avoid the clichés, incoherent ramblings, and basic affronts to the English language that plague so much of what is written on the internet.


• At least in the beginning, I would like to focus on book/journal/issue reports. This blog grew out of a reading journal I’ve been keeping while reading. I’ve struggled with the complexity of why people are poor and sick and why the remain that way, but have slowly gained a better understanding by trudging through academic articles and monographs, as well as attending lectures and devouring as much quality online content as possible. Much of it is dense and at first indecipherable—I think some of my notes, and the conclusions I have come to would be of interest to the layperson, so I’ll do my best to present them here.


• My audience, at least the one I’m imagining while writing, will be intelligent and interested in global health, but will not have any background knowledge on the subjects covered. I will spell out acronyms (at least the first time) and give definitions where I think the average person might need them. I will try not to speak down to anyone (not that I could!), but I will also err on the side of caution.


• I will assert my background where I can. I don’t want this to be a music blog (and I don’t think I have to worry about that!), but I also think that there is some shared ground between audience building for music, which I have done, and audience building for complex issues of global health, which I hope to help do with this blog.

So that’s it for the first post. Hello World, indeed! If you have any feedback, please leave a comment, send me a message (here or on Facebook), or shoot me an email at jmichiel@msn.com

Best wishes,
JM