Homelessness: cause and effects
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EDITORIAL
Homelessness: cause and effects Juan J. Canoso 1,2 Received: 15 November 2020 / Revised: 15 November 2020 / Accepted: 17 November 2020 # International League of Associations for Rheumatology (ILAR) 2020
Abstract In today’s world, wealth accumulates in ever fewer hands. People who live at the margin of the socioeconomic system and are infirm are most prone to become homeless. Many medical and psychiatric problems beset this population. Among them, rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases are, at the same time, illnesses and barriers to care. Healthcare innovations may decrease the lot of these unfortunate. To correct the root of the problem, we should also set our moral compass to a more egalitarian society. Keywords Diseases of poverty . Homelessness . Inequalities
Editorial. We are living sad times. The COVID-19 slow-brewing, lethal pandemics, has no end in sight. Simultaneously, solidarity, which is inherent to most living species, seems to be on the way out from Homo sapiens. Values, understanding, and tolerance are being replaced by an insatiable need for material success, covering up remorse with the idea that, by overflow, some spare change will filter down into the rest of society. However, material success does not trickle down. On the contrary, it works as a suction pump. In today’s world, wealth tends to accumulate in ever fewer, ever more predatory, and ever more resourceful hands, both at the global and individual levels [1, 2]. The blanket is continuously being pulled away from those at the margins. Therefore, it is not surprising that despair, anxiety, depression, layoffs, and evictions have escalated over the past two decades, irrespective of medical and psychiatric ailments, in the dispossessed. Of course, malnutrition, mental disability, alcoholism, drug addiction, tuberculosis, HIV, and now COVID-19 are most prevalent among the homeless, who are the weakest of our brethren. Some degree of anesthesia may make their jump to the open space less painful. Street, crevices, parks, and enclosed public areas in cold weather are the only welcoming place for those expelled. There are also * Juan J. Canoso [email protected] 1
American British Cowdray Medical Center, Mexico City, Mexico
2
Division of Rheumatology, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA
shelters that often homeless avoid for fear of violence and acquiring a disease. There is a difference between the cause and the symptoms of homelessness. In 1993 [3], Mathieu commented that changes in the global economy, namely, deindustrialization in the 1980s, led to discontinuing federal programs, which resulted in the increment of homeless of which only a minority were mentally disabled. To reiterate, mental disease, etc. are not the etiology of homelessness. They are symptoms of the shameful social system we live in today. These conditions have been named diseases of poverty, in which “the most elementary requirements for health are that people must have enough to eat and they must not be poisoned”; “poverty is not a direct ca
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