Dear Minister Sakina Itoo ji and my dear doctors of Kashmir
Let me start with something that doesn’t get said often enough: Kashmir has brilliant doctors. They’ve worked through years of difficult circumstances while carrying their own physical and psychological trauma. Interns put in years of hard work and get paid badly for it. Junior doctors in government hospitals carry a workload that would break most people. I know this, and I respect it.
But I am writing because there is a problem we keep walking past.
Kashmir is sicker than it should be. Years of conflict have left deep psychological scars. Urban life has become stressful and unhealthy. In rural areas, agro-chemicals are used heavily. Even people who live fairly healthy lives are falling ill, and more and more diseases are showing up. I don’t think any of us can say with confidence what’s driving it.
Here’s the strange part. The information we need is already sitting in our hospitals. Government and private hospitals both hold huge amounts of patient data. Yet neither system has a unit whose job is to study it and tell people what’s happening: which diseases are rising, where, and among whom.
So where does the data go? A lot of it ends up with senior doctors, who use it to write research papers. Those papers get published in international medical journals, which most people in Kashmir will never see, can’t access, and couldn’t afford even if they could.
I don’t blame anyone for this. Publishing helps careers, and careers matter. But let’s be honest about who benefits. The patient whose records made the study possible never hears what it found. The family waiting in the OPD corridor doesn’t learn what disease trends are building around them, or which treatments are working and which aren’t.
That feels wrong to me. It’s the people’s health, and the people deserve to know.
So here’s what I’m asking.
Minister Sakina ji, please set up proper data and research units within government hospitals, and encourage private hospitals to do the same. Give them the mandate to study what we’re seeing and to share it regularly, in plain language, somewhere people can actually find it. In Urdu and Kashmiri, not just English.
To my colleagues: keep publishing in journals if that’s your path. But share your findings here too. A short summary in a local newspaper, a talk at a public forum, a page on a hospital website. Any of it would matter.
Think about what this could change. A village learns early that something in its water or soil is making people sick. A city sees its stress-related illnesses climbing and plans for it. Doctors find out what treatments really help, and patients get better care because of it.
We already have the data. We have the doctors. What we need now is the will to turn all of it into something useful for everyone.
I hope you’ll take this in the spirit it’s meant: as a doctor who cares deeply about this place and its people.
