Violence as health problem - The Boston Globe

Dr. Selwyn O. Rogers Jr.

WHAT

Violence should be treated as a chronic health problem, according to Rogers, an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, and the division chief for Trauma, Burns, and Surgical Critical Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Q. You talk about gunshot and stab wounds as the result of a chronic health problem. What do you mean by that?

A. The current paradigm in city after city in the United States is we wait for spikes to happen of disease - be it murder rates, or assault rates - and retroactively throw more resources at it. But we don’t treat it as disease where we will constantly provide resources to address poverty, hopelessness, lack of educational attainment to prevent these outbreaks of violence. I think fundamentally that that is a glaring weakness of our public policy.