بهداشت و سلامت در دوره محمدرضاشاه

The provision of health services by the state and through the private sector also expanded rapidly in this period. The quality and social effectiveness of hospital and medical care were, however, quite comparable with those of education: private medical practice became little more than a lucrative channel for accumulating wealth and investing it elsewhere, even in orange groves and vineyards; investment in private hospitals was a most profitable line of business activity, and exhorbitant fees (certainly much more than in, say, Britain) had to be paid for usually unsatisfactory, and sometimes dangerous even fatal 'services'. The latter considerations of unconscientious care and application are much more serious than the mercenary and entirely materialistic attitude of many doctors and hospitals towards their profession; yet, it is clear that the one cannot be isolated from the other. Frequently, reports on important laboratory tests were confused, the report on one patient being given for that on another; and occasionally laboratory reports were simply filled in without even carrying out the required test. Many a time patients suffering from neuroses and nervous depression were treated for stomach and heart diseases, even hospitalised and operated upon, only to find out usually by a relatively cheap trip abroad - that they were sound in body but frail in spirit. The import, production and distribution of medicinal drugs were no less than a racket, involving import licensees, traders, chemical firms and, most of all, officials in the Ministry of Health. Furthermore, genuine and highly expensive drugs were often left out in the blazing sun for days, and even weeks, in their wooden boxes at the ports of entry. That is why Iranian travellers to the West took large supplies of ordinary aspirin back home, because the same brands sold in Iran were ineffective, or inferior in their effect.
State hospitals were divided into two groups: those which were free of charge, and almost devoid of any real services; and those which cared for lowincome people, on the basis of a fixed annual insurance contribution. The latter group was smaller in number, and concentrated in a few cities; and only those who have had a chance to observe their workings at first hand will be able to appreciate the extent of
gratuitous contempt and hardship to which their patients were subjected.

Homa Katouzian