Friday, July 27, 2007 Yap: Johnny Mnemonics By Januar E. Yap Meanwhile
I LIKE Juan Flavier because he is showbiz. The morning I was on my way to take my board exam years ago, I found a DOH brochure in our school bus. It was about then health secretary Flavier’s health programs. Lacking in chromatics but stuffed with vintage Flavier witticisms.
A propaganda genius, he piggybacked the DOH’s programs on Nike’s famous “Just do it!” slogan and advanced his health programs with the stickiness of an Air Jordan pair of shoes. Those programs were the very stuffs a portion of our exam was made of. That brochure had me a decimal place from being topnotcher.
I remember my anatomy professor, too, one of my favorite teachers. He was a surgeon whose face I still remember as he grinned and pronounced the three tiny bones of the human ear—incus, malleus, stapes—as though they were some breakaway group from the Ten Little Indian Boys.
It was easy, he said, to memorize the parts of the nervous system. He came up with a very funny sentence using the first letters of each of the parts—a mnemonic trick for easy recall.
We could not do it. We were dispatched to the mountain barangays and had our turn to teach. We brought along eggplants and calendars as visual aids in our family planning lessons. Intruding into huts full of housewives, we tried to demonstrate our point by way of the lowly eggplant, rolling and fitting the rubber as we explained some drawbacks on the method.
By the end of our session, a mother raised her hand and asked where she could possibly buy the thing called “rhythm.” That moment, we wanted to smash the eggplants on our heads.
Health education is a tricky undertaking. I remember Dr. Rene Bullecer, too, who was our guest speaker on Aids. In the season of the Iraq-Kuwait conflict, the naughty doctor refashioned our lowly eggplant into a scud missile. To this day, between the T-cell and the scud missile, the latter steals the scene and Dr. Bullecer is waging a war against FHM.
I have yet to scour our library shelves for any graduate dissertations that compare the programs of each health secretaries. Questions like which of those programs proved most efficient, weak, routine, etc.
You succeed in putting out the best campaign slogans in the battle against sexually-transmitted diseases and have them stick into pop culture, and sooner or later, you may have the church again running after you. The tendency may be health education sneaking behind the pulpit. Pretty tricky you’ll have an excommunicated eggplant charged with gross promiscuity.
SSD’s special report on STD’s saw government health clinics as being short, or none at all, of cash to fund cheaper tests and treatments. It also mentions violators, some of which are bars being lax in health cards compliance. Why not an ordinance requiring bars to spend for the tests? They must be made to give their share in the campaign. Maybe our crusader Dr. Bullecer can lobby for that.
I’m out of space, but as to stigma, US lawyer and politician Ed Koch says, “If you turn your back on these people, you yourself are an animal. You may be a well-dressed animal, but you are nevertheless an animal.”
