A Blockade on Nuclear Weapons

ePulse: Why should medical students care about this?

Alex Rosen: As medical students we strive to be good doctors. A good doctor tries to discover the root causes of problems and address them in an encompassing treatment plan. A good doctor tries to prevent what he cannot cure. A nuclear strike has no meaningful medical response. Hiroshima and Nagasaki - even Chernobyl - have shown us: after a nuclear weapon, there's not much that doctors can do to help anymore. So they have a moral obligation, a social responsibility to prevent this ultimate disaster from happening. We know that nuclear weapons kill in three different ways and we must bring an end to this incessant threat to global health. Like fighting smoking or violence so must we doctors and future doctors engage in the struggle to abolish nuclear weapons.

Rudolf Virchow, the great German pathologist once said: "Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing more than medicine on a greater scale." We know the facts, people look up to us and respect our opinion, we have high reputation and the resources to make a difference - with this comes a responsibility to act. Medical students who want to be more than just lab rats, who want to address the real threats to health should realize that they too can make a difference...

Alex Rosen is a recently graduated medical student from Düsseldorf, Germany, where he studied at the Heinrich-Heine University. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of IPPNW and led the International Student Movement for the past two years.