Global Health: Solve Easy Problems First | Big Think

Global Health: Solve Easy Problems First
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Every year, America spends $30 billion on "big name" diseases like AIDS, TB, polio, and malaria, but makes very little progress toward curing them worldwide. For Brian Mullaney, founder of Smile Train and WonderWork, this is tragic, considering that children and adults with easily curable problems like cleft palate and some forms of blindness lack access to low-cost surgeries that could significantly improve their lives.
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BRIAN MULLANEY:
Brian Mullaney has worked for or founded several organizations that offer free surgeries to people in need around the world. He is currently CEO of WonderWork, a company he co-founded. Previously, Brian co-founded Smile Train, the world’s largest cleft charity and served as its CEO for 10 years. At Smile Train, Brian and his team pioneered a new approach to providing free surgery in developing countries by empowering local doctors to solve the problem themselves. He also leveraged his 30-year marketing background to build one of the most cost-effective fundraising programs in the nonprofit world, raising more than $750,000,000 for clefts in less than 10 years. Today, Smile Train has more than 2,500,000 donors and has provided free, life-changing surgery for more than 900,000 children. Brian is a graduate of Harvard University. He co-founded Schell/Mullaney advertising in 1990, a high-tech marketing agency which was sold in 1996 to CKS, America’s first publicly-held, interactive advertising agency. He served on the board of Smile Train from its inception to June 2012. Currently he serves on the board of the International Center for The Disabled. In 2008, Brian was executive producer of the Oscar-winning Documentary Short, Smile Pinki and in 2004, he was the first foreigner ever to be awarded the prestigious Soong Ching Ling Camphor Tree award in China.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Brian Mullaney: I’ve been doing work providing surgeries for the poor in developing countries for the past 25 years. I've been to some of the most wretched places on Earth from Afghanistan to Haiti to Bangladesh to Uganda and I've seen so much suffering and so much misery, but I have never seen anything as powerful as watching someone who is blind open their eyes and see. Today in 2015, there are 20 million children and adults who are blind solely because they can't afford a surgery that takes as little as five minutes and costs as little as $35.

America spends $30 billion every year on AIDS, malaria. TB, polio, we spend tens of billions every year and we seem to make very little progress; it's just so frustrating. So when something comes along that's correctable why don't we solve it? There is a lot of different theories on this. One of them is from this brilliant Fulbright scholar who coined the term "the tragedy of easy problems." And the idea is that the global health folks and the big huge foundations prefer to chase the famous or exotic or sexy problems like AIDS or they want to invent a miracle vaccine. They don't want to solve diarrhea, which is an old mundane, problem, but it kills millions of children every year. They don't want to do cataract surgeries, which were projected perfected in 1949, because it's old news and you're not going to win the Nobel Prize for doing cataract surgeries or cleft surgeries. So, a lot of the energy and the money is chasing home runs and these huge problems that are very difficult to solve and will take billions and billions of dollars. And none of the attention goes to these mundane problems.

If I was in charge of all global health I would make a list of the biggest problems starting from the biggest to the smallest. And then I would have a column and it would have a check in it: existing cure solution or no existing cure solution. And then I would go down and all the ones that have cures like cataract blindness and burns and clubfoot and clefts and I'd solve them first. We could save and change a lot of lives by spending just even a little bit of money in that area.



Every year, America spends $30 billion on "big name" diseases like AIDS, TB, polio, and malaria, but makes very little progress toward curing them worldwide. For Brian Mullaney, founder of Smile Train and WonderWork, this is tragic, considering that children and adults with easily curable problems like cleft palate and some forms of blindness lack access to low-cost surgeries that could significantly improve their lives.

[MrChaluliss]

This is very helpful perspective and honestly one that needs more drive and supporters in general. Corporate world is obsessed with glamorizing everything and ignoring whats real, its time we corrected that behavior in our society.

[Xincos]

Doctors are the real heroes, keep up with the good work

[AtheerAl]

the tragedy of easy..
an eye opener..

[bandarisandeep]

One of those videos which will make most people think, how important is to solve smaller problems to tackle the bigger ones.

[oguzoran]

What's wrong with the footage? It's like he's talking to us from heaven...

[Hombolicious]

The man has some good points. Solve the problems you have solutions for first then work on the ones without solutions. Sadly what a solution is often in convincing people that the solution works. So you get no support and the impact you have on the world is smaller.

[MichaelOlsen-Engineer]

While doing the easy stuff first isn't dramatic or award winning, tackling it first  has several advantages.  Here are four key examples:
1 - Obvious and rapid success.  This great improves the motivation of all involved.
2 - More efficient use of resources.  Less waste of consumables and better management of sustainable and durable resources leads to more economically and ecologically sound solution.
3 - Refinement of skills and increase of knowledge to aid in progressively more difficult  problems. This allows for a well established, skilled, and and educated workforce by the time the really tough problems are tackled.
4 - By repeated removing the easy stuff from the big picture, even the most difficult problems are dramatically reduced in scale and complexity.

These advantages allow for a much larger portion of society to contribute to the overall solution which in turn makes both solving the problem and the solution itself far more meaningful to the populous.

[Kuriby]

This simple problem theory so true, for almost every aspect in life.

[mrquisqueyano]

I agree with this video but only to certain extent. We shouldn't be chasing solutions only for big scary diseases, and instead we should focus on on smaller and less scary ones which are common. But something as cataract blindness which cost 35 dollars is something that I think people with the condition don't solve because they don't have the money but because they are not aware that is that simple. Point being that we don't need to pay for it just inform people about it's simplicity.

[ShawnPhelpsVlog]

Very interesting, and an excellent to-the-point video. I hadn't thought of it that way before but I agree: it's very common for people to seek glory, even when it's under the guise of philanthropy. Sadly, that causes people to overlook the simple solutions.

Curing the curable first builds a stronger foundation. Perhaps prizes and "glory" should be given for *actually* eradicating something, anything, as well as for coming up with new cures that can *potentially* eradicate something.

Reward application of existing solutions as much as creating new solutions, you know? I think this applies to a lot of things in life. We tend to forget/take for granted what we feel we've solved. Always looking for that next "big thing." It's really sad to think that in the medical world, that mindset allows people to suffer who don't need to be suffering.

Again, great video. I hope the right people see it.

[hotfreshrider]

Nutrition and stress reduction would go a long way, but don't expect this in the West as you'd have to see alternative health professionals to connect the dots on what you eat and how you live, and how that make you feel.

[TheMrKrause]

Fix the lighting in the wide shots... It is awful

[ebolaman]

Good thing he's not in charge of global health else i may not be able to eat what i want or do what i want. I do like that he's spreading competition in pricing throughout the globe for certain procedures. If things are to get better there must be competition. And the best competition for the most valueable goods and services is in the free market.

[faaf]

Are they smoking in the studio or whats up with the haze in the pic?

[PsychopathUltimate]

I thought that he had a good point.

Let's see how much that made the comment section mad.

[lazygamerz]

Lets solve the major problems first that everyone get. I'm talking about the results of loss of cells, acumulation of aggregates inside and outside cells, accumulation of surplus extracellular protein matrix connections, breakdown of the mitochondrial genes because they don't have copies in the nuclear DNA, accumulation of senescent cells that refuse to undergo apoptosis, accumulation of cells that can divide forever because they activate the genes for telomere-lengthening (aka cancer). These six things is commonly referred to as aging. And is the cause of all the diseases people get with age, and the only reason you will ever avoid any of these is because you die of one before the others have accumulated enough. The myth of "healthy aging" is daft, there's no healthy old people, they all have accumulated dangerous amounts of these six things, and suffer the early symptoms of the diseases that these things cause.

[MrhibyeTV]

So long as there's money we're fucked

[quinndiesel]

The idea that we don't want to "solve diarrhea"  is preposterous.

[TubeeJack]

They'd only have to lose 2.33% of their research budget to fix all those blind eyes.

[TodorAdventures]

I disagree, because, a thousand years ago we could not cure cataracts (example), if  we are not trying then to cure it we would not now be able to cure it,  as well as with rabies, black plague and other diseases that today we can prevent and cure. I believe that we will one day find a cure for AIDS and cancer,  but we have to try harder.