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Jacob Dreiher

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Summary

An internist who had worked for four years in the Segev Shalom Kupat Holim clinic when Dinero interviewed him on 14 March 2007, quoted at length in Chapter 4 on the town’s healthcare (Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin, PDF p.125).

Details

  • Dreiher describes an epidemic of diabetes and hypertension in the town, “more than the Jewish sector”, which he attributes to adopted habits — not walking, driving everywhere, no exercise, junk food, artificially fed lamb with high fat content, bread and sweet tea; doctors in the 1960s, he says, had ten patients with diabetes and fewer than five with hypertension in the whole Negev (PDF p.125-126).
  • He notes accident-type injuries common in the Pezurah but not in town, including drinking dangerous liquids stored in transparent bottles and home injuries from open fires (PDF p.127).
  • He attributes low compliance with medication, physical activity and smoking cessation to a fatalistic attitude that “everything is from Allah”; Dinero reads a lack of cultural awareness between the lines of his account, and sets beside it Sheiner et al. (2001:457, as cited), who describe Bedouin suspicion of invasive procedures less judgmentally (PDF p.127-128).
  • On the 2007 survey complaint that only one dermatologist is available once a week, Dreiher (3 June 2007) notes there are no waiting lists for the dermatologist, and speculates skin problems are a sensitive issue in Bedouin culture because they are visible and can be read as a sign of being unclean (PDF p.131).
  • On the long-standing complaint about the lack of Arabic-speaking clinic staff, Dreiher (3 June 2007) replies that five of the clinic’s eighteen staff “are of Arabic origin [sic]” and speak Arabic natively — two nurses, two clerks and a physician — and that “the professionality [sic] of the healthcare worker is more important than his/her ethnic background”; both “[sic]” markers are as printed (PDF p.131-132).

Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin, Segev Shalom

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