Two Cultures Workshop: Medicine & Health

The Two Cultures Institute at LUMS seeks to bring different fields of knowledge and practice into conversation around complex societal problems. Through its residential workshops, the Institute brings together young people from diverse academic and professional backgrounds for sustained dialogue and interdisciplinary problem-solving. The first two workshops explored Water & Power and Law & Governance, bringing together perspectives that often remain separated in professional and institutional practice.

The third workshop, Medicine & Health, brings these two closely connected domains into conversation. While medicine is concerned with understanding, diagnosing, and treating disease, health extends to the wider social, environmental, institutional, and policy conditions that shape human well-being. The workshop will explore the challenges facing both domains, their underlying causes, and the connections that are often overlooked when these questions are approached in isolation.

Today, both face significant challenges: medicine is grappling with fragmented and pharmaceutical-driven care, overdiagnosis and overtreatment, the commercialization of medical practice, and the erosion of the doctor–patient relationship, while the broader area of health is marked by persistent inequities, failing institutions, elite capture, and worsening environmental conditions such as polluted air, unsafe water, poor sanitation, and the unavailability of health services, especially in rural areas.