Abstract
At the 47th General Meeting of the Japanese Association of Rural Medicine, I had the opportunity to present my experiences in rural medicine together with the philosophy developed through these settlement activities.
My involvement in rural medicine started at the end of the 1950s after working as a medical student in a farming village in Gifu prefecture, Japan. Also, during my internship I worked with people living on the boart in the Sumida river, Tokyo.
Through these settlement activities I found my mission as a physician.
That is, the physician must learn the patterns of human living and the circumstances surrounding them to find the key to medical philosophy.
At the meeting, I also presented additional experiences and opinions based on practicing medicine at the front-lines of community health care. Even if social circumstances change, the philosophy of medicine based on my rural medical activities will not. I believe we should create more balanced farming areas (with safe foods, pure natural resources, and a symbiosis between urban and rural areas) and should support these ideas by establishing a rural community health care program.
