Photo: Mary Anne Mercer
Stephen Bezruchka
Stephen Bezruchka grew up in Toronto, Canada, the son of immigrants from Ukraine. He became a mountaineer in the 1960s, spent a year in Nepal, where he wrote the first trekking guidebook to Nepal, and then attended medical school. He transformed his goal to train local people to provide needed medical services in remote regions of Nepal. The opportunity to join the Dhorpatan Health Project was ideal. This experience enabled him to later train Nepali doctors in a remote district hospital setting in Nepal. His subsequent efforts in Nepal were to collaborate with Nepalis to work on issues they considered important. These included improving surgical services in remote hospitals and supporting burn care. As he recognized the limitations of healthcare to improve health, he studied population health and focused on the relatively poor health status of the United States, where he now lives and works. Stephen is a member of the faculty of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle.
His book Inequality Kills Us All: COVID-19’s Health Lessons for the World (2022) resulted from his unlearning and relearning about health production. His guidebook Trekking in Nepal has gone through eight editions and been translated into other languages. He also wrote Nepali for Trekkers; The Pocket Doctor: Passport to Healthy Travel and Altitude Illness: Prevention and Treatment.
More details about Stephen Bezruchka, his life and work, can be found at StephenBezruchka.com
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