The Profit of Pain

Posted by Doddy Collince OKelo on 10-Feb-2026

A heavy, ancient endurance is built into the very soil of our settlements. It is the sobering lesson that health is but the softest breath of a flute in a sweeping wind. In low-income areas, if you have it, you are wealthy, if you don’t, you are just another statistic caught between a miracle and a mistake.

I was employee MG18 something, a pioneer in a mission of breath at M-Gas Limited. Fresh from college, I was the third male to join the customer service department, where I spent my days probing the tightened veins of the informal settlements for research and needs assessment. We were selling the promise of a life without smoke to those for whom a clean breath was a luxury they couldn't afford to prioritize.

The raw soil of reality offers a wisdom that the polished wood of a lecture hall never could. I learned that for someone earning barely enough to keep the lights on, a hospital visit is often more terrifying than the disease itself. It is a place where the cure frequently costs more than the casket, and where the luxury of a professional diagnosis is often just a polite word for a financial heist.

My journey started on March 8th, 2021. As part of the team, I did the legwork, knocking on corrugated metal doors, listening to the songs of the slums, and trying to convince mothers that pay-as-you-go gas was the antidote to the silent killers in their kitchens.

The feedback was a cold shower. In these neighborhoods, they don’t treat health, they treat pain. I was told plainly that medication is for the dying. For everyone else, there is the chemist over the counter, a cheap cocktail of painkillers that numbs the struggle just enough to get through another day. It is a culture of self-prescription born of pure poverty. People treat what they don’t understand, numbing the symptoms while the sickness grows fat in the corners of their survival. This is how the tragedy starts, when you seek help, you walk right into the arms of a misdiagnosis that has been waiting to swallow you whole.

Medicine and Healthcare in Kenya has mutated into a high-profit, loosely regulated machine where the cost of survival is a shifting mirage. Because our government facilities are so often skeletal, lacking drugs, staff, or working machines, private clinics have sprouted like weeds to fill the gap. But most of these institutions don't see patients, they see profits.

They thrive on profit-driven diagnosis. There are cases where quack practitioners find a threatening disease in a healthy body just to keep the billing machine running. While a condition like Sickle Cell Anaemia is genetic and fixed, Type 2 Diabetes can be acquired, and it is these acquired lifestyle labels that are exploited. There are horrifying stories of practitioners inducing high blood sugar or over-administering insulin just to turn a one-time visitor into a lifelong customer. Even the surge in people wearing glasses isn’t always about failing sight, often, it is a simple case of eye strain being aggressively rebranded as Myopia to move inventory.

Misdiagnosis is more than a fear, it is a documented systemic failure,

·    The Motherhood Crisis: A 2024 study in Bungoma, referenced by the Journal of Global Health Reports, revealed that diagnostic errors occurred in nearly 68.7% of antenatal clinic visits. This is a direct driver of our staggering maternal mortality rates.

·  The Infection Lottery: Diseases like Brucellosis are routinely misidentified because clinics use cheap, inaccurate tests. Families spend life savings on heavy antibiotics for a disease they never had.

The skepticism we feel is earned. In 2020, my cousin was nearly wheeled into an operating room in Umoja Innercore for a surgery to fix what turned out to be a simple cold, he recovered in two days with standard antihistamines. I, too, was once injected with Ibuprofen, a drug I am deathly allergic to, in that same hospital, even after handing them the paper proving the risk.

We have been conditioned to fear the very people meant to save us. Trust in a doctor has been replaced by a desperate, expensive skepticism. To prevent this, the government must start building reality. We need the Kisumu County Model like the one at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital(Former Russia Hospital), to become the national standard.

1.    Equip the Levels: Every sub-county needs a functional Level 4 or 5 hospital, and every County must have a world-class Level 6 facility.

2.    Digital Health Accountability: We need the Digital Health Act fully implemented so that your records, and your life-threatening allergies and conditions, follow you to every clinic automatically.

3.    Price Regulation: The Ministry of Health must enforce price caps and aggressive audits on private clinics that invent diseases for profit.

Accessibility and accuracy shouldn't be a premium service for the rich. They should be the baseline for every Kenyan.

@Doddyokelo