The first time I went to India and was old enough to remember it, I got a stomach bug. Okay, more like diarrhea but I didn’t think we were close enough for me to open with “diarrhea.”

Anyway, I was visiting my family in India and probably drank water from the tap or cold water from a restaurant because I was soon bedridden, watching Shrek dubbed in Tamil.

Ever since, my parents have only let me drink bottled or boiled water in India. At first, it was frustrating because I’d walk into a restaurant after shopping in the blazing heat and car exhaust of Chennai only to have my parents tell the waiter that, no, I did not want ice in my water and that I would like it hot. Refreshing, right?

While that case of diarrhea wasn’t the reason I decided to pursue medicine in college — that would’ve been way too personal for an application essay — it was something I thought about when I was trying to figure out what areas of medicine I was interested in.

Why? The program I ended up getting into and joining dropped this idea of “global health” into my lap. I realized that while the term “global health” and the growing interest surrounding it is relatively new, the ideas behind it are things that most of us have experienced in one way or another. The reason I couldn’t drink a glass of cold water in that restaurant in Chennai was because water in India isn’t the same quality as water in the United States. While that water gave me diarrhea, it didn’t affect the people who drank it every day. Why is that? How does that affect their overall health? What about mine?

Right now, I feel like “global health” is a buzzword that’s supposed to serve as some kind of umbrella term for everything in medicine and then some. In that way, it’s a good term because it’s as broad as the field and topics it represents. But the phrase also does a disservice to the idea because while it’s really easy to name drop “global health,” it’s not so easy to talk about, well, global health. Did that make sense?

According to Jeffrey’s Koplan’s 2009 Lancet article that defined “global health” in academia, “Global health is an area for study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide” (1).

That sounds super noble, right? By that logic, global health covers literally every health topic you could think of. The opioid epidemic in my county, the hotbeds (or hot puddles) of malaria in villages in India, or the healthcare inequity in big American cities — all of that falls under global health.

Because of that, the field itself can seem a little overwhelming. But wait, there’s more. I think a misconception of global health is that it only covers topics that are explicitly related to medicine. But if you think about it, all of those seemingly “medical” issues are side effects of larger problems in government, economics, infrastructure, social hierarchy, etc. So, global health isn’t just about the diseases that affect different populations and curing those diseases, but learning about and addressing the situations and conditions that allow people to suffer from those diseases in the first place.

When I was first learning about global health I compared it to population health, which the CDC says is “an interdisciplinary, customizable approach that allows health departments to connect practice to policy for change to happen locally” (2).

Keyword: locally. The only real difference between the two is that population health is studying health on a smaller scale, again, locally. Global health, one, sounds cooler, and two, covers a lot more area. As a result, global health has a greater breadth of issues and fields than population health.

But if a field like population health exists to address health issues in a city, state, or even nation, why should countries or even us as individuals bother addressing global health? It sounds like a UN job and while it is, it’s more than just being super noble and caring about other people’s problems out of the goodness of your heart.

I think we have to see the world as a system, and yeah it’s a really big system, but everything affects something else. The Ebola crisis is probably the best example of what global health means. With more people traveling to more places, infectious disease can be transmitted across oceans. So suddenly, healthcare in Africa is going to make a difference in health outcomes in the United States.

It’s not even just infectious diseases. Bear with me, but if women in other countries don’t have access to feminine hygiene products, their education rates go down. And lower rates of education in women correlate to increased maternal mortality rates and decreased national economic productivity (3). That’s going to eventually effect politics, travel, technological advancements, trade, even war in some way or another. All because of a tax or taboo!

The fact that what I just said seems like a bit of a stretch is representative of how global health is trying to tackle intimidating issues. Because every aspect of the world is somehow connected, there’s a reason we should be trying to decrease maternal mortality and a reason we can’t do it without addressing the economies or social norms of the places and populations that are most affected.

As a student studying the field, I think it’s really easy to get lost in how broad and detached the topics in global health can seem. But a benefit of learning about the health issues and healthcare systems of other nations and communities is that you can take that knowledge and use it to solve problems in your own community. If, again, we look at maternal mortality, the rate of deaths per live births in the United States has been increasing since 1990, especially for women of color (4). Botswana, on the other hand, has a higher rate of maternal mortality because of the differences in infrastructure but their rate has been decreasing since 1990 (5). Clearly, we could learn a thing or two from them.

In many ways, perspectives from global health are valuable not only in and of themselves, but because they can improve our approach to population health: think globally, act locally.

Being the kind of person who likes specifics, I never really liked the term “global health” because it felt too broad to accomplish anything. But as I learn more about global health, I’m starting to realize that there’s beauty in the buzzword: anything less broad would minimize the scope and impact of the field. At the same time, we have to recognize that when we talk about global health, it’s not a scapegoat phrase that will get us out of talking about specifics, but a gateway to diving deeper into the things that really affect health and wellbeing.