Podcast 7 — Final

Episode Summary

This episode explores the hidden, human cost of broad sanctions on healthcare systems. Drawing on interviews and field research, it shows how “humanitarian exemptions” often fail in practice— banks, insurers, and shippers avoid risk, so legal medicine and parts never arrive. The consequences are intimate: outdated or unserviceable diagnostic machines, delayed genetic testing, and scarce orphan drugs. The moral question beneath the policy is simple and haunting: Who pays when compliance eclipses care?

Featured Poem

The Machine That Blinked Error

In a white room in Isfahan,
a mother waits for a sound—
the hum of a working heart,
the soft echo of hope.
But the screen flickers: error.
Not from the child—
from the world.

Steel and software grow old together,
rust blooming where mercy should.
A nation’s pulse measured
on machines too tired to care.
And across the sea,
someone signs a paper
and calls it diplomacy.

They say medicine is exempt,
but banks have no conscience—
only compliance.
So insulin becomes contraband,
and diagnosis, a dream deferred.

The child’s genes whisper their secret too late.
The neurons forget how to speak.
Somewhere, a report will note
“non-functional equipment,”
but not the lullaby
that was never finished.

Tell me—
whose child dies
so a policy can feel clean?
Whose grief is counted
as acceptable collateral?

If justice wears a blindfold,
perhaps it’s because
she cannot bear to see
the children she condemns.

Until the corridors open,
until truth outshines power,
we are not sanctioning a regime—
we are sanctioning
the right to heal.