Inside Iran's medical crisis: How healthcare workers treating injured protesters are facing arrests, raids, and state violence for honoring the Hippocratic Oath.
Inside Iran's medical crisis: How healthcare workers treating injured protesters are facing arrests, raids, and state violence for honoring the Hippocratic Oath.
Dr. Alireza Golchini, Qazviz surgeon has received the death sentence for treating injured protesters. Let us pray for him and for the people of Iran
If you walked into a hospital emergency room with a shattered arm or a gunshot wound, you wouldn't expect the person in the white coat to pause before helping you to assess whether treating you might land them in prison.
Yet today, in hospitals across Iran, that is the exact choice every doctor, nurse, and paramedic is forced to make.
The headline sounds like the plot of a dark dystopian film, but it is a sobering reality: Iran’s healthcare community is fighting for its own survival.
For decades, we’ve taken the fundamental principle of medical neutrality—the idea that hospitals are sanctuaries and doctors are neutral healers—for granted. But inside Iran, the simple act of treating an injured human being has been reclassified by state authorities as an act of resistance.
Hospitals Are No Longer Sanctuaries
When protests erupt on the streets of Tehran, Isfahan, or Qazvin, the violence doesn't end outside. Security forces have raided medical facilities, deployed tear gas inside emergency wards, and monitored patient admissions.
Because injured protesters risk immediate arrest—or worse—if they seek formal medical care, thousands are refusing to go to hospitals. Instead, they suffer in silence, leading to untreated gunshot wounds, severe infections, and preventable deaths. Human rights groups have rightly termed this a "secondary killing mechanism."
This fear has pushed medicine underground.
Courageous physicians are transforming their living rooms, bedrooms, and makeshift basement spaces into field clinics. Armed with smuggled antibiotics and basic surgical kits, they remove shotgun pellets and stitch up wounds under the cover of night, fully aware that a single raid could end their careers or their lives.
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The Cost of Honor
To understand the gravity of what is happening, look at the case of Dr. Alireza Golchini, a 52-year-old surgeon from Qazvin. His "crime"? Posting his phone number on social media to offer medical treatment to those too afraid to visit a hospital. For honoring his professional oath, he was violently arrested in front of his family and charged with moharebeh—waging war against God—a offense that carries the death penalty.
Or remember Dr. Aida Rostami, a young Tehran physician who spent her final days treating wounded demonstrators in secret before she went missing and was later found dead with severe marks of torture.
These aren't military operatives or political strategists; they are healthcare workers who refused to abandon their patients.
┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ THE REALITY OF MEDICAL REPRESSION │
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ • Public Hospitals: Monitored by security forces │
│ • Injured Protesters: Terrified to seek formal care │
│ • Medical Staff: Forced to choose between safety & oath │
│ • Underground Clinics: Operating under life-or-death risk │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Why Global Medical Neutrality Matters to Everyone
This isn't just an Iranian issue; it’s a critical challenge to human rights worldwide. When a state weaponizes healthcare, it shatters one of the most sacred social contracts humanity possesses. If medical neutrality collapses in one part of the world without severe international backlash, it sets a dangerous precedent for authoritarian regimes everywhere.
Medical professionals around the globe—from the World Health Organization to medical associations in Europe and North America—must do more than issue mild statements of concern. They must loudly demand the immediate release of all detained healthcare workers and hold state actors accountable for targeting emergency personnel.
The doctors of Iran didn't ask to be heroes; they simply asked to be allowed to do their jobs. As they risk everything to treat the wounded, the international community cannot afford to look away.
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