When I was a medical student, we formed a 'Health Education Society' to share preventive health strategies. One of our earliest interventions was that we printed a small pamphlet on breast cancer. It was a copy of a US printed pamphlet and had a geometric circle with arrows marking the direction for women to palpate their breasts to identify any tumors earlier. I shared a few printed copies with some of my female classmates and some later got offended.

This was surprising for me as our own medical books have much more explicit pictures of the human body but probably it was not the content but who shared it. They thought that it was inappropriate for a male to give them these pamphlets. We decided not to distribute those pamphlets anymore. This was an important lesson in public health for me. No matter how well intended you may be, but you still need to consult the stakeholders. I still have those undistributed pamphlets lying with me reminding me of a costly mistake of thinking that "I know best for the........

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