Compassionate epidemiology: A catalyst for reawakening ecological and relational awareness in global health

Abstract

The field of global health has articulated a commitment to alleviate preventable suffering and advance health equity worldwide. Compassion is frequently invoked as a core ethical value for global health action. Recent attempts to quantify compassion—an epidemiology of compassion—reflect its perceived value in shaping effective action. However, compassion resists full measurement, because it is socially embedded, historically situated, and relationally enacted. Efforts to measure compassion in isolation from these contexts risk producing incomplete or misleading representations, ultimately constraining equity and community well-being.

In response, we propose compassionate epidemiology as a conceptual and methodological framework that reorients global health toward relational accountability, lived experience, and ethical responsiveness to preventable suffering. Compassionate epidemiology does not reject quantitative methods; rather, it challenges its epistemic dominance by centering participatory processes, narrative evidence, and culturally grounded knowledge as core components of epidemiological inquiry. This paper makes two contributions: it conceptualizes compassion as a social and epistemic phenomenon beyond metrics, and it proposes compassionate epidemiology as a paradigm for transforming evidence generation, interpretation, and policy translation.