Paul Farmer
Paul Farmer
Paul Edward Farmeris an American anthropologist and physician who is best known for his humanitarian work providing suitable health care to rural and under-resourced areas in developing countries, beginning in Haiti. Co-founder of an international social justice and health organization, Partners In Health, he is known as "the man who would cure the world," as described in the book, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth26 October 1959
CountryUnited States of America
But if you're asking my opinion, I would argue that a social justice approach should be central to medicine and utilized to be central to public health. This could be very simple: the well should take care of the sick.
I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.
If I am hungry, that is a material problem; if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.
The idea that because you're born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you're born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that.
You can't have public health without a public health system. We just don't want to be part of a mindless competition for resources. We want to build back capacity in the system.
We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, 'What would make this service better for you?' As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers.
The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically.
For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.
The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.
With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
The essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right.
If access to health care is considered a human right, who is considered human enough to have that right?
The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
In terms of the big cities of this country, New Orleans is clearly one of the cities with the most unique character, ... What's happened goes well beyond the devastation of one city - it's a national tragedy.