Paul Farmer Quotes
At the same time, it is obvious that clinicians in Haiti are faced with different, and, in fact, greater, challenges when attempting to treat complications of HIV disease.
Farmer, Paul. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. University of California Press, 1999.
In some areas, the United States has the best performance in the entire world—length of survival rates for breast cancer and some other diseases for example. However, on basic medical services, like infant mortality, we have a poorer record than all the other industrialized countries. Cuba and Costa Rica are better than us in this area and their citizens actually have a longer life expectancy than Americans. Emmanuel makes the argument that the cost differential between US health care and other—even better systems—is so great that we can easily save money and reform our system without rationing medical care or wait in lines for surgery. However, to do so, there must be huge reforms and few in the system want to risk changing anything. It is hard for most Americans to face the fact that other countries offer obvious medical superiority in many areas. For example, in France, if you call their emergency telephone number for a medical emergency a doctor answers the phone, not an operator with only modest medical knowledge. When a French ambulance is dispatched, it does not have emergency medical technicians only, but there is a doctor and a nurse in the ambulance. And the ambulance itself is equipped to do emergency surgery of other critical treatment if time is critical.
The CDC scientists track communicable diseases and are responsible for creating vaccines each year in time to limit the “flu season’ and other disease mortality and morbidity. In the government shutdown, they could not even volunteer to work in their own laboratories.
Paul Edward Farmer is an American medical anthropologist and physician. Farmer holds an MD and PhD from Harvard University, where he is the Kolokotrones University Professor and the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is co-founder and chief strategist of Partners In Health (PIH), an international non-profit organization that since 1987 has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He is professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
