Treatment Access Quotes

Living with AIDS is like always having the sword of Damocles over your head. The disease is scarier than death itself. The disease is so messy, so devastating, so pervasive. It robs you of everything you hold dear.

There are whole states where people [with addiction or mental health issues] can't get to a doctor. If that were true of pancreatic cancer, if that were true of heart disease, if that were true of diabetes, we'd all understand that it made no sense at all. And yet we somehow approach mental health from a very different standard.

Having deinstitutionalized mental health, we have not created the structure and the institutions to take care of people, to identify when there is a mental health problem, and to get the treatment to people.

Many children with cancer in the developing world can be cured. But without appropriate treatment, few survive.

Being treated by a doctor who specializes in your kind of cancer is so important, especially for those of us who have rare or very rare cancers. They will have access to newer treatment options that may be offered only at big academic cancer centers, so you don't miss out on treatments that could help you.

The “right to death" can easily become a threat to the life of patients whose treatment is hampered by lack of funds.

From the beginning, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has presented very difficult challenges.

You can’t have a campaign against AIDS that emphasizes global abstinence.

More people with HIV/Aids are getting inexpensive anti-retroviral drugs, and their life expectancy has increased, but universal access is still far off, and the disease is still spreading, if more slowly than before.

For mental illnesses, we need better access to treatment and diagnosis.

Patients with fatal diseases are fighting for their lives every day while real, meaningful, life-extending treatments sit on the shelf just beyond their reach.

In Africa through the 1990s, with notable exceptions in Senegal and Uganda, nearly all the ruling powers denied they had a problem with AIDS.

The trouble is it's very difficult to pin-point the most important thing because Aids affects everyone in different levels of society, differently and you have to respond to it differently.

And I'll tell you, honestly, folks that I talk to, the 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in America, that I am one of, understand that we're done with insurance companies dropping us or denying us coverage because of - because we have a preexisting condition.

People who need [drug abuse] treatment have got to get it. You don't have to be a humanitarian to believe addicts need treatment. The public is threatened every time a drug addict is told to come back next week.

I had seen AIDS patients in India and Africa, and knowing that people were dying even though drugs existed that could help them was shattering for me.

If a country denies it has AIDS, that country will inevitably become an even greater victim.