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
Well, I don't think that the role of the pharmaceutical industry is any different from that of other transnational corporations.
I don't know much about climate change. But I'm pretty sure we better figure out what to do to lessen its impact - at least its health impact - and that's not going to happen unless you have a lot of young talent interested in these topics.
I've been working in Haiti 28 years - I thought I'd sort of seen it... I've gone through a number of coups, the storms of 2008, I thought, you know, that I'd seen things as bad as they were going to get, and I was wrong.
One of the things we have to acknowledge is that if you look at Haiti, many billions of dollars have gone into development aid there that have not been effective.
I mean we grew up in a TB bus and I became a TB doctor.
The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
If access to health care is considered a human right, who is considered human enough to have that right?
With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
If I am hungry, that is a material problem; if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.
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 essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right.
The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically.
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.
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.