This book written by a Pulitzer prize author, is about Dr Paul Farmer, an infectious disease specialist, influential anthropologist, medical diplomat, public health administrator and epidemiologist who has helped to bring new resolve and hope to some of the world’s most dreadful health problems.
At Harvard, he met his partners and together they founded Partners In Health (PIH) 40 years ago, a small human rights organisation that sought to provide quality healthcare to people living in poverty. They have been very successful in Haiti in their early years. Their non-profit Hospital Zanmi Lasante (meaning Partners In Health in Haitian Creole language) at the remote village of Cange is now the largest non-government healthcare provider in Haiti that serves a catchment area of 1.2 million peasant farmers. Its staffs included more than two hundred community health workers, a dozen nurses, twelve doctors, among them a Cuban surgeon and a Cuban Paediatrician (as the book written in 2003). They were caring for more than three thousands HIV and TB patients. Recently they have Red Cross blood bank and medical laboratories.
At one time, Paul Farmer and PIH consistently fought WHO offiicals who were advising against treating poor patients who are suffering multi-drug resistant TB (MTB) in developing countries. PIH managed to devise new delivery systems for management of medicines and brought down the cost of treatment for MTB.
Dr Farmer has been known as the preeminent healer to the poorest of the poor. He coined the idea of “O for the P” short for preferential option for the poor, that poor people should not just get the bare essentials of healthcare but also preferential treatment as those most in need that the wealthy receive. Over the years, his works has involved in treating HIV and infectious diseases in Africa, Rwanda, Peru, Lesotho, Mexico, prisons of Russia and many medical catastrophes around the world.
The author wrote :
“And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example.
He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world. I think he undertakes what, earlier today, he called "journeys to the sick" in part because he has to, in order to keep going. "That's when I feel most alive," he told me once on an airplane, "when I'm helping people." He makes these house calls regularly and usually without blan witnesses, at times when no one from Harvard or WHO can see him kneeling on mud floors with his stethoscope plugged in. This matters to him, I think—to feel, at least occasionally, that he doctors in obscurity, so that he knows he doctors first of all because he believes it's the right thing to do.
If you do the right thing well, you avoid futility. His patients tend to get better. They all get comforted. And he carries off, among other things, images of them and their medieval huts. These refresh his passion and authority, so that he can travel a quarter of a million miles a year and scheme and write about the health of populations. Doctoring is the ultimate source of his power, I think. His basic message is simple: This person is sick, and I am a doctor. Everyone, potentially, can understand and sympathize, since everyone knows or imagines sickness personally. And it can't be hard for most people to imagine what it would be like to have no doctor, no hope of medicine. I think Farmer taps into a universal anxiety and also into a fundamental place in some troubled consciences, into what he calls "ambivalence," the often unacknowledged uneasiness that some of the fortunate feel about their place in the world, the thing he once told me he designed his life to avoid.”
Dr Paul Farmer passed away in February 2022 after staying up late attending a patient the night before in a hospital in Rwanda where he had conceived and helped bring to fruition a beautiful, full-service facility in a rural district of Rwanda where there had never been a hospital. The hospital has become the cancer-treatment centre for the entire country and the campus for University of Global Health Equity. He was sixty two.
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