Paul Farmer Quotes (40 Quotes)


    Even die-hard fans of the market acknowledge that TB care should be free. Why Because it's an airborne disease and treatment equals prevention.

    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.

    It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.

    The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically.

    You look around the U.S. and the nature of the people who settled in New Orleans is such that you couldn't go to another part of the country and find that mixture. That's one reason the ties are so strong.


    Due to the groundbreaking work of PIH, the global community has moved from asking 'should' antiretroviral treatment be provided to people living with HIVAIDS in the poorest countries to demanding to know 'when' it will happen and 'how' to do it most effectively.

    Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care.

    Since I do not believe that there should be different recommendations for people living in the Bronx and people living in Manhattan, I am uncomfortable making different recommendations for my patients in Boston and in Haiti.

    We have opened a hospital that was abandoned since the genocide 10 years ago and put some hundreds of patients on anti-retroviral therapy, for example, in the middle of rural Africa, ... We have also, needless to say, focused on whatever it is that ails the people who are coming to this hospital and the clinic sites around. And, that is everything from distress during labor, to malaria, of course to other projects. We do not have any doubt that this project will be a great success.

    I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.

    The prestigious Hilton Humanitarian Prize is a terrific boost as we seek not only to provide direct medical services in seven countries, including our own, but also to bring countless supporters into a broad and global movement to promote basic rights for the poor. Winning the Hilton Prize is the greatest recognition yet received by Partners In Health, and we are proud, honored and grateful.


    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.

    The human rights community has focused very narrowly on political and civil rights for many decades, and with reason, but now we have to ask how can we broaden the view.

    In fact, it seems to me that making strategic alliances across national borders in order to treat HIV among the world's poor is one of the last great hopes of solidarity across a widening divide.

    At the same time, the fact the world's poor are calling upon us to help is a marker, in my view, of the limitless potential of human solidarity.

    And I can also show you that people from all walks of life agree that someone who is sick deserves, in principle, compassion and care.

    Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water.

    I mean we grew up in a TB bus and I became a TB doctor.

    It is essential that he be transferred to the US without delay for a more extensive work-up. This disease can be treated if we get him out of jail and into qualified medical care.

    So I can't show you how, exactly, health care is a basic human right. But what I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.

    I critique market-based medicine not because I haven't seen its heights but because I've seen its depths.

    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.

    But as for activism, my parents did what they could, given the constraints, but were never involved in the causes I think of when I think of activists.

    The danger is that they build up a power base and turn everyone in the organization paranoid, everyone becomes afraid of everyone else and the work culture begins to reflect the personality of the leader,

    Shuttling back and forth between what is possible and what is likely to occur is instructive and a lot of what shapes our sentiment.

    The toxic soup, as it has been called, is touching every square inch of the flooded areas, ... That issue of the environmental cleanup is one that we have not typically faced with other disasters. It's not just the structural integrity of the buildings, but it's the whole issue of contamination contamination of buildings, contamination of yards.

    I think we will see better vaccines within the next 15 years, but I'm not a scientist and am focused on the short-term - what will happen in the interim.

    I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.

    I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.

    The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.

    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.

    Well, we've worked with our friends in Haiti to establish nothing short of a modern medical center in one of the poorest parts of that country.

    Well, I don't think that the role of the pharmaceutical industry is any different from that of other transnational corporations.

    Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.

    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.

    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.

    It was apparent from the early 80s that in order to do something lasting and significant in Haiti we would need a springboard in the States.

    It is one of our more stable cities in terms of a population that has stayed, ... It's not a city where people leave in large percentages or arrive in large percentages, except as tourists. So I think you're going to see a very strong impulse among the people there to rebuild.

    We've taken on the major health problems of the poorest - tuberculosis, maternal mortality, AIDS, malaria - in four countries. We've scored some victories in the sense that we've cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible.


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