Healthcare Core Needs identified by Paul Farmer
Reading mountains beyond mountains by kidder makes one reflect on their privilege, especially looking deep into Dr. Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti. Simultaneously it triggers one’s thirst to help out the suffering people in the community around. The book’s focus ensures the students and professors care about places and people more even beyond university and take them from their comfort zones. This triggers thoughts and feelings about the essence of creating learning opportunities about the connections between ill health in different countries globally, including Haiti. The responsibility displayed by the farmer in the book shows the recommendable links in privileged settings with caring responsibilities to some social injustices in some inferior parts of the globe (Tepe). Farmer Influences several ideas, lessons, skills, knowledge, and technologies created in modern universities of research to make a response to deprivation effective.
Farmer embraced the ability to shift the health problems of a country to systematic global issues in the aims of trying to broaden the point of view of health.in his explanations about this, he emphasizes on his mission as more of repairing the broken society rather than helping the distance vulnerable in the community. Farmer’s attention is focused on the break down in global systems (French, and Kidder). This makes his work more critical since it models the global thinking required to construct responses to the broken world both politically and ethically, which involves both the context they help in and the people they expected to improve. In this perspective, this approach is different from the traditional run state development aid and personal charity. According to the farmer, the aid and charity approach in many scenarios major on repeating the old imperial ideas of civilization mission to the needy. Recapping on the negative legacies of imperialism and colonialism and frequently pinpointing other global processes that lead to locals’ ill-health, farmers’ perspective is more about caring about the context of care.
Additionally, the farmer breaks the traditional thinking-frame concerning medicine compellingly by listing the global contexts that cause local experiences of ill health to which they respond to with his colleagues. From his kidder narrations, we understand how he cares about the local-global connections as he links personal with the political (Tepe). When explaining on how a U.S constructed dam caused malnutrition’s in Haiti or how Latin America debt crises triggered the emergence of Multidrug Resistance Tuberculosis (MRT) in Lima cities, he insists that genuinely caring for the sick should include caring about their economic and political development that fostered conditions for sickness instead of barely focusing on treatment only.
According to farmers, there exist scarce health economists in rural parts of developing countries like Haiti. Still, there is a massive number of developmental economists full time working on poverty reduction via economic growth. There is minimal focus on investments in the treatment of infections like AIDS, cancer, and MRT, which is way cheaper and could reduce the spread of the airborne disease. Experts still termed it as selective primary care that does not warrant investments of minimal resources in an impoverished nation (Zarocostas). Farmer and the PIH firmly were against arguments such as treatments offered in rich countries like the U.S that are cost-effective in Haiti settings.
In his analysis of “structural violence,” which explores the root causes of disease and poverty, farmer advocates for attention to daily violence, which includes; hunger, poor health, and poverty since they can have fatal consequences just like bullets in a war. However, this structural violence caused by economic and social institutions, social forces, and policymakers’ decisions (French and Kidder). Regarding this farmer gives an example of how Haiti’s contraction of HIV/AIDS could not blame individuals rather than the displacement of people as a result of the dam construction, which was funded by the U.S government back in the days of slavery. At this point, a farmer’s view of HIV/AIDS is different from that of the WHO since he majors on the causing factors of the disease rather than controlling it using regimens; instead, he focuses on dealing with causal social factors.
In addition to his intellectual contributions towards the healthcare systems, farmer’s significance stems from his selfless efforts in creating positive social change using his medical skills to uplift the lives of the poor. Despite his structural approach, he is still interested in the personal experiences of individuals critically, farmer and Partners n Health (PIH) major on working together with the people they serve by training Haitians to be nurses, doctors, and healthcare workers and establishing sustainable healthcare infrastructures to aid in the fight against infectious diseases and pandemics like the current COVID-19.
References
French, Michael, and Tracy Kidder. Mountains Beyond Mountains.
Tepe, Melissa. “Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing The World: The Quest Of Dr. Paul Farmer.” Einstein Journal Of Biology And Medicine, vol 21, no. 2, 2016, p. 95. Albert Einstein College Of Medicine, doi:10.23861/ejbm20052196.
Zarocostas, J. “Agencies In Haiti Switch Focus To Long Term Health Needs.” BMJ, vol 340, no. apr20 2, 2010, pp. c2148-c2148. BMJ, doi:10.1136/bmj.c2148.