Physician works to improve health care for everyone

An infectious disease specialist believes that more doctors should work for global health equity.

By Damon Adams, AMNews staff. Dec. 15, 2003.

For more than two decades, Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, has worked to improve care for the poor.

The physician and anthropologist is a world-renowned authority on tuberculosis treatment and control. He is founding director of Partners In Health, an international charity organization that provides health care to those living in poverty. He pioneered community-based treatment strategies for infectious diseases and is medical co-director at Clinique Bon Sauveur, a charity hospital in Cange, Haiti.

Dr. Farmer, 44, a professor of medical anthropology in the Dept. of Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, has written books on global health inequity, most recently Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. He recently visited Chicago for the American Anthropological Assn.'s annual meeting and spoke at the Chicago Symposium on Medicine, Ethics and Society, which was co-sponsored by the AMA. He talked with AMNews.

Question: What is the biggest challenge facing the medical community?

Answer: The issue of access to modern medical care for people living in poverty. So far, the medical profession as a whole hasn't taken access to care as seriously as it could, or we would have resolved the problem in this country. We haven't taken this on globally, either.

Q: Do doctors do enough to improve health care globally?

A: It would be great if more doctors could go abroad and see how the bottom billion live and die without access to the fruits of modern medicine. It would engage them more in thinking about the equity issues. There's not a single doctor who couldn't help in one way or another, often without ever leaving their home state. I'm not just talking about giving money and supplies. I'm talking about changing the basic attitude of our profession about equity.