While speaking about his health care initiatives in poverty-stricken areas worldwide to a full Salomon 101 Monday night, Paul Farmer reminded those in attendance that, "You have to have humor to survive in this kind of work."
Farmer, a professor of medical anthropology at Harvard Medical School, gave his lecture, titled "Resocializing Medicine," as the 12th speaker in the Brown Medical School's annual Stanley D. Simon, M.D., Lecture and Forum.
Guided by the principle that people living in poverty need and therefore deserve "the best care," Farmer founded Partners in Health, an international charity that provides and improves health care for poor communities, in 1987.
That sick people may not have access to health care because they are poor is "shocking," Farmer said.
Farmer emphasized the relationship between human rights and access to medical care, focusing on the rights of the poor, women and victims of racism. He explained that his group hopes to be "making sure that these social inequalities do not become embodied" in patients.
Quoting the 19th-century German pathologist Rudolf Virchow and Martin Luther King Jr., Farmer stressed that access to health care is a fundamental human right. Discussing his team's fight for the availability of quality health care worldwide, Farmer said that "in order to have a significant impact ... we have to bring in lots of people who are not involved in health and medicine."
Farmer's medical initiatives have been successful in part due to his focus on the complete care of patients. Full care entails "good community-based support," he said. Farmer also emphasized the need for decent living conditions in order to prevent disease. Overall, to counteract the prevailing pessimistic view that health care cannot reasonably be available worldwide, Farmer stressed the strength of individual relationships, adding that community health workers need to "stay close to patients and family."
Though originating in Haiti, Farmer's health care programs have spread throughout the world, including Rwanda, Russia, Guatemala, Peru and Mexico. Some of Farmer's Haitian colleagues went to Rwanda to help develop the program there. Farmer, who is an attending physician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, highlighted how the success of one program can be used to improve another, saying "the lessons that we learned in Haiti, we've taken and applied them to Boston."
The Brown Medical School has a special affinity for Farmer, who spoke at its graduation ceremony in 2001 and was awarded an honorary degree as the "conscience of the international medical community," said Eli Adashi, dean of medicine and biological sciences in introducing Farmer's lecture. Farmer has changed the way that Brown medical students think about being physicians, according to Soyun Kim MD '08 and Jack Rusley '03 MD '09, both of whom helped to introduce Farmer.
Farmer, in return, teased the Brown medical community, saying that he could not name an area of the world where Brown medical students had not already been. Also, "student activism has played a big role in making the United States a major funder of these initiatives," Farmer said.
Throughout the lecture, Farmer emphasized that, "There's a lot we can do by keeping health care front and center in our discussions about human rights."
