Cassandras

I've just started reading "Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader". Paul Farmer is an MD as well as a medical anthropologist. It is full of his various collection of essays regarding Public Health and International Medicine. As I finished the 32 page introduction, I am suddenly struck by something that it revealed in me. I suddenly realized that not only do I desire to show compassion and bring healing the poor and marginalized, I also desire to see justice brought to them.

I want to fight against the idea that "good medicine is not to be wasted on undeserving people". I want to fight the idea that poor people in poverty stricken countries don't have the same right to good health care as I do. The idea that it isn't cost-effective to treat them because corruption, war, or poverty has given them an unstable health-care system. That a person's "noncompliance" can be attributed their "culture" their "lack of understanding of western medicine" or other sociological constructs.

My roommate recently read me the conclusion to a research paper published by leading female researchers at Harvard University. The researchers identified as a problem Indian women's lack of resources to good obstetric services. Instead of the obvious solution of striving to change this by fixing the broken systems, or by teaching women about their bodies and how to access information and resources for good maternal health, the researchers concluded that the most "cost-effective" route to take would be for the women to just not have babies.
This would NEVER happen in the US! Can you imagine an obstetrician saying to his white 30 something patient "I'm sorry, but I just can't guarantee you will have a complication free pregnancy and birth, so you should probably just not have children."?!?
The Dr. would probably get slapped in the face.
Yet, this is what is suggested as a solution for women in India, by top women scholars at Harvard University. How ethnocentric of them.

Good medial care should be given to everyone, not as an act of charity, but as a belief that it is a basic human right.

This is as much a political and moral battle as it is a biological one.
I want to see change in health systems. I want to see change in those who deliver these health systems.

"Only by struggling for higher standards for the destitute sick will we avoid another unappealing role-that of academic Cassandra's who prophesy the coming plagues, but do little to avert them" - Paul Farmer

If the introduction has stirred up this much, I can't wait for the rest of the book! All 660 pages of it!