And some of the things that we saw in the ’80s, really, they were failures, because patients died. But they allowed us to diagnose the systems’ problems and say, “This is where we need a community health worker system. This is where we need to make sure patients have food support while they’re getting these medicines,” et cetera. So those are examples of tragedies that certainly lead to — not just personal epiphanies — but collective epiphanies, where you say, “You know what? We can do this better if we have the system fixed.”
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Paul Farmer
Physician and medical anthropologist; co-founder of Partners In Health
United States · 1959–2022
Science and medicine
About
American infectious-disease physician and anthropologist who co-founded Partners In Health in 1987 and built community-based treatment programmes for tuberculosis and HIV in Haiti, Peru, Rwanda and Russia. He chaired the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
4 answers
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