Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Hardcover)

~ Paul Farmer (Foreword) "The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with..." (more)
Key Phrases: United States, New York, Yolande Jean (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The New England Journal of Medicine

There are many kinds of gifted physicians: clinicians, researchers, and those who build institutions. Paul Farmer is the rarest of all: a prophet. Pathologies of Power is a jeremiad on how the "structural violence" of denied opportunities, economic deprivation, violent despots (and the powers supporting them), and international financial organizations harm the health of billions of people who are so distant that they are glibly and uncomprehendingly referred to as living in a "third world." This summary does not do justice to the richness of the book. Farmer deftly weaves personal stories from his work with the dispossessed, careful academic notes, and well-chosen quotations from intellectuals, poets, and proponents of liberation theology. These citations introduce marvelous writers who are not well known to readers from the United States. Farmer builds from the 19th century's Rudolph Virchow, who argued that physicians must advance public health through political and social reform as "attorneys for the poor." Farmer's anecdotes about mobilizing the poor on their own behalf echo the work of Norman Bethune. And Farmer extends Jonathan Mann's fusion of human rights and medical ethics to health and human rights. Farmer, a physician and an anthropologist, offers a blistering critique of anthropologists who describe colorful folkways or bits of social problems, such as sexual barter, without illuminating how such practices are sustained by class and political history. This critique and Farmer's advocacy for oppressed persons mark this book as a prophetic work. Therefore, it is also a towering work of medical ethics. Farmer's critique of anthropology applies equally well to medical ethics, with its scholastic focus on moral curiosities and its decorous silence on "political" issues such as the lack of insurance or the ways in which the policies of international financial organizations affect health and health care for the world's poor. The prophetic voice speaks for the marginalized and can strike listeners as shrill, odd, or discomforting. Farmer skirts that risk by careful scholarship and compelling writing. That being said, I think he overrates the competence of Haiti's reelected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the success of Cuba's program to suppress the human immunodeficiency virus. Though he correctly notes the entrenched and mistaken pessimism of the international health authorities about the ability of dispossessed people to complete tuberculosis treatment, he overestimates the capacity of the available infrastructure in many poor countries to manage daily antiretroviral therapy. Such quibbles do not diminish the importance of his larger thesis. Farmer calls on physicians to mount a sustained engagement against human-rights abuses as the roots of disease, disability, and lack of access to health care. Health itself, rather than technical compliance with laws or accords, must be the standard for evaluating governments, foreign policy, and the national restructuring plans of such organizations as the International Monetary Fund. Expanding health services and democratizing information must be central to the global agenda of all physicians. Academic research and education must use the privilege conferred by their power and independence to articulate specific relationships between human rights and abuses of human rights with health and disease. We live in a time when epidemics keep pace with globalization and when the map of deprivation and human-rights abuses precisely overlays the atlas of war, disease, and terrorism. Farmer's sane prescription is more likely to work than is rationalizing neglect, dribbling charity, averting our eyes, or attempting to build a garrison state bounded by a cordon sanitaire. Pathologies of Power is a profound work; it deserves the widest possible audience. Steven Miles, M.D.
Copyright © 2004 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

Review

"This is an angry and a hopeful book, and like everything Dr. Farmer has written, it has both passion and authority. Pathologies of Power is an eloquent plea for a working definition of human rights that would not neglect the most basic rights...This plea has special potency because it comes from...a person who has proven that the dream of universal and comprehensive human rights is possible."--Foreign Affairs -- Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 419 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520235509
• ISBN-13: 978-0520235502
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #281,972 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

97 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Take Two Aspirin and Read This Book, April 10, 2004

By	Patti M. Marxsen (Thun, Switzerland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Paul Farmer's "Pathologies of Power" will probably give you a headache, undoubtedly cause sleep disturbance, and very likely turn your stomach. In short, it will make you sick. But if you are well enough to read this and rich enough to consider purchasing the book, you are better off than the "disposable millions" whose lives he illuminates and honors in this indictment of global public health as-we-know-it. In this passionate and well-researched treatise, a world-class physician takes his own disciplines of medicine and anthropology to task for failing to ask the right questions. Then, noting that the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable industry in the most affluent country in the world, he blows through its defense of those extraordinary profits like a gust of fresh air. A similarly searing deconstruction of health policymakers' rationale for "cost-effectiveness" and their elite argot of oppression reveals a blame-the-victim mentality that plagues the world and explains why, in the midst of unprecedented wealth, over 40 million Americans are without health insurance of any kind. And that is just the beginning.

While Farmer's hospital in Haiti, Zanmi Lasante, is not the only hospital to successfully combat the forces of poverty and disease in that country (Hôpital Albert Schweitzer in the Artibonite Valley predates Farmer's project by nearly three decades), his twenty-year presence in Central Haiti has resulted in a deep understanding of how structural violence on a global scale is a leading cause of disease and death among the world's poor, wherever they may live. Drawing on case-study examples from Haiti, South America, Cuba, Siberia, and the United States, he deftly illustrates why tuberculosis deaths, which he describes as 95 percent curable with inexpensive medication developed many years ago, "occur almost exclusively among the poor, whether they reside in the inner cities of the United Stated or in the poor counties of the Southern Hemisphere." Addressing the growing trend of multi-drug resistant strains of TB, Farmer discusses "tuberculosis as punishment" in the world's prison populations and delivers a wake-up call to those who might consider themselves immune from this, and other, infectious diseases.

In his critique of the commodification of healthcare, Farmer speaks of "orphan drugs" drugs that are simply not developed because they are needed by people who cannot pay for them, the sale of organs by those without resources to those with money, and the equally revolting multi-million dollar compensation packages of pharmaceutical company CEOs and managed care executives. In the midst of this catalog of inequity, he wonders why medical ethics courses in American schools of medicine focus so narrowly on the "quandaries of the fortunate" like whether or not to refuse a particular technology or whether or not to leave a loved one in a prolonged coma when millions are condemned to death or disease before they learn to walk. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) does not escape his critical analysis: "... the language of social injustice is increasingly absent from public health parlance," he notes.

Farmer is one of those remarkable doctors working in remote places who, somehow, finds the energy to look up from his daily workload and ponder the underlying causes of the suffering he treats. Furthermore, he writes about it in the brisk and engaging prose of an investigative reporter and brings provocative interdisciplinary voices of others---Gustavo Gutiérrez, Paolo Freire, Cornel West, Amartya Sen, Jon Sobrino, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, to name a few---to bear on his march toward social justice. His ideas are radical, in part, because they are simple and based on an equitable distribution of health, regardless of wealth. Bringing the observe, judge, act methodology of liberation theology to bear on global public health, Farmer advocates a "preferential option" for the poor, a redefinition of medicine as a healing profession (as opposed to medicine-as-commerce), and a new understanding of healthcare as a basic human right, for all.

Toward the end of a chapter entitled "Listening for Prophetic Voices," Farmer distills his argument into a call to action: "We thus find ourselves at a crossroads: healthcare can be considered a commodity to be sold, or it can be considered a basic social right. It cannot comfortably be considered both of these at the same time. This, I believe, is the great drama of medicine at the start of this century. And this is the choice before all people of faith and good will in theses dangerous times."

Pathologies of Power is a lucid and alarming statement from a fearless physician. It speaks truth to power and it speaks for the destitute sick. Take two aspirin, lie down, and read the book. In spite of its consciousness-raising side effects, this may be the beginning of a cure for what ails the world.

57 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Giving a voice to nobodies..., September 15, 2004

By	Friederike Knabe (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

There are some books whose message is so pertinent to your daily life that they stay with you for a long time. Farmer's PATHOLOGIES OF POWER will have a profound impression on you. Its substance is highly relevant for current topical debates, whether on Medicare and the forty million uninsured in the US, the Canadian government's ambition to "fix" healthcare or on strategies to fight health pandemics like HIV/AIDS. Farmer submits an emphatic challenge to the medical profession, to political and business leaders, mainstream media and all of us.

Farmer stands emphatically on the side of the destitute, marginalized and usually overlooked. His vivid case studies exemplify the fate of millions of "nobodies" - the silent majority of the world's population who have none or inadequate heath care. Why, he asks, are health care services not made available to all human beings irrespective of race, gender, locale, or the ability to pay? Is it not a fundamental human right? Why do millions in developing countries, in the slums of US cities or prisons in Russia, die prematurely of infectious diseases to which medical research has found successful treatments? Can we morally accept that medical research prioritizes cures for baldness or impotence over medicines that protect from drug-resistant tuberculosis or malaria? And, where has medical ethics come to that condones, or even supports, the "commodification" of medicine? How can cost-effectiveness and the ability to pay apply to essential medical treatment? he queries.

Rooted in his deep belief in human dignity and the fundamental nature of human rights, Farmer also draws strength from liberation theology as he "walks the talk". For more than 20 years, Farmer, anthropologist as well as medical doctor, has dedicated his life to the struggle of the "nobodies" for survival, health and dignity. Working among the poorest and the outcasts, he has lived with the evidence that illness is intimately linked with poverty. From his base in central Haiti, one of the world's poorest regions, he has embarked on an international crusade for social and economic rights and the right to health for all - and "that means every body!" Whether in Haiti, the slums of New York and Boston, in Peru or the prisons in Russia, "structural violence" has been the underlying cause for the desperate spiral of illness and destitution. Farmer uses the concept of "structural violence" broadly to describe social inequalities, lack of economic opportunities, activities of oppressive states: the "misery of extreme poverty". Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, one of Farmer's mentors, describes it as the destructive forces of "unfreedoms".

Farmer's book is a passionate testament to his many patients and their struggle for rights and dignity. Consequently, it is a damning critique of current health delivery services by governments, international health experts and aid agencies. He analyses the flaws of the charity and development models to healthcare and concludes that "...In a world riven by inequity, medicine could be viewed as social justice work."
While his recounting of individual cases makes at times gloomy reading, his empathy and fervour speak directly to us, his readers. We are drawn emotionally and intellectually into this complex and multifaceted challenge. Drawing on numerous scholars and practitioners, he exemplifies why we should question the underlying fabric of our current approach to human rights, development policy and globalized economy. Human rights work, he argues, has primarily been viewed from a legal perspective with an emphasis on civil and political rights. Instead, he insists, the focus needs to shift so that public health and access to medical care are treated as social and economic rights. These, in turn, have to be understood as critical as civil and political rights, he concludes.

PATHOLOGIES OF POWER is central to the current debates on health, social justice and human rights. It is also an essential tool for anybody involved in any aspect of public health care, medical ethics and sustainable development. Furthermore, it is an extraordinary study resource for everybody interested in the future of human well being. Farmer's own testimony, "bearing witness", and his in-depth analyses are enriched by detailed quotes and ample footnotes from a wide spectrum of analysts and visionaries. [Friederike Knabe, Ottawa Canada]

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars St. Paul Farmer, August 5, 2003

By	Peter M Hines (Tampa, FL) - See all my reviews

Dr. Farmer argues that, at the very least, access to health care should be a basic human right, especially if we are to uphold the belief that all human lives are equally valuable. Pathologies of Power is an indictment on the social structures that exist to keep the destitute poor of the world just as they are - destitute, impoverished, and without hope. While the powers-that-be make excuses, Dr. Farmer provides solutions that are, indeed, quite simple. His passion for his struggle to provide health care to the poorest of the poor is matched only by his disdain for the social inequities that perpetuate the structural violence inflicted upon the least fortunate of the world. It is heartening to know that there are a few compassionates, amongst the millions of complacent, that work so tirelessly to effect change that is so desperately needed. Hopefully this book will serve as a wake-up call for the rest of us.