A means of raising funds in order to remediate inequalities of access to health care. PIH was that springboard, and it was a dream of mine from the beginning.
Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
And I can also show you that people from all walks of life agree that someone who is sick deserves, in principle, compassion and care.
Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care.
At the same time, it is obvious that clinicians in Haiti are faced with different, and, in fact, greater, challenges when attempting to treat complications of HIV disease.
At the same time, the fact the world's poor are calling upon us to help is a marker, in my view, of the limitless potential of human solidarity.
But as for activism, my parents did what they could, given the constraints, but were never involved in the causes I think of when I think of activists.
But if you're asking my opinion, I would argue that a social justice approach should be central to medicine and utilized to be central to public health. This could be very simple: the well should take care of the sick.
By the time I was 21, I was dead sure I wanted to be a doctor and an anthropologist.
Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water.
Even die-hard fans of the market acknowledge that TB care should be free. Why? Because it's an airborne disease and treatment equals prevention.
For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.
I critique market-based medicine not because I haven't seen its heights but because I've seen its depths.
I mean we grew up in a TB bus and I became a TB doctor.
I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.
I think we will see better vaccines within the next 15 years, but I'm not a scientist and am focused on the short-term - what will happen in the interim.
I was in college and took a course in medical anthropology. I loved the readings, the suggested research (I volunteered in a big emergency room), the faculty, the broad view.
I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
I'm not an austere person.
I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.
I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.
In fact, it seems to me that making strategic alliances across national borders in order to treat HIV among the world's poor is one of the last great hopes of solidarity across a widening divide.
It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.
It was apparent from the early 80s that in order to do something lasting and significant in Haiti we would need a springboard in the States.
My parents were in some senses working class (my mother, a farm girl, was a grocery-store cashier; my father went to teacher's college and was an on-again-off-again teacher) but in others were very unusual.
One of them was that books can matter (AIDS and Accusation, my first book, seemed to figure prominently in the view of those who chose us, while prior to the MacArthur, writing seemed firmly put in its place by the illiteracy of those who came to our growing clinic).
Shuttling back and forth between what is possible and what is likely to occur is instructive and a lot of what shapes our sentiment.
Since I do not believe that there should be different recommendations for people living in the Bronx and people living in Manhattan, I am uncomfortable making different recommendations for my patients in Boston and in Haiti.
So I can't show you how, exactly, health care is a basic human right. But what I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
The human rights community has focused very narrowly on political and civil rights for many decades, and with reason, but now we have to ask how can we broaden the view.
The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically.
The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.
The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.
We've taken on the major health problems of the poorest - tuberculosis, maternal mortality, AIDS, malaria - in four countries. We've scored some victories in the sense that we've cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible.
Well, I don't think that the role of the pharmaceutical industry is any different from that of other transnational corporations.
Well, we've worked with our friends in Haiti to establish nothing short of a modern medical center in one of the poorest parts of that country.
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