You can't have public health without a public health system. We just don't want to be part of a mindless competition for resources. We want to build back capacity in the system.
Interpretation
A functioning public health system is essential for overall public health.
This quote emphasizes the importance of a robust public health system as a fundamental requirement for ensuring public health. Paul Farmer advocates for collaboration and capacity building rather than competing for finite resources, highlighting that true health improvements come from well-structured systems that can serve the community effectively.
In practice
At a public health conference, this quote could illustrate the need for systemic improvements in health care.
If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.
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.
With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
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.
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.
There is nothing wrong with underlining personal agency, but there is something unfair about using personal responsibility as a basis for assigning blame while simultaneously denying those who are being blamed the opportunity to exert agency in their lives
Medical professionals, not insurance company bureaucrats, should be making health care decisions.
Nobody wins when the police are sent to look after people suffering from mental health problems; vulnerable people don't get the care they need and deserve, and the police can't get on with the job they are trained to do.
Unnecessary noise is the most cruel abuse of care which can be inflicted on either the sick or the well.
The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science is that it takes the nutrient out the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.
The joy is that we can take back our bodies, reclaim our health, and restore ourselves to balance. We can take power over what and how we eat. We can rejuvenate and recharge ourselves, bringing healing to the wounds we carry inside us, and bringing to fuller life the wonderful person that each of us can be.
As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol.
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