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.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a belief in the equality of all individuals regardless of their location, advocating for universal standards in healthcare.
Paul Farmer emphasizes the importance of treating all individuals equally, regardless of where they live. He believes that healthcare recommendations should be consistent across different regions, reflecting his commitment to the idea that everyone deserves the same quality of care, whether in affluent areas like Manhattan or disadvantaged ones like Haiti.
In practice
In a speech about healthcare equity, this quote could highlight the need for accessibility regardless of location.
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
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it
... you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!
In your reaction to an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak, and act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock.
Which way you ought to go depends on where you want to get to.
Our ancestors... purged their guilt by banishment, not death. And by so doing, they stopped that endless vicious cycle of murder and revenge.
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
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