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
In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.
The whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
True religion is not about possessing the truth. No religion does that. It is rather an invitation into a journey that leads one toward the mystery of God. Idolatry is religion pretending that it has all the answers.
Misery is what happiness rests upon. Happiness is what misery lurks beneath.
There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline , and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.
Whether I'm wearing lots of makeup or no makeup, I'm always the same person inside.
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