July 26 2007 Tracy Kidder's Book - Mountains Beyond Mountains

This book is about Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard MD that fell in love with Haiti and started a clinic in the Central Plateau, a godforsaken place, mired in extreme poverty, disease and hopelessness. I haven’t finished the book yet, but I’m finding it fascinating. I’m not so much interested in this man’s saint-like qualities, of which there are many. The part that is so interesting is his philosophy about what causes diseases such as AIDS, TB and Malaria to flourish in places like the Central Plateau. He is an anthropologist as well as an MD, a believer in “liberation theology”, a man that puts individual patients before international policies.

It’s a little hard to describe why his approach to curing these diseases seems both radical and extremely logical and commonsensical. Take for example his approach to tackling MDR-TB, multi-drug-resistant TB, a scary problem in parts of the world, that threatens the 1^st world as well as the 3^rd. WHO’s plan for treating MDR was considered too expensive to implement in poor countries, because these countries can’t afford the second-line TB drugs that are only used when the first-line drugs are ineffective. But, Farmer looked at WHY these drugs are so expensive, and discovered that the reason wasn’t that the drugs were expensive to make, but rather that they were used infrequently and therefore drug companies were reluctant to spend much in the way of resources to make the second-line drugs. The drugs were expensive because they were a scarce resource. Farmer was able to persuade the companies to lower the drug price. Then MDR-TB became treatable in poor as well as wealthy countries.

Farmer doesn’t accept the commonly held belief that these diseases can’t be treated in poor countries because poor people won’t take their medicine properly, won’t use bed nets consistently, won’t travel the long distances sometimes required to get to clinics to be treated. He has done many studies to show that poor people are just as capable of following treatment plans as anyone else. He doesn’t accept that the world has limited resources when it comes to medicine. He doesn’t see why the 1^st world can’t share its medical wealth with the 3^rd.

This book makes me want to do something. I don’t mean volunteer at a clinic or anything like that; I’m not that sort of person. But since we moved overseas I’ve been evaluating which charities I’d like to support. I  feel especially drawn to the ones that seem to truly improve people’s standard of living, not by giving them material goods, but by improving their health, which gives them hope and energy to improve their own lives.

Farmer’s organization is called Partners in Health. He’s got a website: http://www.pih.org/home.html. He might not be for everyone. I wouldn’t describe him as left-wing though; he’s not political. But he’s a radical nonetheless. Tracy Kidder subtitled his book “The quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a man who would cure the world”. This is no exaggeration. Farmer doesn’t see or acknowledge barriers, or boundaries, or practicalities. He achieves success with disease-ridden and poverty-stricken populations that most people have written off. He’s worth checking out, and supporting, I think.