patcaetano98's review against another edition
emotional
informative
medium-paced
4.5
“Show us the data to suggest that declining HIV incidence and declining AIDS deaths in wealthy countries will not be followed by decreasing investment in the basic research necessary for new drug and vaccine development. No such data exist. If they did, new antituberculous agents, also sorely needed, could not be termed "orphan drugs" a great irony, since TB remains, along with AIDS, the leading infectious cause of adult death in the world today.”
“After a decade of medical practice in the same village, I was accustomed to ferreting out accusations of sorcery and had previously spent some years trying to make sense of them. And that, paradoxically, is the primary function of such accusations: to make sense of suffering.”
“We live in a world where infections pass easily across borders social and geographic - while resources, including cumulative scientific knowledge, are blocked at customs.”
“(…) educational strategies will not change rates of typhoid when basic sanitation does not exist.”
“Efforts on her behalf may ultimately fail, but they will not have failed to call into question the cynical calculus by which some lives are considered valuable and others expendable.”
“After a decade of medical practice in the same village, I was accustomed to ferreting out accusations of sorcery and had previously spent some years trying to make sense of them. And that, paradoxically, is the primary function of such accusations: to make sense of suffering.”
“We live in a world where infections pass easily across borders social and geographic - while resources, including cumulative scientific knowledge, are blocked at customs.”
“(…) educational strategies will not change rates of typhoid when basic sanitation does not exist.”
“Efforts on her behalf may ultimately fail, but they will not have failed to call into question the cynical calculus by which some lives are considered valuable and others expendable.”
reecha's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
slow-paced
3.5
A super informative book I would recommend to anyone in the same career and/or field as me. However, with that said, this books is incredibly dense and depressing. It took me months to read it but I'm happy I managed to finish it.
erintby's review against another edition
3.0
I enjoyed reading this (like I do any Dr. Farmer book) but as it was written in the 90s, it is definitely less relevant than his more current writings on AIDS and tuberculosis. Yet, I still enjoyed seeing where and how the circumstances and analyses have changed or stayed largely the same since then.
He critiques cost-effectiveness models and the values which inform them (cost effective to whom? not those dying of these preventable and treatable diseases?), warns about the conflation of structural violence and cultural difference, and reminds us that even though the most common unit of analysis in public health is the nation-state, this is often irrelevant because organisms do not respect national boundaries.
Some of his statements definitely seem unfortunately prescient in light of the fact that suffering from the current COVID-19 pandemic has been disproportionately distributed:
“we live in a world where infections pass easily across borders—social and geographic—while resources, including cumulative scientific knowledge, are blocked at customs" (p. 54).
He critiques cost-effectiveness models and the values which inform them (cost effective to whom? not those dying of these preventable and treatable diseases?), warns about the conflation of structural violence and cultural difference, and reminds us that even though the most common unit of analysis in public health is the nation-state, this is often irrelevant because organisms do not respect national boundaries.
Some of his statements definitely seem unfortunately prescient in light of the fact that suffering from the current COVID-19 pandemic has been disproportionately distributed:
“we live in a world where infections pass easily across borders—social and geographic—while resources, including cumulative scientific knowledge, are blocked at customs" (p. 54).
thepaperbackrx's review against another edition
5.0
A must read for any person desiring a higher level of social consciousness. Plagues aren't just for the middle ages, they merely go by a more modern name in the 21st century: epidemics. As always Farmer adeptly illustrates how societal disparities manifest themselves medically.
amayasimone22's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
djasson's review against another edition
5.0
The book to read on the politics of disease in the world today. Farmer introduces the concept of structural violence in this book and describes how people must navigate "within the system" in order to obtain medical help against treatable and difficult diseases.
lindsayw's review against another edition
4.0
This book was surprisingly good, despite the fact that it's now almost fifteen years old, and I've already noted the difficulty of reading about current events that aren't current anymore. However, this book has actually held up pretty well, mainly because the problems outlined by Farmer are still completely relevant, sad though that is.
I thought Farmer did a really great job pointing out the need for a balanced approach to HIV and TB treatment/prevention. While it is of course important to focus on improving the conditions that make certain people more at risk for contracting these diseases, the actual treatment of patients living with them can't be cast aside in the meantime. As Farmer points out, we know how to treat TB, development initiatives are all too easy to get wrong. It's really easy to forget that there is a need to ask about what happens before the massive life-changing improvements are made to health facilities around the world.
Another fascinating aspect of this book was the notion of patient-blaming by health workers. Farmer notes that many patients are forever labelled as non-compliant if they can't actually access the medications they need. Farmer refers to this as overestimating human agency in many developing countries. Telling someone to stop drinking contaminated water is useless to a patient that has access to no water but the contaminated source that contributed to his illness in the first place.
I found the book got a bit repetitive toward the end, but overall, that was a pretty minimal complaint. Well recommended, Goodreads.
I thought Farmer did a really great job pointing out the need for a balanced approach to HIV and TB treatment/prevention. While it is of course important to focus on improving the conditions that make certain people more at risk for contracting these diseases, the actual treatment of patients living with them can't be cast aside in the meantime. As Farmer points out, we know how to treat TB, development initiatives are all too easy to get wrong. It's really easy to forget that there is a need to ask about what happens before the massive life-changing improvements are made to health facilities around the world.
Another fascinating aspect of this book was the notion of patient-blaming by health workers. Farmer notes that many patients are forever labelled as non-compliant if they can't actually access the medications they need. Farmer refers to this as overestimating human agency in many developing countries. Telling someone to stop drinking contaminated water is useless to a patient that has access to no water but the contaminated source that contributed to his illness in the first place.
I found the book got a bit repetitive toward the end, but overall, that was a pretty minimal complaint. Well recommended, Goodreads.