17 Aug discussion
1. How are cultural and political self-determination related to health? What role does racial discrimination play in determining one’s opportunity for health?
2. Dr. Paul Farmer, who is well-known health equity advocate and physician, is dissatisfied with the current distribution of money and medicine in the world. What is your opinion of the distribution of these forms of wealth? What would you change, if you could?
Respond to the two topics in a short paragraph.
1. I grew up in the upper level of the lower class. My mother was a single mother that raised three children by herself, me being the youngest. I do personally think it had a huge impact on my health. I grew up with a hard working mom who’d had to leave us with $0.70 microwave dinners and canned vegetables. We ate whatever was cheapest, so I didn’t really have a choice in what I ate. I was not a healthy child, always sick due to a poor immune system. Growing up I thought that I had it pretty bad, but after looking at the material from this module I feel lucky for ending up okay when many young ones in developing countries develop sicknesses such as tuberculosis and malaria due to growing up in poverty (1).
As someone who grew up poor, I knew the food I consumed was not healthy and often lacked the proper nutrition. However, I didn’t have much choice. Something I did not know, but which makes a lot of sense now, is that being below the poverty line is a huge risk factor in developing type 2 diabetes (2).
Something else the material from this module made me think about was the inequality in healthcare access for poorer people. It made me think about how I did not have healthcare until Obamacare was passed. Things such as poor diet, inadequate exercise and smoking are more prevalent in communities that have lower incomes (3). That’s not something I’d ever thought about before, but after hearing it I thought about the people I knew growing up, which kids my age came from smoking families, which of them had unhealthy eating habits like I did. They all seemed to come from the same class– the lower class.
1. https://www.who.int/features/factfiles/health_inequities/en/
2. https://unnaturalcauses.org/assets/uploads/file/UC_Transcript_4.pdf
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roAQHn5rEoQ
2. After reading “The Harvard Gazette: Paul Farmer on Partners In Health, ‘Harvard-Haiti,’ and Making the Lives of the Poor the Fight of His Life,” it gave me new insights about the current distribution of money and medicine in the world and how unjust it is. It made me to be dissatisfied as well at how unequally distributed money and medicine is globally. In the article, Farmer talks about his efforts to improve the health care of Haiti and what he realized during his time working there. Farmer was doing work in the poor rural area of Haiti and he considered it a clinical desert because there wasn’t much healthcare resources around including the staff, systems, and space [2]. I found it surprising that no funding was put into building healthcare resources and hospitals in these medical deserts such as Haiti even after the earthquake. We spend so much money in advancements in healthcare and research, yet places such as Haiti don’t even have the access to proper healthcare. I would say that we are not prioritizing the right things.
Paul Farmer talks about the idea of socialization for scarcity on behalf of other people, which I have never thought about before. Farmer states that, “we’re socialized for scarcity for other people, and they’re usually black or brown or poor” [2]. The sad reality is that we often prioritize on things that achieve the biggest benefit for ourselves or the “biggest bang for the buck” because of the scarcity of our resources [1]. Many say primary prevention is better than tertiary prevention, however, in a place like Haiti, many of the population are already dealing with these deadly diseases because they don’t have the access to resources to carry out primary prevention.
Paul Farmer states that the solutions to the issue of socialization for scarcity would be less scarcity, which seems pretty straightforward. Yet, we still manage to find ways around it and never actually deal with the issue. If could do something to try to solve the issue, the first thing I would do is try to provide basic resources such as clean water, electricity, and modern infrastructure. Without these basic resources, it would not be possible to run a healthcare facility in the first place. Another possible solution is to provide more human resources by training more doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers who can provide service in these clinical deserts [3]. Most importantly, we should really reconsider our priorities instead of making excuses in order to avoid dealing with these problems. This problem might not be easy to solve and take a very long time, but we must get started in dealing with the issue in order to start making progress.
References:
1. Igoe, M. (2014, December 15). Paul Farmer: ‘We’ve met the enemy – and he is us’. Retrieved from
2. Powell, A., & Powell, A. (2019, June 26). Harvard’s Paul Farmer on traveling the world to fight inequality in health. Retrieved from
3. Two years after the quake. (n.d.). Retrieved from
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