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Thursday, July 10, 2014

Graduation and Reading Paul Farmer

While I'm sure many people much busier than I am at any given time in their lives maintain healthy, thriving, regular blogs, this past school year rendered me unable to do much more than work, work, work, panic, and vegetate. But that is over now, along with my undergraduate career and much to my relief. As Billy Joel would say of me, I've earned my degree. May it be the first of many, but not too many.

Early in this blog I professed my aspirations to become a human rights lawyer, and while that has changed, my itch to do something about all the nonsensical suffering a large part of the earth's human population is going through has not subsided.

Approximately one month before graduation, my mother borrowed two books from the public library and urged me to read them: To Repair the World and Mountains Beyond Mountains. The former: a collection of speeches by Dr. Paul Farmer (Paul Farmer, M.D., Ph.D.); the latter: a biography-like text about Dr. Farmer and the organization he co-founded, Partners in Health (PIH). This Farmer fellow was brought to my mom's attention through a family friend as an expert in tuberculosis. I had just completed and defended my thesis on the origins of tuberculosis in human populations through the paleopathological record, and starting with dry bones and kyphosis and hypertrophic osteoarthropathy had ventured into the juicy world of the pathogenic bacteria and their genetic signatures. She brought the books to me with a dream of me reading them and signing up to work with him by implementing my ideas about the origins of tuberculosis. I looked into him a little further and saw this was not to be. He was an action man and my ideas were still in the realm of hypothesis, academia, and fairly distant theoretical medical practice, not concrete, saving-lives-now medical practice, which is what Farmer is about.

This is not to say those readings were a pointless, mother-imposed exercise. Far from it. I finally got to reading To Repair the World in the days preceding my commencement ceremony, and as it turned out, a great deal of the speeches in the text were, indeed, commencement speeches. Seeing as we did not have an official "commencement speaker" aside from remarks by the president of the university and a shiny student (a fellow EEPster), I decided to absorb Dr. Farmer's speeches as my own personal commencement exercise.

The main theme, hidden or not-so-hidden among advice for effective medical practice, personal anecdotes, and visions of the future, was tireless advocacy for those less fortunate than yourself (Ivy League student, medical doctor, or Susanna Sabin of CSULA). A dismissal of the phrase "cost-effectiveness" as an excuse for sub-par care, outrage at modern occurrences of tetanus and many other preventable illnesses, and a call for the younger people of today to do more and make the world better. As I read, I got busy with snap chatting passages to my pre-med friends, asking to myself, a little self-righteously I suppose, why it wasn't a given, an expectation, that all doctors follow a path of service? Why wasn't it career suicide to refuse to volunteer at a free clinic at some inner-city location? Why didn't weren't more doctors being accompagnateurs instead of handymen? Why wasn't the connection between one's access to healthcare and one's freedom and participation in a democracy more obvious to everyone? And how could one recite the Hippocratic Oath and treat one group of patients with more care and better equipment than another? Or at the very least, what doctor could comfortably live with the disparity?

I am nineteen years old, and I have no idea what will happen over the next few years. I am excited to continue research connected to my thesis, the independent creation of which I am most proud, but there is still the itch. Through his transcribed speeches, Dr. Farmer instilled, or re-instilled that itch to do something more, to make a difference not just in my esoteric field of study, but in the lives of other's who need that difference. I have had this itch a lot throughout my life so far, and generally speaking I mellow out. Being an EEPster, I am often surrounded by people who hold rationality (whether they practice it or not) to a higher standard than empathy or practice, and I am often convinced (generally by my own insecurity and feelings of powerlessness) to be reasonable. This time, though, I really, truly, do not want to mellow out. I want to stay angry at the comedy of differential distribution that is the world today, and I want to use that anger to fix something.

How? Not sure yet. I'll keep you updated.

Something I have done is set up a monthly donation to Partners in Health. If you're looking for somewhere to put your money, I highly recommend them (and you saw how I railed against Invisible Children). Here is their website: http://www.pih.org/