Mountains Beyond Mountains Analysis

Doctors are our societies way of treating disease that plague us. And yet, it seems they can only accomplish this task in one direction; biomedical. They are tuned into the gadgets and the gizmos that often times they neglect the illness portion of being sick; how the patient feels, if they’ve experienced any backlash from being sick and so on. Until reading about Dr. Farmer’s work in Mountains Beyond Mountains, it had appeared no doctor would be able to combine the dichotomies, competence over caring, disease over illness, body over mind. When Farmer talks about “think[ing] about health in the broadest possible sense” (90), he’s elucidating that we cannot simply continue treating or thinking in these dichotomies but must be able to connect …show more content…
To help cure Haiti of infectious diseases that are all but absent in the richer countries where we live, Dr. Farmer built schools, communal sanitation and water systems, on top of a high technology hospital and lab at Zanmi Lasante. He understands the social class and health connection, where those who have less tend to be sicker than those that have more. He gained money to be able to help build tin roofs for the citizens of Cange, where before they had leaky palm roofs. He hired community health workers to ensure proper medication was being taken by patients to prevent drug-resistance and ensure complete recovery. To “increase compliance” he also gained stipends for food for Tuberculosis patients as starving people cannot get better through medicine alone. He also hired and trained local Haitians to staff the medical facility so that treatment could be administered even in his absence. He took advantage of loopholes to ensure free medical care to his patients and used the newest available treatments for the disease no matter the ability of the patients to pay. PIH follows the same ideas of Farmer, as it was truly created on his foundation and principles. They’ve flown patients in rural areas, like a young boy from Haiti, to Boston in severe condition for medical help with the knowledge that …show more content…
Farmer and PIH’s approach however, does not need to be unique for the rest of time. Implementation in the United States can lead to better health statistics as well as just better life overall for our people. Unnatural Causes exposed this link between social class and health discrepancies, usually because people cannot afford either the treatment plan or even the tests in the first place. Creating a health system that does not rely on ability to pay is the first and foremost approach that needs to be addressed. This can come from either universal health care options for everyone, something we’re working towards with Obamacare, or a change in tax payer’s amounts going to general funding of medicine. Doctors could charge less for their services or you could pay a percentage based on your income. Once we have people being able to attend and gain the medical attention they need, and rightly deserve if it’s a basic right, we can turn our attention to understanding the cultural aspects that plague our current system. City dwellers tend to be more sick than rural folk due to the amount of people in the area. Since we cannot change that, we can spend our time educating those in that situation on how to live healthier in their particular environment and give them the necessary tools to help them. We can look at how race may affect treatment, how religion and other stereotypes change our opinion of how someone should be treated. If we look at them not as different, but as humans