Paul Farmer's Pathologies Of Power

In Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, Paul Farmer uses his experiences as a physician and anthropologist to deliver confirmation and analysis of poverty. A substantial part of the work comprises of reflections by Farmer on the way in which the current worldwide economic structures stimulate a genuine and systematic violence against the rights of the poor. While primarily focused on health, and profiling the impacts of Tuberculosis, AIDS and other diseases, his involvement in treating patients beaten by members of military dictatorships and those who experience malnourishment indicate profound social health problems. Farmer shows that social inequalities erode the ability of the poor and marginalized to

In several chapters, he shows how ‘cultural difference’, ‘appropriate technology’, and ‘local standards of care’ are often exploited in the field of international health to naturalize or normalize global inconsistencies in health care access. While he praises the international attention spent on the ethical quandaries of high-tech patient care and the calls to end civil rights abuses, Farmer calls for greater attention to issues of social justice. Strongly influenced by liberation theology, he contrasts the importance attached to individual rights with the way in which the violations of rights caused by structural inequalities and injustices are ignored. As Farmer shows, even in the domain of medical and bioethics, the issue of socio-economic structures is completely swept under the carpet. He refers to this as being the "elephant in the room". However, Farmer’s liberation theology embodies a political analysis, that seeks the root causes by extracting the views of the abused and incorporating these views into all actions. For example, Farmer sees no harm in introducing antiretroviral therapy to the those afflicted with AIDS; no matter where, how many, or even if the therapy is sustainable for that population. Calling upon the ethical arguments, Amartya Sen, the author positions the overall health and the lack of suffering as a moral priority above any concerns for market economics. Further, he is critical of cultural relativism, which he considers dominant within medical ethics discussions and anthropological literature. He argues that this relativism effectively leads to a lack of advocacy on the part of the poor and sick from doctors and anthropologists, who he says maintain a general ambivalence toward the suffering of the impoverished in the Third