HSPH Class Day
Spotlight
June 5, 2003HMS/HSDM Class Day 2003
Farmer Calls on Grads to Change the World of Health Care
In opening his June 5 keynote address at the 2003 HMS and HSDM degree ceremony on the Quad, Paul Farmer promised to behave. As a physician-activist who has shaken up and shored up health care for the poor in the United States and other countries--Haiti, Peru, and Russia in particular--Farmer is skilled at targeting the status quo. But he was generally true to his word.
Though he bowed to ceremony in making an ironic pledge to follow the "graduation-speech code of honor," he spoke unceremoniously and passionately about the need to face the horrific inequities in global health care. He borrowed a theme from the movie The Matrix, urging the new doctors to take the red pill--that is, to see the world as it really is--and not the blue pill--to live in a fabricated world of comfort.
"A certain amount of red-pill popping is just what we need in medicine, dentistry, and public health," said Farmer, a 1990 graduate of HMS, an infectious disease specialist, and the Maude and Lillian Presley professor of social medicine at HMS. "...Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is just that. And ignorance and medicine simply are not compatible."
Farmer contrasted the global campaign against SARS with efforts to control three more deadly infectious diseases. "As of today," he said, "although fewer than a thousand people have died of SARS, several Fortune 500 companies are scrambling to put together a global SARS fund; I'm told that hundreds of millions of dollars have been pledged. I just read that certain airports in Asia have installed thermal scanners to identify febrile travelers. All this in the space of a couple months. All good. But over 8,000 people die every day of AIDS, the leading infectious cause of death in the modern world. And many more die of tuberculosis and malaria. During the course of this year, the year you graduate, six million people, most of them children and young adults, will die of these three diseases alone. Six million deaths, almost all of them preventable with modern medicine, but the red pill reminds us that we have no plan in place to serve those most in need."
Even though the plagues of the poor do not seem of much interest to industry, the press, or even basic science, he said, these are exactly the kind of challenges doctors must face because it is their job to fight for the health and dignity of those who are sickest and most vulnerable.
"Now why dredge up this dreary stuff on a day of celebration?" Farmer asked. "Because you, members of the Class of 2003, can change all this. And you must."