DATE: October 01, 2008

CONTACT: Donna Arterburn, 864-656-0605
donna@strom.clemson.edu

WRITER: Peter Kent, 864-656-4355
pkent@clemson.edu

Paul Farmer, a doctor who does ‘whatever it takes’ for patients, to speak at Clemson

CLEMSON — Paul Farmer is the kind of doctor you would want to care for your family. Farmer and Partners in Health, a nonprofit international health-care group he helped to build, are dedicated to their medical motto: “Whatever it takes.”

Farmer will make a free public presentation at 7 p.m. Oct. 11 at Clemson University’s Brooks Theatre.

The Partners in Health puts it all on the line for the patient: “Our mission is both medical and moral. It is based on solidarity, rather than charity alone. When a person in Peru or Siberia or rural Haiti falls ill, PIH uses all of the means at our disposal to make them well — from pressuring drug manufacturers to lobbying policy makers to providing medical care and social services. Whatever it takes, just as we would do if a member of our own family — or we, ourselves — were ill.”

Farmer is the featured speaker for the William H. Hunter, M.D. ’48 Endowed Lecture of the Calhoun Lecture Series at Clemson University. The title of his presentation is “Health Care Disparities and Delivery in Rural Haiti: Mountains Beyond Mountains.” The lecture is sponsored by AnMed Health. The Clemson University Bookstore will host a book signing after the program.

A medical anthropologist and physician, Farmer is a founding director of Partners in Health, an international nonprofit organization that provides direct health-care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty.

Farmer is the Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology in the global health and social medicine department at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician in infectious diseases and associate chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Along with his colleagues there, in the Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change at Harvard Medical School and in Haiti, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho and Malawi, Farmer has pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies for AIDS and tuberculosis (including multidrug-resistant tuberculosis).

Farmer and his colleagues have successfully challenged the policymakers and critics who claim that quality health care is impossible to deliver in resource-poor settings. In addition to his clinical work, Farmer has written extensively about health and human rights and about the role of social inequalities in determining the distribution and outcomes of infectious diseases. His most recent book is "Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor."

For more information, contact Donna Arterburn, program coordinator, at 864-656-0605 or via e-mail at donna@strom.clemson.edu.

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