Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. Published 2004, Random House Inc.
Precis- Paul Farmer is continuing to make his trips between Cange and Boston, but the grip of the military on Cange was getting tighter, which did not sit well with Farmer. He began sneaking thousands of dollars into Cange for anti-violence campaigns, as well as disrespecting soldiers. Farmer was eventually banished from Haiti for his actions, and established a permanent headquaters in Cambridge. He now began to look into a new disease, Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, otherwise known as MDR. In fact, it was when he lost an old friend to the disease in Peru that sparked his passion to cure the disease. His friend was a man named Father Jack, a priest who had allowed Paul to stay with him in his church while he was still attending medical school in a dangergous neighborhood. Not too long after Jack moved to Peru, the priest became ill and was immediately flown back to America to be treated by Farmer. He passed away a month later, and Paul discovered that he was infected with a strand of MDR that was immune to all of the available tuberculosis treatments in existance.
Gems-
"Farmer was a TB expert. When he was still just a residant at the Brigham, he'd written a treatment manual for the house staff. He had been diagnosing and treating the disease ever since he'd first set foot in Haiti, where nearly everyone was infected and active cases were rampant." (Kidder, 138) Farmer is one of the best in the world at treating this disease. So I can only imagine how much of a wake up call it must have been to realize that a close friend had died from a strain of the disease that he was supposed to be an expert at treating that could not possibly have been cured by any of his known methods.
"Others [who hadn't been able to afford their drugs] had given up and gone back to their shacks on the barren, dusty hillsides and were waiting there to die." (Kidder, 140) When I read this it really made me think about the different ways that people deal with illness and dying. How some people can just accept there fate and will embrace death when it approaches, and others will reject the idea ferociously.
"Meanwhile, here in Peru, where the government made debt payments of more than a billion dollars every year to American banks and international lending institutions, experts in international TB control had deemed MDR too expensive." (Kidder, 141) This sounds a lot like the men and women in "Sicko" who were denied treatment because the health insurance companies would come up with excuses not to allow them treatment, when really the only thing going on is that the health insurance companies are trying to make more money.
Thoughts- This section of the book did an excellent job of reinforcing some of the ideas that the movie "Sicko" had presented to me. Although I never really blamed doctors for the terrible American system of dealing with illness and dying, I always sort of thought of them as machines, who would just treat patients with the resources they had without actually making an effort to change things. In "Sicko," we heard from a doctor who moved to London because he liked the way that they had their health care system set up, and by treating patients in Great Britain, not only was he able to help more people but he was also making a lot more money for himself. Paul Farmer has taken the concept of actually helping people through medicine to a whole new level, and the selflessness in his work is something that defys the human trait of greed, which is something I thought no human, let alone American, would be able to push aside.
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