This documentary examines the world AIDS crisis. The camera travels to Africa, where infections overwhelm the public hea | dG1fNV9Ia1ZkTURPaGc
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00:00Paul Farmer is a doctor.
00:06That is how he defines himself.
00:09His social commitment, purely and simply, is to treating his patients.
00:14The fact that his patients are among the poorest people in the world is beside the point.
00:24In Haiti, he has leveled the playing field and shown that poor people, given medication,
00:30can respond to treatment for AIDS just like anyone else.
00:41This particular community that we're sitting in is a squatter settlement.
00:45It lost its land to a hydroelectric dam that was built as a development project.
00:51So these people became landless peasants overnight and they need resources put back into their
00:58communities.
00:59So for me to sit here in my little tin-roofed house and be very romantic about living with
01:08the people would serve really nobody's interest.
01:24In this part of Haiti, in this area that we serve, people who have advanced HIV disease
01:31are getting appropriate therapy.
01:35It's going to be a small project to the rest of the world perhaps, but it's going to take
01:39up a lot of our time, and it already does.
01:41It takes a lot of time and a lot of passion to make it work, but it is possible.
01:46You can do it.
01:51This patient who just came in was carried from a village called Boisjoli, which looks
01:59like almost a cliff face to get up it.
02:02The way that they came down was the steep way because to go around the long way takes
02:06too long.
02:07They felt she was too sick.
02:14She's well known to the clinic.
02:16She's been here.
02:17She has four pages of clinic notes.
02:20She's had HIV for diagnosed here for at least four years, just four children, and now she's
02:27here with six days of fever and what she called terrible bony and joint pain, and so
02:34now we need to figure out what it is.
02:40Conference today I think was important because all the hard questions got addressed.
02:46How do you possibly do anything meaningful in a setting of so much poverty and inequality
02:52and just hopelessness?
02:59There's less hopelessness really there when they talk than when we hear experts and policy
03:04people talking about this.
03:05They seem to have more enthusiasm and commitment and hope even than people who really are in
03:10a, by comparison, a much more enviable situation, so I mean I think that's important because
03:15you had people who are living with HIV in the poorest possible circumstances who are
03:22being treated for it and doing well, and so again, in a way, they're a living rebuke to
03:28all the people who say, well, it can't be done.
03:30It's not cost effective.
03:32It's not sustainable, and although there are lots of problems, I think it does everybody
03:37good to get together once in a while and talk about some of the small victories as well.
03:44The bottom line for me is I'm a doctor, and I reserve the right to say that I want is
03:53the best for my patients, and I'm, in the end, not necessarily interested in the opinions
03:59of the economists and the policy makers and, you know, people who think that it's just
04:06a hopeless cause because, you know, my contract is with the patient, and so I'm all too happy
04:13when people in those arenas will help me treat my patients, but if they're not interested,
04:21then they need to get out of my way because I don't want to be shouted down by, you know,
04:24someone who says, well, I'm sorry you're not a policy person, or I'm sorry you're not a
04:28health economist, or I'm sorry you don't understand, you know, how to put health systems in place,
04:33you know.
04:34Initially, I used to be quite intimidated by that, but in the end, I, I, I'm sorry.
04:39I'm not going to listen.