Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Even though there are 10,000 NGOs working in Haiti. Haiti has approximately 10 million people. They have 1 neurologist. In the whole country. One CT scan in the whole country. They can diagnose conditions of the brain but for many conditions, especially brain tumors, that's all they can do, diagnose. There is no neurosurgeon. There are 16 CT scans per 50 million poor people in the world. Lives are cheap but medical is not. This book is about a neurologist from Boston who works Partnerships of Health to see patients and train Haitian doctors to recognize and treat common neurological disorders. He develops a working relationship with a Haitian doctor. When back in Boston, the author receives an email from this doctor about a young male patient with a very large brain tumor. The author sees no reason the young man cannot be treated in the U.S. He is warned against this. Too many resources spent on one person he is told. Nonsense says the idealistic young doctor. The book chronicles the time that goes by, the strings that are pulled, the money spent, the surgeries, treatments, and recovery time of this young man. Pull out the kleenex because I teared up more than once.
Haitians are kind, fatalistic, and trust in God. They also trust their doctors implicitly. Unlike Americans, they don't really make their own medical decisions it seems, God and the doctors do. This book covers several other patients also who are helped and two that due before they cannot be helped. Not everything in medicine has a happy ending. Frankly, I don't know how anything can have a happy ending in such grinding poverty. A taxi driver in the book told the doctor out of every 100 people in Haiti only 2-3 of them will eat that day. Partners in health bring self-sustaining self-sufficient hospitals to the poorest places on earth like Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, etc. They use solar panels for electricity. I thought this book would be a downer or depressing but it wasn't. It was hopeful. I especially enjoyed reading all the Haitian proverbs. "A person is a person" "After God is the Doctor" "Many hands make the burden lighter"" Little by little the bird builds it's best" ( )