Quote of the Day (Dr. Paul Farmer, on How Public Health Differs From Laws)

“Laws are not science; they are normative ideology and are thus tightly tied to power. Biomedicine and public health, though also vulnerable to being deformed by ideology, serve different imperatives, ask different questions. They do not ask whether an event or a process violates an existing rule; they ask whether that event or process has ill effects on a patient or a population.”— Harvard Univ. medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor (2003)