If you are looking for the definitive book to introduce you to the changes in healthcare provision in poor countries in recent decades, this is the book. It covers the medicine, the sociology, and the ethics of the subject. Its focus is the search for equity in global health provision. When the authors called the book ‘reimagining global health’ they meant re-imagining it as based on a right to health, not based on utilitarian cost-effectiveness. They had in mind the recent successful struggle to make AIDS drugs available worldwide for treatment, drugs that, on a cost-effectiveness analysis, would never have been provided. You may ask, ‘Why should GPs be interested in “Global Health”?’ The answer, which this book seeks to help us to understand, is: ‘Because it is our …
Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, Arthur Kleinman, and Matthew Basilico University of California Press, 2013, PB, 520pp, £33.00, 978-0520271999