``For seven years we have invited them to sit down with us and solve the problem.
The high professional and economic levels of these bodies and the altruistic religious principles according to which they are supposed to operate seem to have meant nothing.
By their refusal to confer they force action by crisis. And now events have passed beyond them. The initiative offered is no longer theirs to accept.''
Perhaps the current "conflict" between the IDSA, and ILADS,(an "ideological schism") needs to be looked at in this light.
There are too many patients suffering with Lyme disease to allow this "squabble" to continue.. We really have to "move on" from here, and either "vote-in" people that will represent us, or pressure our existing representatives to follow up on all the initiatives that we have presented in the past.
From Wikipedia: (Tuskegee-Syphilis study) On May 16, 1997, with five of the eight remaining survivors of the study attending the White House ceremony,
President Bill Clinton formally apologized to Tuskegee study participants: "What was done cannot be undone, but we can end the silence ...
We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you in the eye, and finally say, on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful and I am sorry."
To paraphrase Dr.H, who appears in "Under Our Skin", "While all this arguing is going on,the patients are suffering" I personally think it's tiring, and lame,and we need to seriously move on..I'm tired of being sick..... Joe
posted
copying this here since it's in TIMESNEWROMAN, and i can't read that at all, breaking it up as well...
Essay
Apology Shines Light on Racial Schism in Medicine
By HARRIET A. WASHINGTON
Published: July 29, 2008
Organized medicine has long reflected that most American of obsessions: race. For well over a century, the American Medical Association has been the nation's largest and most powerful physicians' group -- and an overwhelmingly white one.
Black physicians have their own, lesser-known group, the National Medical Association.
Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Courtesy of Howard University
PHYSICIANS DIVIDED Dr. W. Montague Cobb, president of the National Medical Association in the 1960s.
Enlarge This Image Courtesy of Howard University
Dr. W. Montague Cobb, left, in the 1960s, teaching anatomical comparison.
On July 10, a spotlight fell briefly on this schism. The A.M.A. made a rare public address to the N.M.A. to deliver an even rarer message:
an apology to the nation's black physicians, citing a century of ``past wrongs.''
What wrongs, exactly? Dr. W. Montague Cobb could have answered that question at length.
Dr. Cobb -- physician, physical anthropologist, civil rights activist, president of the National Medical Association in the 1960s -- knew that the organization owed its very formation to racial barriers.
It was founded in 1895 after the A.M.A. refused to seat three African-American delegates at its annual meetings in 1870 and 1872.
He also knew that black patients and doctors were often relegated to subterranean ``colored'' or charity wards or banned from hospitals altogether; they had responded with their own hospitals and medical schools, at least seven of which existed in 1909.
That year, the A.M.A. commissioned a well-known educator, Abraham Flexner, to visit and evaluate each North American medical school.
His 1910 report, ``Medical Education in the United States and Canada,'' raised a further hurdle for black doctors:
it recommended that all but two black medical schools -- Howard and Meharry -- be closed. ****************************************
Unable to attract financing, the others did close, and the number of black physicians predictably fell.
By 1938, the situation had grown so dire that Dr. Louis T. Wright of Harlem Hospital declared,
``The A.M.A. has demonstrated as much interest in the health of the Negro as Hitler has in the health of the Jew.''
In 1963, when Dr. Cobb became president of the N.M.A., the United States had 5,000 black doctors out of 227,027 total.
Although A.M.A. membership was often important to hospital practice, specialty training and professional achievement, many chapters and ``constituent societies'' -- medical groups that were the gatekeepers to the larger organization -- were closed to blacks.
And the A.M.A. repeatedly refused to force its constituent societies to admit blacks.
In 1952, Dr. Martha Mendell, a white member of the Physicians Forum, a multiracial doctors group in New York, argued:
``The claim of the A.M.A. that it is powerless to correct this practice because of the `autonomy' of its component societies is an evasion of its responsibility.
Surely, if the Southern medical societies decided to admit chiropractors to membership, the A.M.A. would quickly find the means of redefining this autonomy.''
Still, a smattering of influential black physicians did gain entree into the A.M.A. Doubtless heartened by that fact, in 1957 Dr. Cobb founded the Imhotep National Conference on Hospital Integration to forge a coalition between the medical associations.
The A.M.A. had eagerly joined the Imhotep initiative.
But six years later, Dr. Cobb bitterly reflected that the association habitually absented itself from Imhotep meetings.
What's more, the two medical groups increasingly found themselves on opposing sides of important antidiscrimination battles.
As the National Medical Association campaigned for Medicare and Medicaid on behalf of its members' mostly black, often poor patients, Dr. Edward R. Annis of the A.M.A. censured both programs as ``socialized medicine.''
Without A.M.A. support, black physicians like Dr. Hubert A. Eaton of Wilmington, N.C., brought federal lawsuits to gain entrance to all-white hospitals. ***********************************
And despite promises to oppose language in the Hill-Burton hospital construction law validating ``separate but equal'' facilities, the A.M.A.'s response was desultory at best.
Dr. Cobb's patience was at an end, and perhaps his hand shook slightly -- from indignation, if not from fatigue -- as he responded in August 1963:
``For seven years we have invited them to sit down with us and solve the problem.
The high professional and economic levels of these bodies and the altruistic religious principles according to which they are supposed to operate seem to have meant nothing.
By their refusal to confer they force action by crisis. And now events have passed beyond them. The initiative offered is no longer theirs to accept.''
His declaration was prescient, for the black doctors and their white sympathizers won their civil rights battles.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed without active support from the A.M.A. Title VI of the act closed the Hill-Burton loophole:
segregation within hospitals became illegal.
Medicare passed in 1965.
But for African-American and other antisegregationist physicians, there remained a final bastion of racial exclusion to conquer: the A.M.A.
To do so, these physicians resorted to the same strategies that had desegregated schools, lunch counters and monochromatic suburbs.
On June 19, 1963, the association had held its 112th annual convention in Atlantic City's stately Traymore Hotel.
As Dr. Annis descended from the ballroom lectern after delivering his presidential address, he was surprised to be met on the steps by Dr. John L. S. Holloman, an African-American A.M.A. member from New York City, who handed him a letter demanding that the A.M.A. remove all racial barriers to membership. *********************************
When it became clear that Dr. Annis had no intention of reading or responding to it before the assembled doctors, Dr. Holloman turned on his heel and left the ballroom to join 20 black and white physicians picketing outside.
Reporters thronged the A.M.A. officers throughout the convention, clamoring to know why physicians were picketing the association as a racist organization.
These scenes of public protest and picketing continued until 1968, when the A.M.A. finally amended its constitution and bylaws to punish racial discrimination by permitting the expulsion of constituent societies.
Warmer relations ensued between the medical societies, and although a 1973 effort to amalgamate them failed, they did form the lasting liaison of which W. Montague Cobb had dreamed.
Their more fruitful joint efforts include the 1992 creation of the Minority Affairs Consortium, and in 2004 the Commission to End Healthcare Disparities.
In 1994, Dr. Lonnie Bristow became the first African-American president of the A.M.A.
Yet reminders of this rancorous history persist, and the A.M.A.'s apology remains pertinent, if long overdue.
Consider this statistic: In 1910, when Abraham Flexner published his report on medical education, African-Americans made up 2.5 percent of the number of physicians in the United States.
Today, they make up 2.2 percent. ******************************
Harriet A. Washington is the author of ``Medical Apartheid:
The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present'' (Doubleday, 2007).
************************************
boy, reading this was just like IDSA's treatment of ILADS and we CHRONIC LYME PATIENTS!!
IP: Logged |
The Lyme Disease Network is a non-profit organization funded by individual donations. If you would like to support the Network and the LymeNet system of Web services, please send your donations to:
The
Lyme Disease Network of New Jersey 907 Pebble Creek Court,
Pennington,
NJ08534USA http://www.lymenet.org/
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
![[cussing]](graemlins/cussing.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic