Posted on 12/29/2014 12:15:03 PM PST by PROCON
No development in U.S. healthcare over the last three decades has imperiled us more than the idea that we benefit from physician oversight of life events and circumstances that are not inherently medical. At its most intrusive, this process, called medicalization, creates a clinical conundrum out of the mere act of living and posits medical solutions for things (such as how to live a healthier lifestyle) that frequently benefit more from individual concentration and perseverance than professional intervention. We are thus bearing witness to tortuous reformation of what it means to be a physician in America: a formerly independent and autonomous profession is now our societal hall monitor.
Adam Goldstein, M.D., of North Carolina exemplifies the problem. His facile positioning of firearms as the new tobacco, coating the argument in a patina of medical benevolence, is testament to the profession’s creativity in dragging into its sphere things that do not belong there. There is, of course, no Constitutional right to smoke. But Dr. Goldstein doesn’t stop there. He wants national standards of licensure and professional behavior, especially regarding physicians and guns, akin to what is seen with commercial truckers. He also supports legal designation of all healthcare settings as “gun-free” zones, without a trace of irony about the fact that schools already occupy that space.
The conflation of smoking and firearms ownership is an almost laughable canard. I know of no reasonable claim that the firearms industry has been intentionally deceptive in its marketing, distribution, or sales, or encouraged gun buyers to engage in reckless behavior (which smoking is, by definition). This is quite a bit different from tobacco purveyors who willfully lied about the dangers of their products for decades, and, indeed, used physicians to deliver the lie and persuade potential smokers that all was medically hunky dory.
It is not so difficult to sense that the bottom line of anti-gunners is a grandiose tobacco-style financial punishment of the firearms industry for its alleged transgressions. If gun rights opponents want to use the legal system to pursue their goals, why not sue the family of Adam Lanza and the estate of Nancy Lanza, to create a theory of civil liability that puts the onus on gun owners to secure their firearms? If you live with someone you know, or ought to know, could use your guns wrongly, it is your obligation, not the gun maker’s, to secure them. Suing Bushmaster, the distributor, and the now-defunct retailer makes no more sense than suing the manufacturer and dealer of the car Margo Bronstein was driving in Redondo Beach, CA on December 17, 2014. She is suspected to have been under the influence of, among other things, prescription drugs.
As I have written elsewhere, the Affordable Care Act’s statutory language against gathering information about gun ownership is a subterfuge. The feds clearly want to doctors to inquire about and document in medical records information about gun ownership; absent that desire, there was no reason for an Executive Order clarifying that the prohibition really wasn’t one. Establishment medicine, as represented by groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, has firmly glommed on to the federal teat, which dispenses nearly forty cents of every healthcare dollar we spend, more if you count the forgone taxes on health insurance premiums and in-name-only not-for-profit health plans and hospital systems and other provider groups.
As physicians increasingly become employees, we can expect them to behave as such; they will ask about what their employers and their employers’ overseers want to them ask about, all under the guise of quality healthcare and helping to save us from ourselves. There is no request of the government that they will fail to heed because there is too much money, power, and influence in play to take seriously the notion that both policy positions and patient interactions ought to be framed by evidence and modesty.
The longer term play here is much more sinister. Doctors will be asked to promote safe guns even though there is no demand amongst gun owners for the technology and even less confidence in its utility. My cell phone periodically reboots without warning; will my safe gun reboot when I need it?
In keeping with the Executive Order, doctors will be asked to promote the idea that they are just trying to find people with mental illness who might be a danger to themselves or others. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has just struck down as unconstitutional a federal law that bars gun ownership by anyone history of institutionalization for mental illness even if they are now deemed healthy.
A new paper in the American Journal of Public Health casts even more doubt on the idea that we can use mental health/illness as the government’s stalking horse to prevent gun deaths, which are in a 20-year-long decline. Discomfortingly, the authors speculate whether psychiatrists “could help society interrogate [emphasis added] what guns mean to everyday people, and why people feel they need guns or reject guns out of hand.” I, for one, am not assuaged by the proposal that we need a cultural interrogation on guns led by the psychiatry industry. How big a step is it from the idea that mental illness promotes gun violence (it doesn’t, according to the authors) to the conclusion that gun ownership is evidence of a mental disorder? If there is creeping encroachment on the concept of competence by the mental health professions, how will we challenge it?
It is bad enough that Obamacare enlists doctors in the feckless pursuit of Americans clinically. This policy meme, all by itself, foments overtreatment, overdiagnosis, overscreening, and just, pure outright medical harm, in a system that already wastes 30% of the resources put into it. Instead of engaging physicians to fix these issues, Obamacare welcomes them as the straws stirring a toxic drink of paternalism and unsustainable deference to people who have no legitimate intellectual or moral claim to the work they’re being asked to do.
The debate we need to have is this one: is it possible for a free society to try to prevent every potential tragic or adverse event? At what cost in commerce, individual freedom, professional autonomy, and respect for government? Was Churchill right…that we can pass so many laws and regulations that eventually everything is illegal and people lose all respect for the law? Have we reached the juncture where we will lose all respect for the medical profession because it is invited incessantly to intercede in so many facets of our lives, and it simply cannot restrain itself from carrying the government’s water?
Within the next decade, a very large number of Americans will join gun owners in the view that the healthcare industry, now explicitly an agent of the federal government, simply cannot be trusted with any information beyond what is necessary to solve an immediate clinical problem. I will not blame gun owners one bit if they look back smugly on today’s debate and say, “I told you so.”
However, a young co-worker of mine had his doctor ask if he had guns in his house. Even though he did, he said no. (He was shocked that the question even came up). And this was 8-10 years ago too.
Anyone experience this with their doctor?
If my son’s doctor asked if we have guns in our house he would answer: “You mean, like, in every ROOM?”
Haven't yet. If he ever asks I'm just going to tell him I don't want to spoil the surprise.
My wife and I had the same thing happen in 1996 when we had our than 3 year old admitted to the hospital. I informed the questioner the question in question was noneya.
I’m more worried about doctors being pressed in to service to push “living wills” and “directives” on every patient.
They obviously want us to give them permission to kill us if/when we become incapacitated in any way - “voluntarily”, of course.
When I was a kid my father always kept a loaded shotgun in the hall closet by the front door. Don’t know how we survived....
Our family doctor reloads his ammo & has a private range that I have unlimited access to.
Yes, I am very fortunate. He is responsible for a dramatic improvement in my marksmanship over the last 3 years. My idea of great medical care. Hee hee.
Seriously, we need to resist this crap. If my kid was younger I would insist on being present for all consultations.
We also homeschooled, so by the time she went to HS, she knew darn well what was none of the school’s business.
Damn Communists.
The idiot nurse at Mt. Sinai in NYC asked after my wife checked in after her water broke almost two years ago when my son was born.
I gave her the answer none of her business, and she was like “can I just put no?” I said fine.
Yes, my doctor asks quite frequently about guns. In fact, the last time I was there he asked if I’d like to see the one he bought over lunch.
When a doctor asks if I have guns in the house, my response is “They are properly called 16-inch cannons.”
They don’t seem to be asking over here in the Tri-Cities. Our kids have never been asked; wife and I have never been asked. The great majority of residents here do have guns.
My answer would be yes I have guns. A glue gun, a staple gun, an air gun, a nail gun, a grease gun and a nerf gun. Which one do you want to talk about?
“Anyone experience this with their doctor? “
It was a question on my last physical, I checked NO
As physicians increasingly become employees, we can expect them to behave as such; they will ask about what their employers and their employers’ overseers want to them ask about, all under the guise of quality healthcare and helping to save us from ourselves
*That* is the problem. He who owns the gold makes the rules. No need to worry about PO'd patients or incompetence resulting in a loss of business, if government or insurance plans keeps sending along patients, and every doc is working for the same beast.gov. Hence the extreme irony of the Obamacare health care "marketplace".
Meet the new doc, same as the old doc. The ethical ones will retire before they must conform to unconscionable care "guidelines" set by unaccountable, bureaucratic bean counters. Gotta cut real treatments to pay the salaries of more and more bureaucrats... kind of like how the military gets to take it in the shorts so that EBT cards will remain flush with cash.
They do ask, however, “Do you feel threatened in your home”? I say ask the psych nurse — she’s in the same clinic.
Pediatrician? I always went to the family primary care doctor if I was sick.
I had that experience when I lived in Minnesota for ten years. EVERY doctor’s office visit started off with a battery of questions unrelated to why I was there. Once I understood the smothering liberal culture, my answer to the gun question was “No! Guns are icky! Guns are bad! Guns are scary!”
I had to resort to a lot of disinformation while living in that kind of political environment. I no longer live in Minnesota, and no longer recognize any professional license from that state.
I like your response.
My father grew up with guns as a boy in rural Georgia. He took us kids up the road to the open field while the Moms were preparing Thanksgiving dinner. He set up a target. Everyone had to stand behind the fence. Before he put a gun in anyone’s hand he gave us a 15 minute lecture on gun safety and how to handle a rifle.
My husband grew up similarly. He commanded the US Army Marksmanship training unit.
Guns are not the problem. People who handle them incorrectly are the problem.
My father grew up with guns as a boy in rural Georgia. He took us kids up the road to the open field while the Moms were preparing Thanksgiving dinner. He set up a target. Everyone had to stand behind the fence. Before he put a gun in anyone’s hand he gave us a 15 minute lecture on gun safety and how to handle a rifle.
My husband grew up similarly. He commanded the US Army Marksmanship training unit.
Guns are not the problem. People who handle them incorrectly are the problem.
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