Posted on 07/30/2014 12:46:11 PM PDT by Q-ManRN
As a pediatrician, I have one, straightforward professional obligation: to safeguard and support the health and wellbeing of my patients. In my case, those patients are children, but you could change the age range of the people coming into the office and apply that statement to any medical provider.
Asking about guns in the house is no exception. When I ask parents if there are firearms in the home, and if so how they are secured, it is for the sole purpose of keeping their children safe.
Physicians in Florida are being threatened with a law that, if enacted, will seriously hamper their ability to do their jobs. The Firearms Owners' Privacy Act, passed in 2011, would subject medical providers to fines and a potential loss of licensure for asking patients about gun ownership or recording that information in the medical record if it is not “relevant to the patient's medical care or safety.”
Gun advocacy groups such as the National Rifle Association have long opposed the AAP’s efforts to strengthen gun laws. But the Florida law has no effect on gun ownership or access. Its insidious reach enters into medical offices and chokes off the free-speech rights of the people trying to work there.
As much as the NRA and its ilk want to deny it, having a gun in the home is a risk factor for serious injury or death. Acknowledging that fact is not the same thing as taking the gun away. The Florida law seeks to “protect” gun owners from even having to be informed about truths they’d prefer to ignore, and seeks to cast medical providers in an unflattering light for having the temerity to question them.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
Doc, this isn’t about safety. Its a back door gun registry and you are a useful idiot.
I assume these busybody doctors also ask whether the kiddies stick forks in electrical outlets or indulge in a sip of Drano?
I agree with the Doctor who wrote the piece, as should all conservatives.
It is none of the government’s business what a doctor asks her patients. The doctor has a first amendment right to ask about guns, or swimming pools, or dangerous dogs, or the use of car seats, or whatever. I have a first amendment right to not answer and to pick a different doctor if I think those questions are out-of-bounds.
There’s no need for the government to get involved.
Surely it is safer for children if a parent has a gun and knows how to protect the children from the predators who are home invaders. I am glad the children in our family are in such a protected home, and they will soon be taking instruction in safely using firearms themselves. After all, we can’t all live in gated communities as wealthy physicians do.
Asking about guns in the house is no exception. When I ask parents if there are firearms in the home, and if so how they are secured, it is for the sole purpose of keeping their children safe.
Since Dr. Nanny's sole concern is keeping children safe, I assume that he also asks parents whether they have a backyard swimming pool or unsecured medications or household chemicals around the house, since a child below the gang-banger age has a much greater chance statistically of dying or suffering a serious injury from water, overdose, or poisoning, than from a firearm.
I’ve fired a few bad docs in my time. Just saying.
It is far more likely that I or someone in my family will be shot or beaten when going out to a restaurant. What is a peds doctor going to to say about that? Nothing.
Why would a physician focus on guns unless it was simply because they had an anti-gun agenda? There are far more dangerous items in households than guns, such as cars, farm equipment, ladders, poisons, prescription medications, chain saws, table saws, knives, fireworks, gasoline cans, lawn mowers, and improperly stored and cooked raw chicken.
In fact, why would a physician ask about ANY of this stuff at all unless the reason for the visit was because of an accident with one of the above? Why would ANY of this be any business of the physician (or government) unless said item caused the injury being treated? I mean, what’s the physician going to do with this information, say, gun possession? Keep records to turn over to the government? Lecture or teach gun safety because the physician is an expert about that?
Does it actually serve the sick patient’s interest for the physician to spend a chunk of their extremely limited face time asking the patient irrelevant questions and gathering unrelated personal data instead of trying to actually focus on curing the sick patient? Isn’t a cure why a patient sought out the doctor in the first place? What they are paying the doctor for? How would you like to pay a plumber, auto mechanic, or electrician to interrogate you about your gun ownership, or your medical problems for that matter, instead of fixing what you hired them to fix?
Changing doctors is getting difficult and will soon be nearly impossible. The best are quietly retiring or heading offshore and what is left will not be nearly enough. The future of American medicine is Clinic Medicine and you get the doctor who is on duty at the clinic your Plan assigns to you. The doctor eventually will be a 4 year graduate of something related to medicine and heavy on Bureaucratic Compliance Studies or will be an upgraded nurse.
Do/did your children attend public school?
Exactly. If he isn’t asking about every risk factor (how many streets do you cross going back and forth to school, etc.?), he’s a hypocrite at best.
Surprise, surprise! "He" doesn't even live in Florida. Probably lives in CT and is gay doctor near Newtown.
I agree. That is their First Amendment right.
As it is my First Amendment right to tell them to lump it.
According the CDC, there is a much greater chance statistically that you will die or suffer serious bodily harm as a result of medical malpractice than from a firearm. Indeed, on the one occasion that my former doctor asked me whether I own a firearm, I looked him in the eye and said, "Do you know that according the CDC, something like 110,000 people died from medical malpractice last year, which is more than 10 times the number of firearm deaths." He changed the subject.
Perfect response, especially having the doctor liable for injury or death resulting from not having a fire arm for defense.
Self serving bastard Doctors with political agendas are not Doctors of life,
they are Doctors of Abortion and death and deserve attitude adjustments accordingly.
“When I ask parents if there are firearms in the home, and if so how they are secured, it is for the sole purpose of keeping their children safe.”
If the children’s safety were his only concern, he would distribute literature to all of his patients.
excellent!
So should doctors have to disclose if they are homosexuals? After all, homosexuals have a higher risk of contracting AIDS and doctors have a higher risk of passing it on through blood contact. A risk far higher than that of a patient getting shot by accident. Should patient ask? What about intravenous drug use? Maybe patients should come with a list of questions of their own, or maybe the doctor should stick to medicine and the patients should mind their own business.
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