Posted on 08/13/2012 2:25:34 AM PDT by Slings and Arrows
Let’s set aside for the moment the question of whether it’s appropriate to talk about gun control in the wake of the shootings in Aurora, Colorado (though I can’t think of a more appropriate time to talk about it). And let’s not consider whether it makes sense that it’s legal to buy thousands of rounds of ammunition on-line in the U.S, without any background check (though could it, really?) And let’s not revisit that old argument about people, and not guns, killing people (though millions of “people,’ including evil and deranged people, do seem to live in countries with negligible amounts of gun violence).
What I’m thinking about today is the role doctors and other health professionals do and should play in preventing the 30,000 deaths and many more injuries in which firearms are involved every year in the U.S.
Behind the closed doors of my exam room, I ask patients many very personal questions: about their sexual behavior, alcohol and drug use, domestic violence, and other sensitive issues.
But there are no questions I ask–and I ask them routinely, especially of new patients–that meet with more surprise than these: “Do you own any firearms? Do you keep them locked and inaccessible to children?”
I believe the questions come as a surprise because people don’t usually think of gun ownership as something about which a doctor would or should be concerned.
But according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, homicide, suicide, and accidents are among the top three causes of death for Americans ages 0-54, and these deaths often involve firearms-over 30,000 per year. That’s seven times as many as die of cervical cancer, and nearly as many as die from pancreatic cancer annually.
It’s seems to me difficult to argue that health professionals shouldn’t be as interested in the prevention of gun violence as in the prevention of other causes of death.
Yet, doctors’ role in counseling patients about the potential danger of firearms is controversial, as expressed in this exchange. Some see such counseling as no different than speaking with patients about safe sex, smoking, and exercise. Some see it as an inappropriate intrusion of the doctor’s political views into the patient’s medical visit and an invasion of the patient’s privacy.
This latter view was in the news last fall when a Florida law, subsequently overturned by a federal judge, banned doctors from counseling patients about firearms, and would have imposed fines or even jail time on, for example, pediatricians who inquired about safe storage of guns in homes where children live.
In my own practice, most patients I ask about guns tell me that they don’t own any. This isn’t surprising because Massachusetts has one of the lowest gun ownership rates of any state in the U.S. (and, as it happens, the lowest rate of gun-related deaths).
And it’s possible that some patients don’t wish to discuss their gun ownership with me and choose not to answer my questions about it.
But occasionally I have a conversation such as I had not long ago with a man who lived alone and kept his loaded guns unlocked and accessible. Now and then his young nieces and nephews visited and it hadn’t occurred to him, until I asked, that his firearms might be a hazard to those children.
I’m going to keep asking about firearms, especially in regard to those at highest risk of harm from them: children, patients struggling with depression, patients with difficult family relationships.
As a doctor, why wouldn’t I?
Suzanne Koven is an internal medicine physician who blogs at In Practice at Boston.com, where this article originally appeared. She is the author of Say Hello To A Better Body: Weight Loss and Fitness For Women Over 50.
Bet she supports ObamaCare, too.
You ask, we’ll tell you to “None of your damn business” and maybe find a new doctor.
Amen. In the final analysis, only an armed society is one that can’t be ordered to get on govt buses, trucks or trains to be taken to a “temporary relocation center, for our own safety.”
Without our firearms, Socialist Utopians will always fall to the urge to get rid of the bitter clingers the final and permanent way.
Our firearms prevent the Obamas, Holders, Napolitanos and Jarretts from giving the orders for roundups and “population movements.”
And they hate guns for it. Such a little thing, standing between them and Utopia!
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Sun Apr 29, 2012 SSB Net report
For this evening’s net, Ruth, KK4CDA took the reins, and did a bang-up job under rough conditions. With a group of hams numbering over a dozen, from Maine to Georgia, her topic for the net was “Recommended Books”. Here is a list, as best she could copy. A search should lead to the exact one, if we have any slight errors. A BIG thank you to Ruth for standing in under non-optimal conditions.
Book list:
Holy Bible
Enemies foreign and domestic – matthew bracken
Leverage, how cheap money will destroy the world – karl denninger
Home production of quality meats and sausages – stanley and adam Marianski
Encyclopedia of country living – carla emery
Patriots – james wesley rawles
Jakarta pandemic – steven konkoly
How to survive the end of the world as we know it – james wesley rawles
Making the best of basics – james talmage stephens
98.6 degrees, the art of keeping your ass alive – cody lundin
Foxfire series (1st and 3rd book, but all good)
Self sufficient life and how to live it – john seymour
Mother earth news magazines
Mary bell’s complete dehydrator book
??? Pleasant valley ??? – lewis brownfield (1930s-1940s book)
When technology fails – matthew stein
Putting food – janet greene, ruth hertzberg, beatrice vaughan
??? Workforce handbook??? – ????
Ball blue book guide to preserving (canning, freezing)
Backwoods home magazines
Camping and Woodcraft- Horace Kephart
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Well, in all honesty, Suzanne, we can hardly make what's "difficult for you" the standard for what people should and shouldn't do. The streets would be littered with shoes and there wouldn't be a VCR in the land that wasn't blinking "12:00"! Twit.
Someone on another thread posted a good reply to such Dr.s. questions.
“There are no Jews in my attic”.
Great Post!
The correct answer would be “I don’t believe that is any of your business” before you walk out.
Brilliant. I've never been asked but I will use that if it does happen.
CREEPY_DOCTOR_PING!
Learning about the transcendentalists first made me realise that. Almost every nanny state, big government, environmentalist, white-guilt, “we’re from the government and we’re here to ‘help’ you” movement had its seeds in that group of people (they considered themselves the enlightened intellectual elite and have passed that attitude down to their children and their disciples). They always especially had a love-hate relationship with the South-read the biographies and memoirs of Bronson Alcott. In later years, it’s turned to a strictly “hate” relationship, as they made a point of destroying the things about the South which they secretly loved but would never have admitted to doing so.
Suzie is a brave new world one. Being on front line, cutting edge of introducing Americans to our new “medical” death care panel decisions, she figures the power to control and even kill people with authority, is Utopia. She knows best and she always wanted to be the mommy of America. She has nothing by superior intellegence and intentions at heart.
I think she’s downright sacrificial to offer up her own self defense for the safety of those upstanding citizens full of bullet holes in the city hospital emergency room. The government will keep her safe and on top of everything.
Big Mother Is Watching
>>> “Do you own any firearms?”
“Why? Got a favorite you’d recommend, Doc?” -and go from there with appropriate tsking. Lettem assume what they will. None of their business & not gonna give them an honest answer on their nosy parker government form. This is obviously an end run around anti-registration laws.
Me: I do not now, nor have I ever owned A firearm. (While thinking "Actually, I own quite a few . . . ")
Stealth registration is my impression too, plus an ever-expanding list of NICS denials.
Pretty arbitrary slice of the data to get these results. Why not children under 6 with young adults between 18 and 24?
I'd see this doctor once.
If a doctor asks me about firearms and its not in the context of wanting to go shooting with me, then my answer will be: “Hey, doc, how much to you make every year, and what’s your net worth?”
I know that the answer will be, “That’s none of your business.” To which I’ll reply, “Exactly.”
Docs who do this are committing what’s known as a boundary violation. Mention that phrase to them, and ask them for the name of their malpractice carrier, and watch them start acting like Obama without a teleprompter. You see, firearms are out of their area of trained expertise, so if they give advice (like “lock up your guns”) then they are responsible for the consequences - AND THEY WON’T BE COVERED BY INSURANCE BECAUSE IT IS OUTSIDE THEIR AREA OF EXPERTISE.
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Dr. Suzanne Koven received her bachelor’s degree in English Literature at Yale and her medical degree from Johns Hopkins. She practices internal medicine with a special interest in weight issues at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and teaches at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Extension School from which she received a masters degree in Literature and Creative Writing.
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