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What gun owners want from the AMA
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
What gun owners want from the AMAAmerican Medical Association President Richard F. Corlin, MD, has advocated reducing firearm injuries. Indeed gun safety is gospel among the great majority of American gun owners. But the perspective of gun owners is quite different from that of the AMA. What can our AMA leaders do to improve relations with gun owners? Here are a few suggestions: Accept that we gun owners are not a public health hazard. Those who misuse firearms are a tiny minority. Visit any organized shooting sport activity and you will see a dedication to safety that any physician would be comfortable with. Start taking seriously the opinions of experts on firearm injuries -- the criminologists. Their 25 years of research confirm the safety and social good of the average American gun owner. But medical journals have ignored it, instead jumping on the gun control bandwagon. Call up the National Rifle Assn.'s Safety and Training Division. Ask its experts to work with you in reducing gun injuries. The NRA has been teaching gun safety for 130 years. Can our AMA afford not to partner with such a useful resource? Give up the quest to identify a class of bad guns. When we lend our scientific authority to buzzwords like assault weapon, pocket rocket, and junk gun, we damage our own credibility. Any category of guns we demonize will include high-quality firearms used by civilians and police for decades. Lighten up on the rhetoric. Yes, there are still too many gun deaths and injuries. But it's hard to argue that we have an epidemic. Fatal gun accidents have been steadily decreasing for 70 years, according to the National Safety Council. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us all gun deaths dropped by more than 25% during the 1990s. Gun ownership has been a part of American life since colonial times, and it's not likely to disappear anytime soon. So let's welcome gun owners as knowledgeable allies in our effort to reduce gun injuries. --Timothy Wheeler, MD Director, Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Claremont Institute, Upland, Calif. Back to top.
Once patient needs are met, they stop asking for suicide assistanceRegarding "Physician-assisted suicide: Death by the numbers" (Editorial, March 18): Your editorial was persuasive and resolute in its opposition to physician-assisted suicide. As the medical director of the largest hospice in the country, The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast, I often see the most formidable cases that end of life can bring. Some of these desperate patients, as expected, ask that I facilitate their premature death. However, I have found that once I address the suffering of these unfortunate folk in all dimensions -- physical, social, psychological and spiritual -- almost all of my patients change their mind and are glad that they didn't take that path. The problem as I see it is that many physicians are uncomfortable and unskilled when dealing with their patients in all the dimensions of suffering. And that is why I am so appreciative of the recent JAMA articles on end of life, which stressed better pain management and helping doctors to better address the psychological and spiritual sufferings of our patients at end of life. The AMA has taken the harder and more noble road. To approve physician-assisted suicide would be disastrous for our patients, our profession and our society. --James A. Avery, MD Largo, Fla. http://www.ama-assn.org/sci-pubs/amnews/amn_02/edlt0408.htm#1
Once patient needs are met, they stop asking for suicide assistanceRegarding "Physician-assisted suicide: Death by the numbers" (Editorial, March 18): Your editorial was persuasive and resolute in its opposition to physician-assisted suicide. As the medical director of the largest hospice in the country, The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast, I often see the most formidable cases that end of life can bring. Some of these desperate patients, as expected, ask that I facilitate their premature death. However, I have found that once I address the suffering of these unfortunate folk in all dimensions -- physical, social, psychological and spiritual -- almost all of my patients change their mind and are glad that they didn't take that path. The problem as I see it is that many physicians are uncomfortable and unskilled when dealing with their patients in all the dimensions of suffering. And that is why I am so appreciative of the recent JAMA articles on end of life, which stressed better pain management and helping doctors to better address the psychological and spiritual sufferings of our patients at end of life. The AMA has taken the harder and more noble road. To approve physician-assisted suicide would be disastrous for our patients, our profession and our society. --James A. Avery, MD Largo, Fla. http://www.ama-assn.org/sci-pubs/amnews/amn_02/edlt0408.htm#1