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Against the Grain

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Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Wednesday, March 6, 2002

Many patients are startled to find their doctors asking them if they have any guns in the house. Because this is a matter related less to medicine and more to politics and household safety, many patients are simply refusing to answer. In some cases, they are telling their doctors to back off, according to letter writers responding to NewsMax.com's previous report on the issue.

Falling Membership

Compounding the irony is that this entire campaign is driven by an organization whose numbers are shrinking. AMA, once the respected voice of the mainstream of the medical profession, has become just another left-wing interest group. Declining membership does not prevent AMA from presuming to speak for all doctors or from aggressively weaving its leftist dogma into the doctor-patient relationship.

Dr. Lyle Thorstenson, an ophthalmologist from Nacogdoches, Texas, told Physician's Weekly that AMA gains 30,000 members a year and loses 33,000. At this rate, he says, it will be left with no members by 2023.

Further, recent trends have indicated that of those enrolled in AMA, only about 60 percent have been full members. The rest are mostly students and residents, says the weekly. Michael Perrone, an assistant to a member of the New Jersey Legislature, tells NewsMax.com that his own investigation revealed AMA's membership has nose-dived (in part because of scandals that have wracked the organization) from a huge majority of the nation's doctors in the 1960s to only about 30 percent today.

And even that low figure, he says, is inflated with "thousands of free memberships, including thousands of medical students."

A Good Way to Lose Business

What, then, would motivate an organization that has its hands full with internal problems to stick its nose into whether you opt to exercise your Second Amendment rights to own firearms and keep them in your home for your own protection? In some instances, doctors who have followed AMA's line have lost patients in the process.

A mother in Wright City, Mo., had to fill out a questionnaire issued by her child's pediatrician. One of the questions was whether the family owned guns and how many.

"What in the world does that have to do with the growth and development of my child?" asked an indignant Cheri Griggs, who told NewsMax she not only refused to answer, but also decided to locate a new doctor.

Del Lowe, a retired police officer from Livermore, Calif., says that while a physician was examining his daughter, the staff handed him a survey that included a question about his gun ownership. He later learned that one of the nurses had asked his young daughter the same question.

"I told her and both of my other girls and my wife that they just don't respond to any questions at all on that subject in the future. It's plainly none of their damn business," he told NewsMax.

Recording Your Personal Business

A medical transcriptionist who, for obvious reasons, prefers anonymity reports noticing in doctors' notes recently, for physical exams of children and adults, "some doctors are asking and recording if the patient has guns in [the] home."

The information is recorded? And how confidential is that, one wonders?

Last year, Dr. Miguel Faria, editor of Medical Sentinel, a publication of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), exposed gun control as not only being unlikely to reduce violence, but as actually having adverse safety and economic consequences.

Guns a Virus to Be Destroyed?

Recently, AMA joined a coalition known as Doctors Against Handgun Injury, which has compared guns to viruses that must be eradicated.

Dr. Richard Corlin, president of AMA, is billing himself as a scientist studying the "social consequences" of private firearms ownership.

Steven Milloy, author of the book "Junk Science Judo," notes that very little of the AMA's theory about gun ownership has been reported in the mainstream media, which are "already known for a strong anti-gun rights bias."

It's bad enough that your doctor may be trying to peddle that political correctness to adult patients who might have the maturity and judgment to understand when the doctor-patient relationship is crossing the line into left-wing politics. But as indicated above, many physicians are imposing these notions on children.

"This is exactly what happened to myself and my daughter when she saw her pediatrician," a patient tells NewsMax. "I told my daughter, who is 11, that this is a bunch of nonsense and that we are allowed to have guns in our home."

Despite its dwindling membership roster, AMA, according to Dr. Faria, "has ample finances to fund gun control efforts and other leftward-leaning projects."

Your Tax Dollars Used Against You

AAPS General Counsel Andrew Schafly says AMA's wealth is derived largely from its publication empire, which rests solidly on a heretofore-secret monopolistic agreement with the Health Care Financing Administration. The pact been in effect for nearly 20 years.

Author Milloy points out that "the ranks of firearms owners produce about 1,000 accidental deaths each year. That amounts to 0.0000167 accidental deaths per gun owner." Gun owners groups, he adds, "have zero to do with criminal misuse of firearms."

Doctors, on the other hand, "account for 120,000 accidental patient deaths per year," a figure that is often quoted in none other than the Journal of the American Medical Association.

What is the old saying? "Physician, heal thyself?"