Your Doctors Need Your Help
By: William B. Rogers, MD
WRogers@KeepAndBearArms.com
So many medical personnel and laypeople alike have felt unable to turn back the tide of politically correct bad advice coming from their doctors - individually and collectively as large organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Association of Pediatricians.
A lady wrote to us at Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws
(http://www.KeepAndBearArms.com/DSGL) and reported that she had encountered a questionnaire at her doctor's office that asked if she or her family had guns in their home. She concluded that she should just ignore the question and leave it blank.
Here is my advice to her and to anyone that runs across a similar situation:
Challenging the Doctors
At some point we must come out of the closets and start challenging the doctors.
If it is a doctor you know well, and who has worked with you or your family for years, then it would be proper to ask for a conference, gently challenge the information he or she is getting through medical literature, and invite her to take a hard look at the "science" in that literature. If he does, he will find out that it is "junk science" and far below the standards which she was taught to demand from literature in making medical decisions. He would NEVER prescribe a medicine for his patients based on such sloppy data-gathering and conclusion-forming as we find in the anti-gun literature.
If the doctor says he/she has read the literature (Believe me: he hasn't; hardly any doctor has time to read anything but the abstracts on the papers and then usually just the hypothesis and conclusion --they depend on the reputation of the journal that published the paper to insure it is good science, and they're being let down.), then challenge her belief that "guns are bad" with some humorous comment like: "Would you allow me to try to try to change your mind with some valid science?" If he says "yes," then use what you find on the DSGL site
(http://www.KeepAndBearArms.com/DSGL/links.asp) to print him some scientific papers and download the PowerPoint presentations, etc. If the doctor gets excited and wants to review the material, put him in touch with me at
WRogers@KeepAndBearArms.com or by phone at (603) 909-0557. I would be willing to fly out and give her and her interested colleagues a brief literature review over dinner.
Spreading the Word
We have GOT to start spreading the word. Dr. Tim Wheeler of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (http://www.claremont.org/1_drgo.cfm) has worked for years to make a dent in organized medicine from the "top down." High level conferences were useless against the political agendas of those in the power seats of medicine --and that, my friends, is quite alarming! My method will be to work with the troops -- one small group at a time until we have them talking to their colleagues, their colleagues talking at hospital medical staff meetings, the staffs talking at county medical society meetings, and then on up to the State level.
The biggest problem I'm encountering so far is a fundamental lack of communications. Doctors are not used to listening to their patients and patients are not used to critically (if tactfully and kindly) questioning their doctors.
I'm doing this as sort of a "pilot project." If it is workable, then I want to train the other doctors in KABA and DSGL to make similar presentations. If something clicks in your community and you see an opportunity for me to try my program, please, please, please let me know.
William B. Rogers, MD
Tyler, TX
WRogers@KeepAndBearArms.com
