These Doctors Admit They Don’t Want Patients With Disabilities
At last, a medical association has come out and said it. After years of not wanting to deal with those with any sort of disability, or in some cases even those with a severe one, the American Medical Association has finally come out and said it: “No one should be denied care because of a disability,” the group said in a statement last September.
The AMA has not released public statements since then, but for some this has been a long time coming. It has taken the group a year, but now an organization that once stood as a beacon of medical orthodoxy has finally said it. “People with disabilities need the same medical care,” said the AMA’s president, Dr. Frank J. Alt, in the statement. “What’s most important is that we provide excellent quality care to all so that no one is left in the lurch or without the right information.”
It’s no shock that the AMA would finally acknowledge the need to treat all people equally, but the statement isn’t without its critics, both on the left and the right. Many argue the AMA’s statement is a step in the wrong direction, that the group doesn’t want to treat people with disabilities, but it has also been attacked by those who say that having disabilities should be a personal choice and that the disability label is an insult to people with disabilities.
And many people on the left who were once sympathetic to the medical establishment are now critical of the statement, even though many of them have personally been treated by doctors for something they believe to be a disability.
Even many people who were sympathetic to the medical establishment are now critical of the statement. If, as the AMA says, no one should be denied care because of a disability, why would one doctor refuse to treat a child for a disability he believes in the name of the patient’s right to choose?
But the AMA statement is not yet a complete 180 from previous statements that the organization has made. In fact, the statements