Social responsibility

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I need to study for a Cell Biology exam tomorrow. I sit at my computer (missing biochemistry so that I can study, no less) writing this not so much because of procrastination, but because other things are on my mind that need to get out. I’ve talked about feeling helpless before, and if I were still working at UH, I’d have taken vacation days to help out at the hospitals, the ‘dome or at other relief organizations there, like the Star of Hope Shelter. I really don’t want to blog about Katrina or the devastation I see on TV, the ineptitude of our federal response or any polarizing, political diatribes. I want to write about my med school experiences, my life here, and the things that make me, well, me.

But one of the things that makes who I am, one of the reasons I chose medicine is because I do feel a sense of social responsibility. Helping others in and of itself is not a life calling for me, but without it, one can’t really be a decent physician by any standard. So to my classmates, friends, family, and anonymous people that read this and wonder if this site is going to turn into a political blog, I assure you it’s not. I DO want to get back to all the things that go on here, for better for worse, but they just so pale in comparison to other things. Please bear with me, but this is, after all, who I am.

Lastly, it is precisely stories like this that infuriate me the most. I can see myself as one of these doctors 5-6+ years from now, getting permission to leave one’s residency/job to help out temporarily in a national crisis. These doctors are in Mississippi, just 100 miles away in a state-of-the-art government facility, but are just standing there, waiting for someone from the government to actually deploy them. The reports from these physicians paint a completely different picture than what Homeland Security/FEMA would have you believe, that “it takes time to mobilize assets when dealing with a crisis of this magnitude:”

Dr. Jeffrey Guy, a trauma surgeon at Vanderbilt University who has been in contact with the mobile hospital doctors, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview, “There are entire hospitals that are contacting me, saying, ‘We need to take on patients,” ‘ but they can’t get through the bureaucracy. The crime of this story is, you’ve got millions of dollars in assets and it’s not deployed,” he said. “We mount a better response in a Third World country.”

How much more evidence is needed to show that Homeland Security is and has always been a mistake? This is the first test of Homeland Security in a major situation, and it has failed so miserably that no band-aids, no firing this person or that person will fix it. Unfortunately, it won’t happen in this administration.