Physicians for Social Responsibility
Quack quack! Take my gun control snake oil and Ban the Bomb miracle elixir! Quack quack!
Witch, I mean which, doctors think their expertise in medicine extends to social issues like gun control and national defense issues like national missile defense? It's the Physicians for Social (Ir)responsibility who, when it comes to these issues, are eminent proctologists; they have their heads so far up their own kazoos they don't need sigmoidoscopes. PSR's physician members may be fine doctors, but when it comes to prescribing remedies for social problems and national defense-- areas outside their profession: http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/quackpro.html "Daily practice can become humdrum. Pseudoscientific ideas can be exciting."

PSR's members have every right, under the First Amendment, to express any opinion they want-- even that the earth is flat. Their right to express it as medical advice, especially regarding gun control, may be another matter.

Warning to practicing physicians and nurses: PSR has posted "Counseling Patients on Gun Violence Prevention-- A Pocket Guide for Physicians and Nurses."

When the Romans destroyed Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War, they salted the fields so nothing would ever grow there again.

Letter to the Editor (298 words)

To the Editor;
 

Like PLO leaders who encourage teenagers to become "martyrs," the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) have published an unsigned  "Counseling Patients on Gun Violence Prevention: A Pocket Guide for Nurses and Physicians" on their Web site. It encourages physicians and nurses to commit what might be unprofessional conduct by serving patients gun control dogma and junk science under color of medical advice. A pro-Second Amendment physicians' group (it doesn't present its political views as medical advice) uses the term "boundary crossing."
I am not a lawyer and I cannot give anyone legal advice. It's easy, however, to envision a patient complaining to the state medical licensing board if a doctor asks the patient (or his her children) whether there are guns in the home, or says that a gun in the home is far more likely to kill someone you know than a violent intruder. The latter is true if you know people like drug dealers or rival gang members. Gun control groups want ordinary law-abiding people to think it applies to them.

Doctors and nurses, don't martyr your careers for PSR's ideology. If you do get in trouble and call them for help, I suspect that your calls will neither be answered nor returned. They'll hang you out to dry and leave you on your own.

Doctors Against Handgun Injury (DAHI— is anyone for handgun injury, except in self-defense against violent criminal aggressors?) has drawn several mainstream physician groups into its umbrella. This jeopardizes these groups' reputations and 501(c)(3) tax exemptions (if they get too heavily into politics). It could lead members into unprofessional conduct as described above. Medical practitioners can support gun control or the Second Amendment through groups like Handgun Control Incorporated or the NRA respectively while keeping political opinions out of the doctor's office.

PSR's new area of expertise: national missile defense (NMD)
Their online petition argues that NMD has failed 14 out of 18 tests during the past 17 years. So improve the technology; with that attitude, PSR's profession would still be using leeches and letting barbers practice surgery. PSR also argues that the U.S. faces no military threat that warrants NMD deployment-- but Bill Clinton's Mainland Chinese friends recently boasted that their missiles could hit our West coast. PSR complains that NMD has cost $120 billion and that the new system will cost another $60 billion. How much would a nuclear attack on even one U.S. city cost, in lives as well as money?
Freezing in the Dark with the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty
PSR has also discovered its expertise on this matter. Wow, what do they teach in medical schools nowadays?
Letter to PSR
Sent to: adixon "at" psr.org, psrnatl "at" psr.org, bmusil "at" psr.org ~4/15/01 (no response received as of 5/9/01)
Subject: Junk science versus constructive projects for PSR

The following remark refers to PSR's non-medical (political) activities, e.g. in gun control, missile defense, and the environment.
http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/quackpro.html "Daily practice can become humdrum. Pseudoscientific ideas can be
exciting."

However, I'd like to suggest a couple of very constructive projects in which PSR could actually use its medical knowledge to improve the human
condition.

PSR's members are probably fine doctors but, when it comes to missile defense, the environment, and gun control-- all areas outside the domain
of medicine-- they are indeed spouting pseudoscientific ideas and selling snake oil. Just as quack medicines can hurt patients, PSR's
pseudoscience and junk science can hurt the United States and even get people killed (if swallowed whole).

http://www.psr.org/enviro.htm on global warming... this is an area in which I, as an engineer and MBA, do know something. The Kyoto Global
Warming Treaty exempts developing nations. Its adoption by the United States, as PSR wants, would encourage businesses to relocate factories--
and all their carbon dioxide, and the jobs that go with them-- to developing nations, including our "friends" in Beijing.

Whatever you think of the pros and cons of firearms, http://www.psr.org/firstmonday/firstmonday.html statement that gun
violence kills 3500 children a year is junk science, junk research. I saw another PSR page that cites "10 children a day," a misleading and
deceptive figure taken straight from the disgraced (recently expelled from its San Francisco General Hospital office, and exposed last year
for promoting political candidates while claiming 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status) Million Mom March.

"10 children a day" requires the redefinition of young legal adults (18-19, an age group that includes many violent criminals) as children
to inflate the perceived problem. Although the only acceptable number is no children (or anyone else) killed by gun misuse, the issue here is
responsible research versus junk science. Is this the kind of data that a responsible medical researcher would submit to an epidemiological
journal? If not, should PSR be posting it on a Web site for public consumption?

Doctors for Integrity in Public Research has, in fact, condemned Handgun Control Inc. for citing fraudulent and misleading statistics. As a M.S.
statistician (yes, I'm that as well as an MBA) I know junk statistics and deceptive statistics when I see them. HCI makes common use of them.
PSR should really think twice before trusting this information source.

There is an analogy between guns and public health. Although gun misuse does cause deaths, firearm ownership prevents millions of violent crimes
every year. (More Handgun Control Inc. distortions and lies: they say a gun is 43 times more likely to "kill someone you know" than kill a
violent stranger. Problem #1: "someone you know" includes violent criminals who know each other, women who know violent ex-spouses, and so
on. Problem #2: for every violent criminal who is killed by gunfire, 3 are wounded and 96 others are driven off or captured without being shot
at all-- i.e. 100 violent crimes are prevented for every justifiable homicide.)  Great Britain is now reaping the rewards of gun abolition:
skyrocketing violent crime of all types, including gun crime (criminals don't obey gun laws).

http://www.psr.org/pocketgun2.pdf now crosses the line from political advocacy to patient counseling, which might be construed as the practice
of medicine. I am not a doctor and I cannot therefore render an expert opinion on this document's ethics, but the "facts" are misleading.
Again, the business about a gun in the home being more likely to "kill someone you know" is nonsense for people like us, since we (and most of
your patients) do not know rival gang members, drug pushers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and pimps. A gun-- probably owned illegally-- in
the home of a gang member or other criminal is very likely to kill someone he knows. Normal people don't shoot friends and relatives in
fits of rage. HCI simply mixes the two populations to get a sensationalistic and misleading junk statistic.

Suicide: this statistic also is probably misleading. True, a gun is a very effective way of checking out, but someone who wants to express a
"cry for help" will use a sublethal dose of poison or something else that is NOT effective. Japan outlaws gun ownership but its suicide rate
rivals or exceeds ours. The reason is that someone who really wants to die will do so. Suicide is more acceptable (and even honorable) in Japan
than it is here. Talk to some epidemiologists, look at ALL the root causes and independent variables.

Similarly, chlorinated drinking water causes some fatal stomach cancer cases, but I doubt we'd want cholera and typhoid in exchange for getting
rid of chlorinated water. Flu vaccine kills a few people due to Gullian-Barre syndrome, but I get a shot every year (especially since
flu-initiated pneumonia could have killed me 20-odd years ago). It is the same with firearms; if all firearms could be made to disappear by
magic, the result would NOT be a utopia.

http://www.psr.org/abolition_slideshow.htm "Ban the Bomb" snake oil. Nuclear weapons cannot be abolished-- any country with precision machine
tools (for shaping the conventional explosives that drive the plutonium segments together, and for shaping the segments themselves) and
electronics (for timing the charges) can build a nuclear weapon.

Warheads can be as small as suitcases, it's impossible to verify that a country has no nuclear weapons. I am not privy to classified information
but I am an engineer and I can understand the technology. PSR apparently cannot. PSR's opinion that we should trust our country's security to
"scraps of paper" (the German term for the treaty that assured Belgian neutrality in 1914) is snake oil and it could get a lot (millions) of
people killed if our government actually followed this advice. Scraps of paper will not prevent Chinese missiles from incinerating our West Coast
(as the Chinese threatened a couple of years ago), national missile defense plus deterrence will.

The problem is the "halo effect" that surrounds doctors. The general public assumes that, because someone is a doctor, they're right about
everything. The general public is likely to swallow PSR's miracle elixirs whole, and that would be very bad medicine.

Now on to a constructive idea. Doctors CAN talk about abolishing cancer, AIDS, and even old age. Doctors have already abolished polio and
smallpox. Here is where PSR can make a constructive difference and in fact use its members' medical expertise:

(1) How can we protect the United States from biological attack or biological terrorism? (e.g. the airborne Ebola in Tom Clancy's
"Executive Orders," anthrax, or smallpox-- the latter possibly crossbred with some other awful disease.) Public health and medical solutions
please, not "pieces of paper" that outlaw this form of warfare.

(2) How can we eliminate medical mistakes that cost 90,000 or so lives a year? (That's more than guns and car accidents combined, by the way.) As
an industrial quality professional, I can tell you that individual doctors are rarely at fault here. The system in which they work is more
likely to be the problem. There are plenty of techniques available to prevent, for example, drug overdoses, drug interactions, and wrong
prescriptions. This is something with which I could help. Many industrial quality techniques can be easily adapted to hospitals.

PSR, instead of fighting me (and lots of people like me) on issues in which you really have no expertise-- and therefore a fight you cannot
win-- why not work together to create something constructive that we can all be proud of? You cannot ban the Bomb or make violent crime go away.
We CAN fix the public health care system so "spiraling health care costs" will no longer be an issue in this country.

Regards,

Letter to Washington DC Department of Health
(Sent 4/29/01, medicine "at" dchealth.com, no reply received as of 5/9/01, re-sent 5/9/01)
To: Washington DC Department of Health

A DC-based organization that includes physicians, but whose executive director is not a physician, has posted on the Internet a guide for
"counseling patients on gun violence prevention," and it is "A Pocket Guide for Nurses and Phsyicians." My question is, does publication of a
"Pocket Guide for Nurses and Physicians" on the Web site of an organization whose title includes "Physicians" constitute the practice
of medicine (provision of medical advice) in the District of Columbia?

As I perceive this publication, it enourages medical practitioners to step outside the boundaries of medicine and preach, in the context of
the doctor-patient relationship, a particular political position (gun control). I also believe that this "Pocket Guide for Nurses and
Physicians" includes junk science and pseudoscience in the form of misleading and deceptive statistical statements (the kind that I doubt
would be accepted by any reputable epidemiological journal). I am not a physician but I am, among other things, an applied statistician with
numerous publications and professional certifications, and I am well qualified to assess Mark Twain's observation,  "There are three kinds of
lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

As one example, the publication says that a gun kept in the home is "11 times more likely to be used to commit or attempt suicide than to be
used in self-defense." I've seen reasoning like this-- fraudulent, misleading, and deceptive reasoning-- from Handgun Control Inc. that
confuses cause and effect. A gun will obviously be present in the home of anyone who chooses this as a sure and effective means of suicide, and
it may in fact be purchased for that explicit purpose. (Just as sleeping pills will be found in the home of a suicide who uses that method even
if he/she never used sleeping pills before.) In other words, the desire to commit suicide causes the gun to be present in the home, the gun's
presence does not encourage the person to commit suicide as HCI and this "Physicians" group would have one believe.

There are also different ways to interpret "used in self-defense": of every 100 incidents in which a firearm saves its owner from a violent
crime, the criminal is shot and killed in only one. (Per police firearm instructor Masaad Ayoob.) Three are wounded and 96 are held for police
or driven off without being shot at all. If this group says a gun is 11 times more likely to be found in the home of someone who has used it for
suicide than someone who has actually shot a violent invader, it is probably right. It is also deceiving its readers because there are about
25 self-defense events per actual shooting and because of confusion of cause and effect regarding the gun's presence.

Questions:

(1) Does pushing a political stand (gun control) in the doctor's office constitute the unprofessional or unethical practice of medicine? If so,
I may file a complaint (naming the organization) on that basis alone.

(2) Does provision of junk science as medical advice to medical practitioners constitute the unprofessional or unethical conduct of
medicine? If so, I may perform a formal analysis of their statistics to demonstrate that it is indeed junk science.

(3) The publication is not signed by any MD or RN. Should it be touted as a  "Pocket Guide for Nurses and Physicians?"

William A. Levinson
 

Definitions of Professional Misconduct
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