thebibliosphere:

autisticadvocacy:

“The medical establishment in particular has been slow to comply with the ADA.“

“The medical establishment in particular has been slow to comply with
the ADA. Dr. Lisa Iezzoni knows why. Not only has she researched the
topic, she has lived it. At the end of her first semester in medical
school in 1980, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which
complicated her future — but not nearly as much as the prejudicial
attitudes that had already shaped the profession she hoped to enter. In
short, she successfully completed her studies and graduated from Harvard
Medical School but was prevented from applying for an internship or
residency by HMS higher-ups, whose biased, uninformed views on her
disability led them to withhold support for credentialing.

Since then, Iezzoni, now a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical
School, has distinguished herself as an expert in healthcare inequities,
especially for the disabled community. In a 2016 American Medical Association Journal of Ethics
article, she writes that physicians “have little understanding about
living with disability or the consequences for daily life or
health-related behaviors.”

She cites a seminal study of the attitudes of
233 doctors, nurses and emergency medical technicians toward treating
persons with spinal cord injury. She then compares their responses to
people who actually live with SCI. One statistic stands out starkly:
Only 18 percent of the medical personnel said they could imagine being
glad to be alive following SCI, compared to 92 percent of those living
with SCI.”

Holy shit.