Gun Violence & Healthcare
Hi, thank you for coming back for the latest edition of Beyond Primary Care’s blog- Gun Violence and Healthcare. In Beyond Primary Care blogs we highlight healthcare news, advice for medical conditions, and how membership for care works! Beyond Primary Care is an insurance free, membership based family medicine clinic. Beyond Primary Care is the highest rated Direct Primary Care clinic serving patients in Ann Arbor and throughout Washtenaw, Livingston, and Wayne counties giving families and employers peace of mind about healthcare costs by providing affordable and accessible primary care services.
The primary purpose of the blog is to introduce healthy lifestyle concepts and answer common questions we receive from patients that we believe are important. We want to start discussions that will help educate, benefit, and improve your well-being.
In this blog post, we want to deviate from our usual marketing-styled posts for a bit and have a honest, educational, and opinionated discussion involving the tragic events that occurred at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas on May 24th.
Gun Violence and Healthcare
At Beyond Primary Care we have made a business decision to stick to healthcare related topics for the vast majority of our educational outreach. Let’s be honest, politics and healthcare is not a topic that unites anyone. There are times though that talking from our heart as a business is more important. Such an instance occurred following the unjustified death of George Floyd and the resulting Black Lives Matters movement when we wrote about Racism in Healthcare.
Now with the daily gun violence affecting our nation - Michigan included- and the deaths of nearly 20 elementary children, we reflected on our business values. Our first business value at Beyond Primary Care is ‘community,’ and to ‘believe in the power of communities to make a bigger impact, having an interest in others, enlisting others in actions.’ To that end, we enlist ourselves and anyone else to get together and have a honest conversation for meaningful change to our nation’s gun violence problem.
Gun violence is a problem. Gun violence is a problem to us physicians and the community we care for. As physicians, I acknowledge we have rarely spoken out regarding gun violence. In 2020, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death among children and adolescents, defined as persons 1 to 19 years of age. This is unacceptable.
Being a physician sometimes means tolerating the poorer decisions our patients make. Smoking, medication misuse or diversion, and even not taking a life saving medications. Physicians often tolerate these choices not because it’s the right choice by the patient or ourselves being ‘uncaring,’ but truthfully -with a shoulder shrug- the poor choices typically only affect the individual making them.
Gun violence, however, affects us all. Gun violence is a public health crisis. Often forgotten is that 60.7% of the gun deaths in 2015 in the United States were suicides. The victims whose lives are tragically cut short. The families who suffer the trauma of a lost loved one. The community that collective grieves from the violence, afraid to think if it is them who are going to be next. The physicians who see and relive the last moments of the victims in the emergency room with brain matter oozing out the bullet holes of their skull.
Mental Health and Gun Violence
Following the shooting at Uvalde, the Governor Greg Abbott of Texas said “anyone who shoots someone has a mental health problem.” As physicians who diagnose and treat mental illness on a daily basis, this is absolutely not true. If someone shoots someone it may be the result of an argument, an accident, desperation, etc.. But what they all have in common is a gun.
We need to stop making accusations, calling people ill, and kidding ourselves that more money will be spent on mental health treatment.This is like saying drinking and driving is about alcoholism, and we should only discuss treatment for alcoholism and not discuss how to prevent drinking and driving.
Additionally, comments like what Gov. Abbott stated is incredibly stigmatizing to humans who do have mental health conditions. A myth about mental illness is that humans with a mental health condition are dangerous when in fact, statistics show that they are actually more likely to be the victims of violence than to be the aggressor.
The Point of This Post
Please do not interpret this post as a way to place blame or shame any group of individuals into defensive posture. The intention is to elevate the discussion surrounding the manner that gun violence is affecting, and will continue to affect ourselves, our families, and our communities. Next time we meet, let us speak freely about improvements to our laws and societal responsibilities.
Beyond Primary Care and its physicians are committed to doing our part by continuously pushing the status quo of healthcare to become more inclusive and factually informative of the issues affecting us all.
Thank you for reading
Dr. Jeff O’Boyle with Beyond Primary Care
