President Obama has nominated Dr. Regina Benjamin, a family physician from Bayou La Batre, Alabama, a rural community, to be the next Surgeon General.
The surgeon general is the people's health advocate, a bully pulpit position that can be tremendously effective with a forceful personality.
Benjamin has that reputation.
A decade ago, the New York Times called her ''angel in a white coat,'' a country doctor who made house calls along the impoverished Gulf Coast, paid whatever her patients could scrounge.
From those early days she has emerged as a national leader in the call to improve health disparities, pushed by the need in her own fishing community of Bayou La Batre, Ala., and its diverse patient mix -- where immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos make up a growing part of the population.
This is a post that requires Senate confirmation, so expect the religious right to scrutinize Dr. Benjamin's record on sex-ed advocacy and position on reproductive freedom. Here's a snippet of her NIH bio:
Regina Benjamin practices as a country doctor in rural Alabama. As founder and CEO of the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic, Dr. Regina Benjamin is making a difference to the underserved poor in a small fishing village on the Gulf Coast of Alabama. It is a town of about 2500 people, about 80 percent of her patients live below the poverty level, and Dr. Benjamin is their only physician.
...Dr. Benjamin earned an M.B.A. degree in 1991. The same year she was selected for the American Medical Association's "Unsung Hero Campaign". In 1995 she was named a "Person of the Week" on ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, and in 1997 she received the Kaiser Family Foundation's Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights. She was interviewed by People magazine in the article "Always On Call," in May, 2002 and was the subject of an "Everyday Heroes" feature in the January 2003 issue of Reader's Digest.
When her clinic was reduced to rubble by Hurricane Georges in 1998, Dr. Benjamin rolled up her sleeves and helped rebuild it, and continued to serve her patients by making house calls in her 1988 Ford pickup. As she explains her motivation, "I hope I make a difference one person at a time. By making a patient feel better, by being able to tell a mother that her baby is going to be okay. Whether her baby is four or forty-four the look on the mother's face is the same. I also hope that I am making a difference in my community by providing a clinic where patients can come and receive health care with dignity."
http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/12008/president-picks-first-black-woman-president-of-alabamas-state-medical-society-as-surgeon-general
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
