Thursday, January 6, 2011

A Story Worth Noting; A Man Worth Celebrating!

Should Physicians be Activists?


By jay keter

Created Dec 23, 2010 - 11:10am


Dr. Roland Wong is under threat of losing his license to practice medicine. He didn’t harm anyone. He helped people on social assistance get extra money for food.

The average Ontario welfare recipient gets $500 per month. The special dietary allowance program provided extra benefits of up to $250 per month to enable those with medical conditions to purchase more healthful food. An estimated 20 percent of people on social assistance rely on these extra benefits.

Wong, who specializes in occupation and community medicine, admits to completing about 15,000 special dietary allowance forms in one year. He not only signed forms for his own patients, he also signed them for people attending mass clinics arranged by anti-poverty activists.

Between 2001/02 and 2009/10, the cost of funding the special dietary allowance program rose from $6 million to $220 million. Claiming that the program was being “abused” the province scrapped it and directed the police to investigate 2,300 recipients of this benefit. Conservative city councilor Robert Ford, was running for mayor of Toronto in October, filed a complaint against Wong with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. The College must now investigate whether Wong engaged in conduct that “would reasonably be regarded by members as disgraceful, dishonorable or unprofessional”.

Ford insists, “A doctor is there to be a doctor, not to advocate for the poor...You can’t have people in the medical field doing that”.

Wong views the complaint against him as politically-motivated harassment and refuses to be intimidated. At an April 6, 2010 public meeting, he protested government policies that promote homelessness, starvation, sickness and premature death in the richest province in Canada. “Income level is the best predictor of health”, he said. “We have to invest in human resources - they are not to be wasted”. Wong points out that cuts to social assistance in the mid-1990s saved the province $2 billion dollars, while the special dietary allowance restores only 10 percent of what was lost. With regard to the charges against him, he stated, “I don’t know what will happen. But whatever happens to me, I will be happy because I’ve done something useful”. Roland Wong embodies the spirit in which all physicians should practice medicine.

Watch the 15 minute video of Wong’s April 6 presentation: http://vimeo.com/10830778

The Ontario 2010 budget, released on March 25th, confirms that the McGuinty government's "poverty reduction" efforts are all pretense. Specifically, the government eliminated the Special Diet, a vital benefit that 20% of Social Assistance recipients in Ontario had been relying on to buy food and pay the rent. This is the most devastating social cutback since Mike Harris slashed welfare rates in 1995.

People on OW and ODSP live on rates that are shamefully inadequate. Since the 1995 cuts, these rates have been reduced in real terms by at least 40%. For 15 long years, people have been forced further and further into poverty. Dr. Roland Wong talks about the relationship between poverty and health and the McGuinty government's attacks on poor people.

For more information about the Special Diet: socialistproject.ca/​bullet/​329.php

Send messages of support to Dr. Roland Wong: specialdiet@yahoo.com

Source: IHWPOP

Author: Susan Rosenthal



Susan Rosenthal is the editor of PEOPLE FIRST!