On the other hand...

[fpb]

From today's Yahoo News:

One-limbed med student to graduate UCLA Sun May 27, 6:49 PM ET



LOS ANGELES - A woman who lost both legs and an arm as a child is poised to become a doctor for children.

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Kellie Lim, who became a triple amputee at age 8 because of bacterial meningitis, is to graduate from UCLA's medical school on Friday, and she plans to focus on childhood allergies and infectious disease.

The Michigan native, 26, does not use a prosthetic arm and manages to perform most medical procedures — including giving injections and taking blood — with one arm. She walks on a pair of prosthetic legs.

"Just having that experience of being someone so sick and how devastating that can be — not just for me but for my family too — gives me a perspective that other people don't necessarily have," Lim said.

Raised by a blind mother in suburban Detroit, Lim went through years of wheelchairs and painful therapy after toxic shock from the meningitis claimed her limbs and three fingertips on her remaining hand.

Lim recently saw her childhood medical file, and learned that doctors had given her an 85 percent chance of dying of the meningitis. Just five months after the amputations, Lim returned to a normal school. Born right-handed, she learned to write and work with her left.

"I hate failing," she said. "It's one of those things that's so ingrained in me."

Lim's teachers and fellow students said she exudes a calm that makes them and her patients forget her physical circumstances.

"She has an aura of competence about her that you don't worry," said Dr. Elijah Wasson, one of Lim's supervisors. "At first you notice her hand is not there. But after about five minutes, she is so comfortable and so competent that you take her at face value."

Lim will begin a residency program at the UCLA Medical Center.

Comments

[dirigibletrance.livejournal.com]

Ok... and? This is a qualitatively different kind of situation here. He could still *see* the notes written, and remember/imagine what they would sound like, even though he couldn't hear.

But if you've only got one hand (with only two working fingers) then you've only got one hand.

However, Rfachir's reply was a bit more helpful. And I'd forgotten that Pediatricians are basically just general practitioners, but for kids, so like said mostly what they do is diagnose and prescribe medication. Nurses and Physician Assistants could do all the physical work.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

If you can imagine a worse disability for a maker of music (and Beethoven as a young man made his living as a performer, not as a composer) and one likelier to put him off his work, I cannot. And Beethoven did not just ignore his disability: he overcame it in the most astonishing fashion. In the last years of his life, the quarter that was performing one of his late quartets felt that a particular passage was hurt by a ritardando (slow down) instruction. They were supposed to play it in the presence of Beethoven himself, and it was a huge work, more than forty minutes long. The quartet leader said "let's just play it without the rallentando and see what he says". Beethoven sat in a corner, his eyes fixed on the hands and bows of the four players. He did not say a word. When the rehearsal was over, he got up, said simply: "Let it remain so", walked over, and crossed out the rallentando instruction in all the four parts. I tell you that not many musicians with both ears working could have done something like that without a score.

What really annoyed me is that you suggested that this girl was given extra breaks out of Political Correctness. PC may perhaps promote people above their abilities in hard-to-test and easily bluffed subjects such as most of the humanities, but medicine is another matter. It is a demanding, difficult and frighteningly expensive and time-consuming discipline to study, and nobody gets to the end of the course unless they mean it. No amount of extra points for PCness could get her through the years of training. Besides, you imagine that disabled people are given advantages. I do not know what it is like in the United States, but let me tell you, sir, over here that is certainly not the case. The unemployment rate among disabled people who are able and willing to work is several times the national average, and, as a rule, a disabled person who really wants to get ahead had to either set up on their own or work ten times as hard as the next guy for less pay. I have disabled relatives and friends and believe me, I know something about it.

[dirigibletrance.livejournal.com]

"I do not know what it is like in the United States,"

There you go. You should have stopped right there. Since I *do* know what it is like in the United States, and since the girl graduated from medical school in the *United States*. Not in Italy.

If that really annoys you, too bad. It's only the truth. Modern US culture is rotting from the disease of political correctness. I have seen it first hand, not from across the Atlantic.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

DO YOU HAVE ANY REASON WHATSOEVER, APART FROM YOUR OWN PARANOIA, TO BELIEVE THAT THIS IS THE CASE WHERE SHE IS CONCERNED? AND DO YOU HAVE ANY REASON TO BELIEVE THAT SOMEONE CAN JUST GET CARRIED OVER SIX YEARS OF THE TOUGHEST OF ALL ACADEMIC COURSES? IF NOT, KINDLY PIPE DOWN. I FIND YOUR TONE ARROGANT AND YOUR ASSUMPTIONS UNWARRANTED. YOU ARE JUST SAYING: "THAT'S THE WAY IT IS AND THAT IS ALL THERE IS TO IT." THAT PROVES PRECISELY NOTHING EXCEPT THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO MAKE YOUR POINTS.

I now declare this thread closed. I do not intend to waste any further anger on it.