Medical Self-Care: Your School Bag

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Issue # 58 - July/August 1979

"What people get trained to do in medical school-and dental school, and other institutions of medical education-is diagnose and treat disease, and a lot of times we tend to call this `health care'. In fact, it's illness care. And I think that one reason self-care is getting to be so popular now-and my magazine (Medical Self-Care) is by no means the equivalent of the self-care movement . . . it's just a small part of it-is that consumers are starting to see professionally delivered illness care for what it is. And one thing it's not is 'health care'.

"People are beginning to realize this now and they're looking for alternatives. Doctors and consumers alike are beginning to look, for instance, at illness care delivered by lay people, and wellness care delivered by professionals. All of these new ways of looking at what we've been lumping together and calling `health care' are addressed in some way by the idea of self-care . . . which is simply the notion that the primary health resource in our society is not the physician, but the lay person himself or herself."

Do the above words sound familiar? They certainly should to regular readers of MOTHER . . . because such folk have heard 'elm before, back in Issue No. 51 when we first interviewed Tom Ferguson. And those of you fortunate enough to have had that exposure to Tom and his ideas on self-administered, group-supported medical care may remember that-at the time of his Plowboy Interview-the young man from California was completing his formal medical education at Yale . . . and, not so coincidentally, editing an outstanding fledgling publication titled Medical Self-Care: Access to Medical Tools.

Well, Tom Ferguson is now Doctor Tom Ferguson and (wouldn't you know it) the concept of medical self-care itself has become contagious. It, seems that more and more people are aware of the ideas pioneered by individuals such as Dr. Keith Sehnert his book How to Be Your Own Doctor (Sometimes), $4.95 from Grossest & Dunlap, 51 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10010-and furthered by the likes of Tom Ferguson.

The word is getting out that the lay person can-in fact, must-learn more about those subjects (like nutrition, body awareness, self-examination, and so forth) heretofore held to be comprehensible only to "the doctor".

Such an education is just plain healthful. MOTHER thought so back in Number 51 when we introduced our readers to Tom Ferguson. Then, to carry on the "story", we took you all the way to Russia in "A Firsthand Look at Health and Nutrition in the Soviet Union" in Issue No. 53 . . . talked to Dr. Harold Manner in No. 54 . . . even showed you how to-in certain cases be your own veterinarian (in Issue No's. 52-57) . . . had Dr. Robert Nara give his views on preventive dentistry as the subject of the Plowboy Interview in No. 56 . . . and the list goes on and on.