http://www.medpagetoday.com/Blogs/SlowMedicine/63529
Interesting article.
Interesting, but the political anti-gun bias shows through crystal clear. Here's where you start to see it:
Suicide is the leading cause of gun deaths, accounting for more than 20,000 deaths each year. While gun owners are no more likely than the general population to attempt suicide, they are much more likely to be successful. One analysis found that firearm-related suicide results in death 80% of the time compared to pill overdoses, which result in death only 2% of the time.
Despite this epidemic of suicides by firearm, a recent survey found that 4 in 10 physicians never asked their patients about guns in the home, perhaps in part because the issue has become something of a taboo to discuss in many settings.
The word "epidemic" is used again after this quoted section, at least once. Never mind that the "epidemic" is actually an epidemic of suicide
attempts, they choose to apply the term ONLY to those who actually succeed in killing themselves with guns. Yet, in epidemiology, a flu "epidemic" is not defined by how many people die of the flu, but by how many people catch it.
So if there's a suicide "epidemic," it's an epidemic of people attempting suicide by whatever means, and the discussion should be about how to prevent people from attempting suicide rather than blocking their access to one method so they'll look for other (possibly less efficacious) methods. Like my daughter, who has tried unsuccessfully to kill herself with pills enough times that she has done permanent damage to her liver and her kidneys. When the shrinks and medical doctors finally got their act together and limited her access to the pills, she tried to jump out the window of a tenth story apartment.
Yes, the article is interesting -- in showing how deeply the anti-gun bias has become ingrained in the medical profession overall.
As said above, if they want to address gun safety, or general home safety, or suicide, there are ways to do so without asking patients what they own.
I think I have commented before, although perhaps not on this forum, that doctors who have concerns about patients and gun safety have options. If a general practitioner thinks a patient has a dislocated elbow, he/she refers the patient to an orthopedist. If the doctor thinks a patient has cancer, he/she refers the patient to an oncologist. In other words, doctors routinely refer patients to people with specialized knowledge.
Who has specialized knowledge of firearms safety? NRA instructors. So why aren't doctors referring patients to the "specialists" with the professional expertise in firearms safety if they are concerned about firearms safety? Oh, right ... because the NRA is evil, that's why. So instead of referring to a qualified specialist, many doctors prefer to engage in what some of us consider to be a boundary violation.