Evil Still Lurks In Our Hallowed Halls & Ivory Towers

More Doctors Turning to the Business of Beauty

Given the cost of obtaining a medical degree, opening a practice, and maintaining malpractice insurance, it seems that more doctors are seeking the easy road to wealth rather than live up to a notion that medicine is a profession and vocation (ministry). We have arrived at a point where the most educated in our society are free to abandon their obligations to the society as a whole in order to fulfill self interests and personal greed.

On top of the notion that greed is taking over our professions--medicine and law in particular--we now have more foreign-born (and remain foreign citizens) practicing medicine than we have American citizens graduating from our medical schools. While I have nothing against foreign-born phsyicians (except those that cannot speak to me because they haven't bothered to learn manners or English), I do have a problem with our colleges and universities (and our government) providing the best medical training in the world via subsidized programs provided by their home nation while we ignore "tons" of medical school candidates that want to become physicians and surgeons for altruistic reasons.

I also have a problem with the idea that so many doctors are turning their attention to providing services that accentuate our penile erections, our mammary glands, our waist lines and our noses over making sure we are healthy, less disabled and treated with a modicum of decency by those working in medicine.

In her three years as an obstetrician and gynecologist in Brooklyn, Dr. Ngozi Nwankpa-Keshinro delivered several hundred babies, conducted several thousand pelvic exams and diagnosed everything from infections to infertility. But this year, with a little additional training, she has entered a new field: cosmetic medicine.

Dr. Ngozi Nwankpa-Keshinro turned to cosmetic medicine after three years in obstetrics and gynecology. “When you clear up someone’s acne or facial hair, they are as grateful as if you delivered their baby,” she said.

As one of the owners of a medical spa in Brooklyn that opened in January, she has given dozens of clients Botox injections to relax their wrinkles and Restylane injections to fill out their smile lines and plump their lips.

“The two fields are as alike as an apple and an orange,” Dr. Nwankpa-Keshinro said. “One can be lifesaving, while the other is not. But when you clear up someone’s acne or facial hair, they are as grateful as if you delivered their baby.”

Cosmetic medicine also provides a more relaxing lifestyle, she said. “And it’s very satisfying.”

Meanwhile, our institutions of higher learning are so busy feathering their nests as not-for-profit educational corproations by not only raising funds for endowments and special programs, but by denying their least paid/most needed employees with less than a living wage, decent working conditions and the decency that any hard working person deserves. In the article below it is Vanderbilt that is not paying its basic service workers a decent wage. Not too long ago it was Harvard that was in the news for failure to pay a living wage. Brown, Yale and several others have had their day in the news for similar problems.

I thought that a not-for-profit was supposed to act for the benefit of the whole of society in order to keep its tax exempt status? We really need to take a look at the Social Responsibility Amendment being proposed by the Network of Spiritual Progressives, especially for those entities that are already receiving a lot of public support via donations, grants, financial aid for students, tax exemption and participation in state and federal research programs.

When Mary Hampton landed a housekeeping job at Vanderbilt University in 2004, she looked forward to the boost that the steady, full-time work and benefits would give her and her two young daughters.

Instead, she says she now makes $7.92 an hour and brings home less than she did in factory and warehouse jobs. She moved to a shelter for the homeless about seven months ago when her daughters’ father stopped paying child support.

The fragile economic state of some of Vanderbilt’s union employees like Ms. Hampton and the contrast with university spending elsewhere, like the $6 million renovation of the chancellor’s 20,000-square-foot house, has become a point of contention between the administration and a loose coalition of labor, students and community members.

A “living wage” campaign, which is picking up steam alongside contract negotiations between Ms. Hampton’s union and the university, is hardly unusual. There are more than 35 campus-based living-wage campaigns in progress nationwide, according to the Living Wage Action Coalition in Washington.

What makes Vanderbilt’s situation unusual is that Vanderbilt’s chancellor, E. Gordon Gee, is one of the highest-paid university executives in the nation, giving the union and its supporters added leverage in their bid for higher pay, said Paul F. Clark, a professor of labor studies and employment relations at Penn State.