Pass The Mic!

It’s wonderful that Americans are engaged in a sorely needed discussion about healthcare reform. Yet the voices of reputable professionals have been notably diminutive in this debate. The opinions of physicians, nurses, scientists, public health policy experts, etc., are infrequently solicited, perpetuating the ignorance of the masses to larger, potentially more deleterious issues.

For instance, reasonable individuals identify inefficiencies in our current healthcare system as problematic; still we fail to have proper discussions about the nature of those deficiencies and how to correct them. It’s painfully evident to me as a scientist that there is a glaring inefficiency in the government’s return-on-investment for the $30.5 billion it spends annually on biomedical research. Much of that research is conducted in academia on rare diseases for which there is no available treatment. Often, these are the same diseases for which pharmaceutical companies have little to no financial incentive to investigate. As academicians are seldom concerned with profit, much of the $30.5 billion ends up in publication oblivion. In other words, huge potential for therapeutic discovery is lost between the academic’s thirst for knowledge, and industry’s requisite for profit. This isn’t an unfamiliar phenomenon to biomedical scientists. In fact, we often mock the gap between academia and industry by describing the collaborative effort to communicate ideas between the two as “throwing it over the fence”. This problem is far from beyond repair. Easily, the government could offer enticements that would promote collaboration between academia and industry, thereby encouraging the translation of a larger chunk of that $30.5 billion into tangible therapeutics.

That’s plainly obvious to me, and I’m just a Ph.D. candidate. Imagine what a Nobel Prize winning biologist could add to this discussion.

I don’t hesitate to place blame on healthcare professionals for allowing their voices to be muted. Yet, I also recognize that we as a people effectively silence the commentaries of those which are most desperately needed. We are magnetized to sensationalism, rather than verity. Resultantly, “Joe The Plumber” becomes a household name, while in the midst of a storm of controversy around healthcare reform, few can identify the current Surgeon General.

If we want real solutions, we must engage those who have been most aptly trained to provide them. So the next time somebody wants to discuss Bill Maher and Sarah Palin’s position on some aspect of healthcare reform, you should ask them about Steve Galson and Regina Benjamin’s stance on the same issue...they’re the acting and prospective Surgeon General (I figured you might need to know who they are).

Often, those with the loudest voices are the least worth listening to.