Why does the medical establishment look down on public health professionals?
There was a long-standing fight between organized medicine and public health. The American Medical Association and organized medicine have systematically gone to war against public health regulation. The position of the AMA was always — and they’re finally coming around about a 100 years later — that organized public health was a threat to their dollars. They saw public health authorities as meddling with their profits and in their individual rights to relate one-on-one with their patients. In the early days, physicians were reluctant, for example, to turn over the names of their tuberculosis carriers because they didn’t want rival physicians to know who their patients were. Even now, as we talk about ciprofloxacin and fears of overuse, the truth is that all over New York City there are doctors writing out prescriptions for their patients, saying “Sure, go right ahead. Here’s a stockpile of cipro, you can have it in your home.” That’s deliberately making a choice to give a prescripti
