Medicine: Cease & Desist

Organized medicine snorted "politics" when Harry Truman set up his Commission on the Health Needs of the Nation last winter, and it looked askance at Wisconsin's Surgeon Paul B. Magnuson, member in good standing of the American Medical Association, for agreeing to serve as the commission's chairman. Last week Dr. Magnuson offered his critics some advice. When he took the job, said Magnuson, he was "unalterably opposed to compulsory national health insurance"; after taking 8,000 pages of evidence, he was of the same opinion still. But, he told the District of Columbia Medical Society:

"It is our plain and simple duty as doctors to furnish leadership in every national, state and community effort to look into ways of improving health conditions in America. If we abdicate this responsibility . . . then other elements in our society will take over and we will find ourselves under a distasteful system of medical care. If organized medicine is to retain its rightful place of esteem in our society, it had better cease and desist at once from its current policy of proclaiming that it alone can decide whether there are any health problems in this country, and that it alone can decide what the average doctor should think about the pressing problems of the day."

Added Dr. Magnuson: he hopes to see his views printed soon in the A.M.A. Journal, where they will reach some of the hard cases he is talking to.