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Andrew M. Ball, MS, PT -> Re: Teacher parallels? (August 12, 2001 7:03:00 PM)
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Mcap,
Your point is a good one, but requires a response that may give some people the impression that I'm equating human worth with financial worth, or that I'm somehow biased against either African-Americans or Organized Labor. I am neither. I am a member or a minority group myself, and deplore bigotry in all forms.
I ask anyone who's offended by this post to read it several times before responding to it. Odds are, that if you're offended, you've taken a line or two out of context. The point here is that human worth, financial worth, and political worth are NOT the same thing. I don't think that anyone would argue that at times througout history, many minority groups have had human worth, but nothing else. I am IN NO WAY implying that ANY minoity group was void of HUMAN WORTH at any point in their history.
I'm not exactly saying that PT's are worth what the market will bear. I am saying that people are FINANCIALLY worth what the market will bear AT THAT TIME. But I'm also saying that this worth is a dynamic process that is in the complete control of the individual, and whining to the enviroment in lieu of organization and action, accomplishes little. Organized action is required to change one's enviroment, and by extension, POLITICAL OR FINANCIAL worth. The significant strides in civil rights, women's rights, and gay's rights stand in memorial to that fact. People changed the envirnoment that dictated their POLICIAL worth . . . not the other way around. No one gave women the right to vote . . . though they had HUMAN worth, they had no POLITICAL worth until pioneers like Susan B. Anthony transformed human worth into political worth first. Just because they believed that they had inheret political worth did not make it so.
I like your analogy though. There is not a direct correlation obviously because slave-owners did in fact buy, sell, and trade slaves. Furthermore, as I understand American history, the cost of owning a slave was (thankfully) prohibitive for all but the affluent few. The point is, that slave owners did in fact see a value in slave ownership, and paid handsomely for it . . . the slave however, was not paid for his or her services until the Civil War (and slave revolts before it) began to demand otherwise.
This is by no means to say that anyone, anywhere, ever deserved to be enslaved and exploited. Your analogy fits so well with my original point, and not because I'm arguing that slaves didn't have HUMAN WORTH but because they DID. At the time, that's ALL they had. They had little FINANCIAL and little POLITICAL worth . . . that is why they were unexcusably explotied.
Most slaves and exploited workers (like PT's) had an internal (and accurate) sense of HUMAN worth that surpassed the environment that they lived. This was clearly justified, but by no means translated into FINANICAL or POLITICAL worth, of which they were in general robbed of. At the time however, not slaves nor workers were motivated in an organized fashion to change their situation. It was not until the PERCEIVED FINANICAL AND POLITICAL worth of any of these groups began to change that organization and envionmental change began to take place. Only then did their ACTUAL FINANCIAL AND POLITICAL worth improve.
My point is that PT's tend to want to skip that step of effecting environmental change and simply demand respect without first changing the enviroment around them. History teaches us that life just doesn't work that way. Never has a minority group been freely given increased rights without first asking for them, and subsequently working to make that happen.
Physical therapy is no different. We must stop wasting time trying to effect FINANCIAL AND POLITICAL change in ways that neither the public nor other healthcare professionals understand nor appreciate. In my opinion, history teaches us that this approach is futile and isn't going to work. Outcomes research is nice, and we need it, but it doesn't replace an all-out marketing campaign to change the enviroment.
My point is actually exactly the one that you made:
A person's professional situation is what he or she makes it. FINANCIAL worth is not determined by external factors, it is determined by the individual . . . so if you don't like the enviroment that you're in, change it.
Drew
[This message has been edited by Andrew M. Ball, MS, PT (edited August 13, 2001).]
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