There’s a cute little website out there called Dr. Oz – The Good Life, which purports to be one of those ‘wellness’ websites that gives you information on diet, exercise, skin care, you know what I mean.  Dr. Oz is actually a television personality named Dr. Mehmet Oz whose medical advice over the years has been attacked by other physicians as ‘pseudoscience’ and ‘quackery,’ even though he still retains his position as Director of Integrative Medicine at Columbia University. His online CV he lists his highest honor as his Emmy Award for Best Daytime Television Host, which is what ‘integrative medicine’ is really all about.

              The website is really a vehicle for health and wellness advertising, the products you can purchase to help you lose weight, gain control over your thinning hairline, etc., etc., etc., just abound. But the website also contains an occasional article of some medical value, with a current article entitled, “When Bullets Meet Bodies: What Doctors Think About Gun Violence” written by a faculty member from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The article is a series of interviews with professionals who have treated gunshot victims, including a several surgeons, an occupational therapist, a pediatrician and an EMT chief.

As you can imagine, these interviews reflect the reality of gun violence at the level at which it really occurs, namely, in the medical facilities that have to deal with the people who get shot and whose lives often hang in the balance based on whether the attending medical staff gets it done timely and gets it done right. Gunshot wounds are probably the worst kind of injury because a bullet can and will travel through the human body damaging multiple organs at the same time. So a bullet that enters someone’s torso might go through a lung, sever an artery, smash a rib or two – what do you work on first? Most of the stories collected by the writer, Jennifer Wolff, are first-hand accounts of the difficulties and dangers involved in patching someone up.

Every physician interviewed for this story advocated stricter controls over firearms and clinical interventions by physicians to reduce gun violence before it occurs except one. And the one doctor who felt that his colleagues should basically stay outside of the gun debate is a psychiatrist named Robert Young, who happens to be affiliated with something called Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, which claims a national membership of physicians except they have never given out an actual number of the size of their organization, even though they have managed over the past twenty-five years to inject their stupid views into all kinds of public discussions about doctors and guns.

I say ‘stupid’ because not only do their uninformed, pro-gun views clash directly with the stated positions on gun violence published by every, professional medical society in the land, but when they get up and say something in public they just as often get it wrong. In the OZ interview, Young states that the Florida gag law which criminalizes doctors who talk to patients about guns is “under appeal and not yet enforced.” Well I guess Dr. Young hasn’t yet heard about the decision of the 11^th Federal Circuit on February 17 which overturned the Florida gag law for good. But the even more remarkably stupid thing he says is that if he has a suicidal patient, “I make a plan with whoever else lives in their house to keep them from potentially lethal things. That includes firearms, but it also includes knives.” Is he joking? Is he comparing the lethality of a gun to the lethality of a knife?

I suspect that the reason Jennifer Wolff gave Dr. Young some space is that she didn’t want to be accused of only hearing from one side. But with all due respect to the canons of journalistic practice there is only one side with respect to the medical risk caused by guns. And except for a few brainless physicians like Dr. Young, this is something which, thankfully, the medical community fully understands.