Newspaper Page Text
The Augusta News-Review - November 1. 1973,
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H Dignity
by Al Irby I
MEDICAL DOCTORS ARE FINDING OUT THAT NATURE
HAS USE FOR EVERY ORGAN IT PUT IN THE HUMAN
ANATOMY. RECENT RESEARCH HAS TURNED UP
EVIDENCE THAT TONSILS PLAY AN IMPORTANT PART IN
THE BODY’S IMMUNITY SYSTEM. THE DEBATE OVER
WHEN SURGERY IS JUSTIFIED RAGES IN MEDICAL
CIRCLES.
Not very many years ago, removing children’s tonsils was a
medical-religious must. Now it turns out that many top-flight
doctors assail tonsillectomy as dangerous and useless. In 1972,
this ambiguous surgery was the result of 300 deaths at a cost of
$375 million to the victims families. This operation is still the
most common surgical procedure in our nation, with over a
million performed every year. Inspite of the fact that these
operations have been performed for over 2500 years, they have in
recent years become one of the most controversial issues in
medical annals.
TONSILS HELP THE BODY FIGHT OFF MANY
AILMENTS-The exact immunization by which tonsillectomy
alters the progress of polio showed that tonsillectomy reduced
poliovirus antibody levels, which protected against the disease for
periods up to seven months after the operation.
Also medical researchers are linking tonsillectomy to Hodgkin’s
Disease. Although the Hodgkin’s disease debate is just beginning,
a clear lurk between tonsillectomy and subsequent development
of bulbar-poliomyelitis has been observed for many years. The
most dramatic evidence that tonsillectomy increases the risk of
this crippling and often fatal form of polio is an ipidemiological
study of an Akron, Ohio, family in 1942.
Five of the family’s six children had their tonsils and adenoids
removed during the summer of 1941. Within the few weeks after
the operation, all five had become acutely ill with bulbar polio,
and three of the children died. The parents and the child who
hadn’t had a tonsillectomy remained well. Epidemiologists
investigating the case determined that the children were all
carrying the polio virus at the time of their operation. The
operation they concluded, caused what otherwise would probably
have been a mild form of the disease to develop into the severe
bulbar polio.
A group of researchers led by Nicholas Vianna of the New
York State Department of Health’s Bureau of Cancer Control
recently published a study showing the people who had
tonsillectomies were nearly three times as likely to develop
Hodgkin’s disease. (Os course, the risk of contracting the disease
under any circumstances is very slight; less than 5,000 cases are
reported each year in the United States.) tn their report, the
doctors suggest that the tonsils act as a barrier to many diseases,
and that their removal weakens the body’s defense.
These results were supported by several subsequent studies one
of these studies was conducted by researchers at the National
Institute of Health's National Cancer Institute. In a study of 200
patients, Drs. Sandra Johnson and Ralph E. Johnson found
definite correlation between the tonsillectomy history and the
clinical features of Hodgkin’s disease. Several scienctists, who
were a bit reluctant at first corroborated the Johnsons’ findings.
“Ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of the T and A’s being done
today are absolutely unnecessary.”
Dr. A. Frederick North, Jr., visiting professor of pediatrics at
the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said, “some 300
children die each year from complications arising out of the
futility of tonsilllectomy senseless surgery.” And he added, “The
benefits are too small and uncertain, while the costs are real and
substantial.”
THE STAGGERING COST IS AN ISSUE AS WELL-States
should pass drastic laws to force “operating happy” surgeons to
study this vital medical problem more thoroughly. Because there
are too many physicians who argue that it’s often hazardous not
to operate. Dr. Joseph L. Goldman, a New York
Otolarnyngologist who is professor and director emeritus of the
Department of Otolaryngology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
and Mount Siani Hospital, made this statement: “Because the
operations represent one-fourth of the surgery performed on
children in this country each year, and two-thirds of the
operations are on children under ten years of age, many cases
could be treated successfully.” This great medical controversy
amounts to more than a technical non-philosophical debate on an
arcane subject. It’s significant economic issue as well; with about
$375 million spent annually on a surgery that has not been
researched sufficiently. This operation, that is so important to
thousands of American families, is a laughing affair among
medical students in the Medical Schools of our nation.
The lay-population knows very little of tonsils and adenoids,
and less about their functions. The tonsils are two masses of
lymphoid tissue, each about the size of an unshelled peanut, that
are embedded in the sides of the throat behind the tongue. The
adenoids are a mass of tissue about half the size of the tonsils,
located on the throat. Healthy tonsils and adenoids are believed
to act as a barrier to infections that enter the body through the
nose and mouth. Maybe the ease with which the operation is
performed is an incentive to most operation happy doctors.
Surgery to remove them even when they beomce infected takes
about an hour, and is usually accompanied only by a day or two
in the hospital.
HOW NAIVE CAN THE MEDICAL PROFESSION BE ?-Much
of the controversy surrounding the faddish operations have been
centered on charges by many doctors that the criteria for doing it
are confusing and contradictory and shift with fashion, in the late
19205, for example, the operation was though by some to be a
cure for goiter, diabetes and epilepsy. As recently as 1956, it was
recommended in one study as a treatment for nightmares, night
sweats, snoring and bad breath. Even today, standard pediatric
textbooks differ on this subject.
Generally speaking, tonsillectomies are suggested treatment for
chronically infected or abscessed tonsils only; and
denoidectomies are recommended only for repeated ear
infections and breathing difficulties or deafness caused by
enlarged or obstructive adenoids. As evidence for the iack of firm
knowledgable criteria for the operations, many critics say that the
frequency with which most of these operations are performed
varies sharply from community to community. One study showed
that in Newburgh, New York, the proportion of young children
who had tonsillectomies was three times greater than adjacent
Kingston, N.Y.
DOCTORS PLAY IT COOL ECONOMiCALLY-Although
poor families have “Medicaid Cards”, tonsillectomy is notably
higher in white middle-class children.
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Page 4
I PLACES W’ I
with Philip Waring fl
BLACK POWER AND AUGUSTA
Last summer when visiting Augusta, I had several discussions
with friends about “Black Power”. What is meant by “Black
Power” for America’s 25 million Negroes, here for 350 years,
helped build the nation, fought in every war to defend the
republic but yet are not yet free?
1 would like to share with our News-Review readers a column
on this subject written by Frank Stanley, Publisher of the
Louisville Defender, co-founder and past president of the NNPA,
member of many presidential commissions, and a elderstatesman
of the Black Press.
When you read Frank’s column go through it a second tune
and see how this would apply to the CSRA. Make notes!
Now let’s read Frank Stanley:
BLACKS MUST ACT FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE
RACE
We continue to hear rhetoric about Black power and its
practical uses to open new doors of opportunity for 25 million
Black Americans.
Throughout history we have been struggling as a group to
amass Black Power. We have even been mindful of many existing
powers such as; Catholic Power, Political Power, Jewish Power,
and more certainly Money Power. By living continuously in an
atmosphere of power constellations, we have been constantly
aware of the forces which have direct effect upon their very
existence.
Power of itself is not evil. It is the misuse of power which
should result in fear, however, in this land, whites continually
associate Blackness with sordid and evil intent; once “Power was
associated with the adjective “Black”, the white majority, guilty
of decades of misuse of white power, became tearful that Black
Power would be used in a form of retribution.
... So we ask ourselves: What does it avail us if we have access
to a restaurant but have no money to pay for a meal? What does
it avail us if segregated schools are illegal and yet the majority of
our children still are required to attend segregated and inferior
schools because we are forced, for the most part, to live in
discriminatory housing, and what does it avail us, if the only
means of acquiring even a modicum of school desegregation -
busing - becomes such a false emotional political issue, that even
non-thinking Blacks are caught up in the “anti” tide against it?
What does it avail us if Black unemployment is consistently
more than twice as high as white unemployment?
1 submit that we no longer want civil rights alone we want
civil liberties as well. We demand civil justice.
Liberty for us must mean more than the freedom to beg bread
or sleep in the park: Equality must provide more than an even
grip on two ends of a dry bone. This is certainly not enough.
Yes, we have torn down barriers. Now we must do what is even
harder: We must build. We must educate the illiterate, train the
unemployed, rebuild the ghettos, and bring new hope to the
forgotten. It is a job of grand dimensions and great demands, it
requires the acceptance of distinct personal responsibility. The
civil rights struggle has no relevance for the child in the inferior
school, the family in the slum, or the man in the relief line, until
it helps them obtain a better education, better home, better job,
and better medical care.
Some time ago I read about a study made by two psychologists
- one Black and one white on “Self Esteem and Racial
Preference in Black Children”. They found, as we all knew, that
Black youth have developed a higher self-esteem and
consequently prefer people of their own color.
These psychologists concluded: That the relationship between
self-esteem and racial preference suggest that “Black is truly
beautiful” and that Black children have come to appreciate then
uniqueness, beauty and special value-experiencing some level of
self love. This is good because “personal pride is essentially the
expression of group pride.”
But let us use this same Black pride to motivate us to not only
think and talk Black, but to act Black, at all times, for the
advancement of our race.
One of the greatest by-products of Black pride and
concerted Black action is “Black Power” Os course, i mean more
than a symbolic clinched fist, or an afro or dashiki. I am talking
about utilizing our Blackness, our pride, our buying power of $45
billion and our political power of over 15 million votes as
unifying forces in leading all Blacks to demand complete
self-determination.
Meaningful Black power means:
1. Full development of the concept of negritude.
2. The demand for equitable political power which will only
materialize when we Blacks of the midwest, north and west come
to cherish the ballot as dearly and usefully as our Black brothers
and sisters of the south and establish ourselves as co-equals of
whites in the development of political action.
3. The Black Power demand tor economic and social control of
Black ghettos, in short, since we are forced to live in the blighted
neighborhoods of the cities, while whites flee to suburbia, then
we must control their every aspect. This means active
participation in civic programs, serving and working on
committees and boards, financially supporting community
projects and initiating beautification, rehabilitation and clean-up
campaigns as well as wholesome recreation and cultural programs
and the like.
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BY VERNON E. JORDAN, JR. J/ k
ATLANTA SHOWS POLITICAL MATURITY
I’ve known Atlanta’s new mayor-elect, Maynard Jackson, since
the days when we both attended the segregated David T. Howard
High School in Atlanta, a school whose textbooks were
hand-me-downs from white schools that discarded them, a school
that for a long time had no gym, a school whose Black students
were often bused past half-empty all-white schools to maintain
segregation.
Maynard and 1 were in the school band together - I played
trumpet, he played trombone. Now he seems to be playing the
right kind of music for Atlantans, who just elected him the first
Black mayor of a major Souther city in an election that has
national significance.
The lessons to be drawn from the Atlanta election are many,
but perhaps the most immediately significant is the sophisication
and maturity of Atlantans in general and Black voters in
particular.
Jackson’s opponent went all out in a campaign that appealed
to the hidden racism of many people. He tried to tie Jackson to a
more militant Black, Hosea Williams, running for council
president, and took out scare ads in the papers that were
headlined: “Atlanta is too young to die.”
As other desperate politicians have learned, this approach
backfired. In a city whose population is evenly divided between
Blacks and whites, there is just too great an interest on everyone’s
part in keeping racial hatred out of the picture. Jackson got over
20 percent of the white vote and might have gotten more if his
opponent had not had a record and reputation of liberalism.
The large number of whites voting for Jackson was a
heartening indication of the city’s political maturity, but even
more impressive was the Black vote. As expected it went
overwhelmingly for Jackson, a qualified, popular Black candidate.
But Black voters showed their independence of racial factors in
the election for city council president. Over thrity percent voted
for a white liberal with a reputation for racial fairness, deserting a
Black candidate in the process, so many Blacks voted a
split-ticket and brought an integrated team into City Hall. In one
majority Black councilmanic district, a progressive white minister
won over a popular Black candidate and both men kept race out
of their campaign.
Thus, we see a remarkable example of political sophistication
at work among Black people who, let us not forget, were barred
from voting throughout much of the South until only eight short
years ago. In the first round of voting, Blacks rejected another
Black candidate they saw as a “spoiler” to split the Black vote
and united behind Jackson, and then in the run-off, split their
votes to back an integrated city government that has a Black
mayor, a white council president and a city council evenly
divided among the races, 9 and 9.
So Atlanta can be said to be the first American city that is
truly bi-racial in its government and in its civic life. Hopefully,
the Atlanta example will be the model for the nation, instead of
the polarizing, hate-filled campaigns and results too common
elsewhere.
The hallmark of Jackson’s campaign and of his plans for the
city is his concern for integrated solutions to the problems facing
Atlantans, solutions that benefit whites and Blacks alike. His
victory was based on community-wide support of both races and
the team that campaigned for him was fully integrated, as well.
So the new mayor-elect comes to office with a huge debt to
the common people of the city, a gut commitment to integrated
approaches to city government, and a heritage of public service.
His grandfather, John Wesley Dobbs, was a pioneer in Black
politics in Georgia and helped organize the Georgia Voters League
and the Atlanta Negro Voters League, and his father, Dr.
Maynard H. Jackson, was a leading Atlanta minister and teacher.
So the new mayor has not only a deep commitment to the city
and its people, but to a family tradition of service and excellence
that bodes well for the future. We wish him well.
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WHICH IS MORE THAN I
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UP IN THE GHETTOS HE
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NO BLACK TEARS ...
THE AUGUSTA NEWS-REVIEW
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ANNOUNCEMENT
Want to Adopt a Black Child ?
Call the NAACP Adoption Project,
Ask For Miss Joyce Tutt
722-5951
or visit
Tabernacle Baptist Church
1224 Gwinnett Street
Augusta, Georgia