A website known as STAT recently published an article by Rebecca Jones titled Large majority of doctors hold misconceptions about people with disabilities, survey finds.  This story confirms what many of us have found, that the medical community often harbors prejudices against people’s disabilities.  These prejudices lead to or are made worse by their failure to accommodate our needs either physically (by providing accessible equipment), programmatically (by modifying schedules, policies, etc.) and/or attitudinally (assuming our quality of life is worse than the lives of those without disabilities.)  The article sites several recent studies on these issues and it links to abstracts of these studies. The abstracts (which are like summaries) contain links to other articles on related topics. 

These kinds of attitudes are what led to the death of Michael Hickson and others, as well as to the more limited health care so many of us “enjoy.” The article mentions this link and says:

       Last March, the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human         Services issued a bulletin [if you click here you can see the bulletin] that “persons with disabilities should not be denied medical care on the basis of stereotypes, assessments of quality of life, or judgments about a person’s relative ‘worth’ based on the presence or absence of disabilities or age.”

We just thought you might want outside confirmation you aren’t imagining things when you feel like your doctor doesn’t treat you the same as other patients.