[blindlaw] Blind Students and Health Professions, Inside Higher ED, June 30 2014

[Gerard Sadlier]

Could someone please circulate a link to the judgment?

Thanks

Ger

On 7/10/14, Nightingale, Noel via blindlaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>
> Link:
> http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/06/30/iowa-supreme-court-says-chiropractic-college-discriminated-against-blind-student#sthash.PTpKENGU.M59eVX9L.dpbs
>
> Text:
> Blind Students and Health Professions
> June 30, 2014
> By Scott Jaschik
>
> The Iowa Supreme Court on Friday ruled 5 to 2 that a chiropractic college
> violated the rights of a blind student by denying him the use of a sighted
> reader to describe X-rays to him. The student, blind from birth, was unable
> to stay in the program when his request was rejected, and the Iowa court's
> decision may represent a shift in how courts consider the issue of health
> professions students with certain disabilities.
>
> The ideas in the decision, if embraced elsewhere, could lead to more options
> in health professions programs for students who are deaf or blind. The Iowa
> court found that a health professions college cannot simply assert that
> seeing an X-ray or patient is the only way a chiropractor or student could
> make a diagnosis. And the court ruled that it is relevant that there are
> blind medical doctors and medical students, suggesting that there are ways
> that blind students can meet academic requirements that in most cases may
> require vision.
>
> The Iowa court also rejected the approach of the Ohio Supreme Court in 1996
> ruling upholding the right of Case Western Reserve University to reject a
> blind applicant to its medical school.
>
> And the Iowa court offered a new emphasis on a 1979 decision by the U.S.
> Supreme Court that upheld the right of Southeastern Community College, in
> North Carolina, to reject a deaf applicant to a nursing program. The Iowa
> court said some parts of the nursing case in fact suggest a higher bar than
> has been assumed for colleges to meet in denying accommodations to students
> with disabilities.
>
> L. Scott Lissner, Americans With Disabilities Act coordinator at Ohio State
> University and president of the Association on Higher Education And
> Disability, said via email that while the ruling will apply only in Iowa,
> the issues in the case extend broadly to health professions programs.
>
> "I think health professions are conservative when it comes to risk," Lissner
> said. "Because of their clinical focus they have a tendency to treat all
> requirements and standards as a patient safety issue whether it is or not
> and are slow to accept different ways of accomplishing tasks (the essence of
> accommodation) until others have proven it."
>
> While the Iowa ruling will likely be hailed by advocates for students with
> disabilities, the dissent in the case shows that many people (and judges)
> remain sympathetic to idea that health professions colleges should have the
> right to say that vision is a basic requirement. The dissent states that the
> opinion in the case "elevates political correctness over common sense."
>
> The dissent asks: "What is next? Are we going to require the Federal
> Aviation Administration to hire blind air traffic controllers, relying on
> assistants to tell them what is appearing on the screen?"
>
> The ruling is about Aaron Cannon, who enrolled at Palmer College of
> Chiropractic, although he was warned that there might be some portions of
> his education that he could not complete due to his blindness. The decision
> says that Cannon believed he could work something out, and that he succeeded
> in much of the coursework required by the college.
>
> The conflict came when he was required to take radiology and Palmer rejected
> his request that a sighted reader be used to describe X-rays so he could
> demonstrate his ability to diagnose based on X-rays. The college said that
> its academic judgment was that its students needed vision to view X-rays
> themselves. Palmer is not unique in having the view that vision is a basic
> requirement for a medical professional; the technical admissions
> requirements of medical schools at such institutions as the University of
> Pennsylvania and the University of California at Los Angeles (among many
> others) specifically state that candidates for admission must have good
> vision.
>
> The Iowa opinion, however, found that Palmer was engaged in discrimination
> (as defined by the federal Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with
> Disabilities Act) in not considering whether Cannon could function without
> being able to see the X-rays himself. The court faulted Palmer for not
> considering alternatives to its traditional requirements and asked how the
> college, having apparently granted waivers to some blind students in the
> past, could now insist that it could not do so.
>
> And the court cited Palmer's acknowledgment that about 20 percent of
> practicing chiropractors don't have X-ray technology in their offices, but
> rely on others to make X-rays. This suggests, the opinion said, that what
> matters to a chiropractor is getting information from an X-ray in some way,
> not being fully involved in the process itself.
>
> The U.S. Supreme Court's 1979 decision, the Iowa court said, certainly
> established the idea that a college could demonstrate that certain requested
> changes from students with disabilities would be unreasonable to approve.
> But the Iowa court noted parts of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that may
> give more hope to students like Cannon. The U.S. Supreme Court said that
> changes in technology and practice could well make it possible for students
> with disabilities in subsequent cases to be able to meet academic
> requirements that couldn't have been achieved in 1979. The U.S. Supreme
> Court said that it could "envision situations" in the future "where an
> insistence on continuing past requirements and practices" could deny an
> education to "genuinely qualified" people. It is this part of the decision,
> the Iowa Supreme Court ruled, that was relevant to Cannon's case.
>
> The press office for Palmer did not respond to a request for comment.
>
> The Iowa dissent argued, however, that the court should have followed the
> model of its counterpart in Ohio when it considered a blind applicant to the
> Case Western medical school. That court specifically cited reading X-rays as
> one of the tasks a blind person could not do, and affirmed the right of the
> Case Western faculty to define that as a requirement.
>
> A "misinterpreted X-ray could lead to improper treatment and lifelong
> paralysis," the dissent said. "X-ray interpretation requires training and
> skilled judgment to reach correct conclusions based on shades and shadows of
> complex bony structures. That is why many physicians with 20-20 vision
> choose to outsource interpretation of X-rays to radiologists. It is
> ludicrous to override Palmer's academic decision and require it to permit a
> blind person to interpret X-rays for patient treatment based on what someone
> else claims he or she is seeing."
>
> The dissent added that the opinion intrudes on academic decision-making.
> Said the dissent: "The majority's intrusion into academic judgment on
> professional health care standards is unprecedented. No other court in the
> country has forced an academic institution to allow a blind student to
> interpret X-rays relying on an untrained sighted assistant."
>
> Lissner of Ohio State said he didn't know if the ideas in the Iowa ruling
> would take hold. But he said that, given all the disability issues raised by
> the case, it would be "a wonderful teaching tool."
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