[rehab] resource on Medical involvement in blindness skills

[Bob Kresmer]

Regarding the discussion of Medicaid and Medicare involvement in blindness
skills training - 


The writings and speeches by Dr. Fred Schroeder, past commissioner of RSA,
often address these alternative approaches.  You can access this material at
www.nfb.org.  


Another source of information is a recent book you can download from the NLS
BARD site.  It is a powerful and analytic look at the present antagonism and
resulting impotence of the Americans With Disabilities law and its
regulations.  


"Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeves, and the Case against
Disability Rights" 

By Mary Johnson 
DB53169copyright 2003 
Advocado Press, Inc.  


A typical selection from this book - 

"What is behind the statement that "Disability rights go counter to common
sense"?  What is behind it is the conviction that a disabled person's claim
to "rights" is simply not a valid one.   It is bogus. Disabled people are
not like racial minorities: are not in fact a minority at all, say those who
make this complaint.    

Their problems, unlike those of racial and ethnic minorities, do not stem
from animus (ill will).  Their problems stem simply from the fact that their
bodies don't work correctly.  Medical research was seeking cures constantly.
That's how society was helping the disabled.  Beyond that, they were given
special help and assistance.  

But it was wrong for the organized disabled to blame society for their
problems.  A New York Times in the previous decade, questioning the
reasonableness of disabled people having a right to ride on the public's
busses and subways, had put it like this:  "Going to incredible expense to
remodel trains and busses would be justifiable only if the handicapped, as
some insist, have a fundamental legal, even constitutional, right  to use
public facilities without difficulty" 


. That a person's disability is a personal medical problem, requiring a  but
an individualized  medical solution.  That people with disabilities face no
"group problem" caused by society, or that social policy should be used to
ameliorate.  This is what disability rights activists call the "medical
model of disability".   "  

This book goes on to describe social resistance to recognizing the political
implications of disability and the ongoing reluctance to part with the
medical model that deals only with an individual's need to be cured.  

This book may help illuminate resistance to reliance on medical involvement
in what is essentially a political and cibil rights challenge.  


Bob Kresmer