Carson wants to talk about discrimination against Christians, not gay people

[GMDino]

(06-14-2015, 07:41 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Actually at 33, he became the youngest major division director in Johns Hopkins history as director of pediatric neurosurgery and is the foremost expert and ground breaker in the separation on twins conjoined at the skull  . Did you ever wonder what those initials DR meant at the beginning of his name? No doubt he is the idiot.    

Great surgeon...still an idiot.

(06-14-2015, 07:44 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Actually it wasn't the fact that Paul couldn't get certified (He actually passed the Board on his 1st attempt). He just disagreed with the Board giving older doctors a lifetime exemption and not requiring them to re-certify. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-rand-paul-tried-to-lead-an-eye-doctors-rebellion/2015/02/01/010994da-9cd6-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html

Quote:The letters came from a young ophthalmologist in Kentucky. He was recruiting for an eye doctors’ rebellion.


“We won’t be trod upon,” he wrote, using the language of 1776. “You can’t promulgate injustice without consequences.”

(A letter from the National Board of Ophthalmology, the group that Rand Paul formed to issue its own certifications to ophthalmologists.)
The injustice he was talking about was a new rule, from the powerful group that deems American ophthalmologists to be “board-certified.” It required younger doctors to take a test that older doctors did not have to take.

The Kentucky doctor was so outraged that he seceded — and started his own Board of Ophthalmology, so he could certify himself.

“You can send a clear message to the establishment” by signing up to be certified by the new board, too, the letter said. “Check the appropriate box and return the card with your $500. Sincerely, Rand Paul, M.D.”

The letter, from about 2003, helps illuminate a little-understood (and mostly ridiculed) chapter of Paul’s life before politics: how he became a self-certified ophthalmologist.

The saga began in the 1990s, when Paul — now a senator representing Kentucky and a GOP presidential contender — hatched a plan to put his family’s free-market ideals into practice. He wouldn’t submit to the establishment. He would out-compete it by offering doctors an alternative with lower fees and fairer rules. His do-it-yourself medical board lasted more than a decade, becoming one of the most complex organizations Paul ever led on his own.

But it didn’t work. Indeed, in a life of successes, it became one of Paul’s biggest flops.

The board certified only 50 or 60 doctors, by Paul’s count, and was never accepted by the medical establishment. It failed partly because of resistance from the old guard — but also because Paul hurt his own cause with shortcuts and oversights that made his big effort seem small.

The other officers of his board, for instance, weren’t ophthalmologists. They were his wife and father-in-law. His Web site was mainly a mission statement, and his mission statement had grammatical errors. And, after Paul missed a filing deadline in 2000, the state legally dissolved his board. Although Paul kept it operating, it remained unrecognized by the state until he officially revived it in 2005.

“It was a good idea,” said Tim Conrad, an ophthalmologist in Louisville, who paid to be certified by Paul’s National Board of Ophthalmology. He eventually took the certificate off his wall. Now he can’t find it.

“It fell on its face,” Conrad said. “But I liked the idea.”



Paul spent 17 years as an eye doctor in Bowling Green, Ky. He still has a license to practice in Kentucky — which doesn’t require doctors to be board-certified — and does free surgeries at home and abroad.

“He’s a very gifted, skilled surgeon, or I wouldn’t be working with him,” saidBarbara Bowers, a Paducah doctor who has done surgeries with him since 2012. She said Paul had handled the most difficult kind of case she had: patients without insurance, whose untreated cataracts had hardened inside their eyes.

“It literally becomes kind of like a rock that you have to chisel out, and replace piece by piece,” Bowers said. “They’re kind of like Third-World-country cataracts.”

Paul declined to be interviewed for this report. A spokesman in Paul’s Senate office provided a brief statement from him: “I’m proud of my decade-long fight to have all ophthalmologists re-certify, regardless of age.”

Paul’s time as a doctor is a key part of his story, establishing him as more than just the son of libertarian icon Ron Paul. But, during the younger Paul’s run for the Senate in 2010, the Courier-Journal in Louisville put a dent in the tale, revealing that Paul’s only active “board certification” came from . . . himself.

“Tonight, I am getting certified by my newly formed ‘The USA Board of Ophthalmological Freedom,’” Stephen Colbert said on Comedy Central. Colbert was one of many to treat the board as a self-serving gimmick, set up by Paul to exempt himself from taking tests. “Here’s the application right there. Okay. It’s on a cocktail napkin.”

Back at the beginning, though, Paul’s breakaway board didn’t look like a joke.

To a generation of young ophthalmologists, in fact, it looked like something bold and noble. Maybe even something that would work.

“Dr. Paul was the one that organized us. Because he was the only one who really came out and said, ‘We should have our own board, and have our own tests,’” said Frank Burns, an eye doctor in Middletown, Ky. “We all felt the same way. He just, he had the voice.”

The fight began because the American Board of Ophthalmology — which had tested and certified new eye doctors since 1916 — had stopped making its certifications good for life. Instead, they would expire after 10 years. At that point, doctors had to take a test.


But there were exceptions. Doctors certified before 1992 were exempt.

“Once we had given a ‘lifetime certificate’ to somebody, legally, we couldn’t say, ‘We’re taking that away from you,” said Bruce Shields, who taught at Duke University and was on the American Board of Ophthalmology at the time.
Soon, however, the board heard from a mild-mannered former student of Shields’s at Duke. The professor remembered him — barely — as “Randy” Paul.

“If he hadn’t become famous, I would probably hardly remember him. He was very nondescript. Nothing negative. There were no issues that I recall. He did his job,” Shields said. “He was just, he was very quiet.”

No longer.

Paul wrote angry letters. He showed up at ophthalmologist conventions. He was demanding that the board test the older doctors, too. “He was pretty aggressive. And I was shocked, frankly,” Shields said.
Paul failed. The older doctors were the board. They weren’t changing.

So the revolution began.

“We mainly did it by e-mail. Basically, we just had to submit test questions. He kind of put it together,” said Burns, who helped Paul write his new board’s exams. “He did most of the legwork in terms of notifying physicians” that the test existed.
Paul established his board in 1997 and started giving exams in 2002. That didn’t solve the problem he was mad about: in the traditional system, the older doctors were still exempt. But Paul hoped to bleed the old board of people and money, and perhaps pressure it into changing the rules.

Seems like Mr. Paul wanted special rules for himself.  Odd.