The Dr. Patrick Chavis Controversy
ObitsMan
As Number Six would say, "I note them."
It just seems to me that if there is any newsgroup that ought to debate the
issue, it's this one. The predictable people will say the predictable things,
of course, and I will say is that I think it is interesting that Chavis'
obituary has appeared in so few places.
First, this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6710-2002Aug11.html
Patrick Chavis Dies; Bakke Case Doctor
By Richard Pearson Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, August 12, 2002; Page
B04
Patrick Chavis, 50, a former Los Angeles area physician whose medical career
was cited by both supporters and opponents of affirmative action as evidence
for their case, was killed July 23 in Los Angeles.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles County sheriff's homicide office said Dr.
Chavis was shot during a carjacking. The spokesman said Dr. Chavis was leaving
a store and entering his car when three men attempted to take his car and shot
him.
Dr. Chavis received a degree of fame through the quest of Allan Bakke to gain
admission to the medical school at the University of California-Davis in the
1970s. The medical school rejected the application of Bakke, who was white, but
accepted five black applicants, including Dr. Chavis, who had lower test scores
and lower college grades than Bakke. The five won admission under a special
racial-preference quota.
Bakke sued. What became a landmark case, Bakke v. Regents of the Board of the
University of California, reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the school's
affirmative action program was struck down in 1978. The court maintained that
while an applicant's race could be used as an admissions factor, it could not
be the only factor. Bakke was admitted to the school and later graduated, as
did Dr. Chavis.
There it might all have ended but for the partisans on both sides of the
affirmative action issue. By 1995, Bakke was an anesthesiologist in Rochester,
Minn., and Dr. Chavis was an obstetrician-gynecologist in an inner-city section
of Los Angeles where his patients were largely poor women of color.
Nicholas Lemann, in the New York Times Magazine, Tom Hayden, in the Nation
magazine, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), speaking before a Senate
committee, all called attention to the careers of the two medical school
graduates. They pointed out that while Dr. Chavis was helping the poor of
California, Bakke made his practice among much wealthier, largely white
patients in the upper Midwest.
They suggested that the state of California was being repaid much higher
dividends on the education it had given the poor California black student than
by Bakke.
Then, it all started to go wrong for Dr. Chavis. As reported by conservative
commentators as well as by such newspapers as The Washington Post and the
Boston Globe, Dr. Chavis lost his medical license in 1997. He had switched his
practice from ob-gyn to cosmetic surgery, including liposuction, areas in which
he met with difficulties and was accused of malpractice.
An administrative law judge found Dr. Chavis guilty of gross negligence and
incompetence in the treatment of three women, one of whom died, and the
California medical board suspended his license, saying he had an "inability to
perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician."
Dr. Chavis's career was now taken up by opponents of affirmative action in
their belief that it illustrated the policy's moral and intellectual failure.
Others contended that although Dr. Chavis deserved to be criticized for his
actions, those actions did not prove anything about affirmative action. These
commentators pointed out that there was no statistical correlation between
affirmative action admissions to medical school and later malpractice charges.
[To which James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal
[http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/] replies:
"This precisely inverts what happened. It was the backers of racial preferences
who had used the Chavis case to support their case. The critics did not argue
that Chavis was a typical product of race-based admissions policies, only that
Lemann & Co., having lived by the anecdote, should die by it too."]
Dr. Chavis was raised in South Central Los Angeles by a mother on welfare.
Following medical school, he completed his residency at the University of
Southern California in 1981. He also received a master's degree in public
health from the University of California at Los Angeles.
He opened his offices in Compton, a largely black and Latino town adjacent to
Los Angeles. Practicing family medicine, with an emphasis on ob-gyn, he
delivered about 1,000 babies a year before switching specialties.
------
And for an even more incendiary dissneting opinion on the topic, there's this:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/michelle/malkin080702.asp
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The deafening silence about the death
of an affirmative action 'hero'
Dr. Patrick Chavis is
dead. Will the liberal politicians and gullible media who made
him a poster boy for government-imposed affirmative action
shed a single tear, or will they continue to ignore what a
shameful tragedy his life became?
According to a Los Angeles County Sheriff's detective I spoke
with last week, Chavis was murdered on the night of July 23 in
Hawthorne, an economically depressed neighborhood on the
southern edge of Los Angeles. Three unknown assailants shot
him during an alleged robbery at a Foster's Freeze. They remain
on the loose. The news has yet to be reported anywhere else,
but sources told me it was the buzz of the Los Angeles medical
community last week.
Seven years ago, Chavis became the toast of the media elite
and the racial preference crowd when he was profiled lavishly by
New York Times magazine writer Nicholas Lehmann. Chavis,
who made the cover of the magazine, was a black physician
admitted to the University of California-Davis medical school
under a special racial-preference quota. In 1978, the U.S.
Supreme Court later struck down the program after a landmark
challenge by white applicant Allan Bakke. Lehmann contrasted
what he considered Bakke's unremarkable career following the
lawsuit with Chavis' noble and booming ob-gyn practice in the
ghetto of Compton.
Three months later, Jane Fonda's ex-husband, left-wing
California politico Tom Hayden, heaped praise on Chavis in
defense of affirmative action. "Bakke's scores were higher,"
Hayden wrote in an article for The Nation, "but who made the
most of his medical school education? From whom did California
taxpayers benefit more?" Sen. Ted Kennedy picked up the
banner a year later, calling Chavis "a perfect example" of the
need for lowering admissions standards in the name of racial
diversity. The doctor, Kennedy crowed, was "making a
difference in the lives of scores of poor families."
What the New York Times never got around to reporting, as
JWR columnist Jeff Jacoby first noted and journalist William
McGowan later chronicled in his award-winning book Coloring
the News, is that the "difference" Chavis made in the lives of
several young black women involved gruesome pain-and
death-as a result of botched "body sculpting" operations at his
clinic.
An administrative law judge found Chavis guilty of gross
negligence and incompetence in the treatment of three patients.
Yolanda Mukhalian lost 70 percent of her blood after Chavis hid
her in his home for 40 hours following a bungled liposuction; she
miraculously survived. The other survivor, Valerie Lawrence,
also experienced severe bleeding following the surgery; after
Lawrence's sister took her to a hospital emergency room, Chavis barged in and
discharged his suffering patient-still hooked up to her IV and catheter-and
also stashed
her in his home.
Tammaria Cotton bled to death and suffered full cardiac arrest after Chavis
performed
fly-by-night liposuction on her and then disappeared.
In 1998, the Medical Board of California suspended Chavis' license, warning of
his
"inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician."
In a
statement filed by a psychiatrist, the state demonstrated Chavis' "poor impulse
control
and insensitivity to patients' pain." A tape recording of "horrific screaming"
by patients
in Chavis' office revealed the doctor responding callously: "Don't talk to the
doctor while
he is working" and "Liar, liar, pants on fire."
If Allan Bakke, the white doctor, had engaged in such disgraceful behavior and
met such
an ignominious end, you can bet the Left would never let us forget it.
But Ted Kennedy and Tom Hayden, who spoke so voluminously about the poor black
patients who supposedly benefited from medical affirmative action, had nothing
to say
about the poor black women who were brutally victimized by the incompetent
Chavis.
As for the New York Times, Bill McGowan wrote: They "ran nothing to amend their
false portrait of an affirmative action hero, or question the legitimacy of the
race-conscious social policy that had made him a doctor. A riveting, nationally
newsworthy story central to the country's discussion of racial preferences
somehow
ended up completely falling through the cracks."
Will the Times editors bother to run an obituary about their fallen affirmative
action
hero? Will Ted Kennedy send his condolences?
Don't hold your breath.
-----------------
Kentucky Wizard
"ObitsMan" <obit...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20020812162517...@mb-md.aol.com...
> Please note that I don't completely advocate any the following points of
view.
> As Number Six would say, "I note them."
> It just seems to me that if there is any newsgroup that ought to debate
the
> issue, it's this one. The predictable people will say the predictable
things,
> of course, and I will say is that I think it is interesting that Chavis'
> obituary has appeared in so few places.
It seems to me that it has absolutely nothing to do with Affirmative Action,
only that the good doctor made a bad career decision. As the old saying
goes, "Don't Changes Horses in Mid-Stream".
--
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The Kentucky Wizard
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