(BlackDoctor.org) — During the 23rd Annual Mazique Symposium, keynote speaker Vivian Pinn, MD, urged NMA members to continue their work for equity in all areas of health care. “Serious inequities in health and health care still exist,” Dr. Pinn said. But members of the NMA are uniquely poised “to promote the best that medicine has to offer” to all underserved ethnic groups.
Dr. Pinn was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, where her interest in medicine and women’s health issues began at an early age. She helped care for her grandparents and give her diabetic grandmother insulin shots. Her interest crystallized after doctors continually dismissed her mother’s complaints of chronic pain. This pain turned out to be bone cancer, however, and her mother died when Dr. Pinn was just 19. She ultimately attended medical school at the University of Virginia, where she was both the only woman and only African American in her class. Currently, she is the director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where she works to make sure that women and women’s issues are included in NIH research. She is also a past president of the NMA.
In her keynote address, Dr. Pinn reminded attendees that the NMA has a vital role to play in improving health care on the national scene.
“We are part of a continuum of mutual empowerment,” she said. “I hope this conference will strengthen us as individuals, so that we can continue to provide excellent medical care in an effective health care delivery system.”
The ongoing economic crisis and threatened budget cutbacks, however, might prevent physicians from delivering the best possible health care to all their patients, Dr. Pinn said. Many in the room are “fearful of the future” because of threatened cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, as well as potential changes to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The NMA must continue its leadership role in advocating for the continuation of these programs so health disparities don’t grow.
“We must keep making our voices heard,” she said. “As physicians and scientists, we need to deliver health care first, but also deliver the message of the need for health equity.” Delivery of this message to local and national politicians will help influence important legislation that will affect the ability of underserved populations to seek effective care.
Dr. Pinn closed her talk with a call for NMA members to leave the 2011 Annual Convention and Scientific Assembly with “power and purpose, so that the wisdom of our united effort can, and does, make a difference.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle,” she said, and she told NMA members “to continue the spirit of struggle for what you believe in.”
The symposium honors Edward Craig Mazique, MD, who was born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1911. A past president of the NMA, his career spanned more than four decades. He was one of the first African Americans admitted to the Medical Society of the District of Columbia, and was active in the NAACP and its efforts to desegregate schools. He died in 1988, the same year that the first Mazique symposium was presented.
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