We recently spoke with Dr. Claudette Lajam, NYU Hospitals for Joint Diseases, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, as well as Adult Reconstruction and Joint Replacement Assistant Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery, NYU Langone Medical Center. She does pediatric, assisted in the lauded robot knee-replacement procedure, affiliates with Cornell Medical and the Alpha Award Club, and hosts Sirius Radio, Monday evenings. These will do for a start.
Lajam was speaking on “The Myth of Choice” to the NY County Republican Women’s Club. We stayed afterwards to schmooze and exchange views on reproductive topics and related hot-button topics. “Choice” means more than pregnancy termination.
Not inconsequentially, Dr. Lajam -- pert, personable, honey-blonde wife and mother -- is sole female surgeon specialist in her practice field in the city. The hospital in which she plies her skills is No.1 in safety.
To get where she is, she had to stay focused, tough, mindful of her colleagues, ahead of thousands of would-be’s. Not, as anyone knows who has tried to wrest an appointment with an in-demand pro, a breeze.
Thoughtfully, Dr. Lajam referred to the fact that 26 August is the 95th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution -- after a long, bloody fight by incredibly doughty women who suffered jail, torture, humiliation and public shamings.
“There’s more to Choice than genitalia,” asserted the ‘orthopod.’
Because the Feds are so involved in care, micromanaging medicine and its practitioners, all independent hospitals in Queens, she notes, are gone.
Every surgeon generates seven or more support staff: aides, accounting, intensivists, resupply, nurses, and the like. When you cut a hospital, you cut all ancillary staff that keeps it humming -- and patients in standard ameliorative care.
Medicine is Big Biz.
Why aren’t we more aware of the irritating negatives and foreclosing of real ‘choices’? “There’s no meme for these things,” responds Dr. Lajam. “The abortion meme is there, and gets a constant workout,” shutting out other valid concerns. That narrows what some seem to be able to envision.
“The leading cause of doctor visits in the U.S.,” Lajam continues, “is musculo-skeletal problems.” As a consequence of President Obama’s signature, deeply meddling Affordable Care Act, unneeded workers in those hospitals -- mostly women -- were excessed. They lost what had been good jobs, benefits, decent pay.
