138 Journa l of Public Health Dentistry

GUEST EDITORIAL*

Individual Responsibility

The problem of public health, typical of problems dealing with human beings, is extremely complex and yet profoundly simple. It has economic, social, political, historical and psychological ramifications. Yet, it condenses to one essential ingredient-individual respon- sibility.

Economic empires crumble and fall only to be rebuilt. Civilizations spiral through time, enjoying periods of vitality and enduring periods of gloom. Political philosophies and attitudes toward them change with the world. History is forever the plaything of philosophers and the tool of opportunists. And the more psychologically oriented people become, the more confusing is .their predicament. Psychology has only introduced the issue of relativity into daily life and, under the influence of this science, values only disintegrate unless the element of individual responsibility is introduced.

Currently, no man (least of all the health professional) escapes this predicament. Never has there been greater knowledge than now of how to have and maintain good health. Never have the earth’s resources been so accessible that so many might enjoy a degree of comfort in life-style. Yet, never has the planet seen more destruction and waste, more mental and physical sickness than at the present. If the solutions to the problems are great, so are the problems themselves, and as health professionals’ knowledge grows, so are the demands on their responsibility magnified.

There is little point in cataloguing the sins of the dental and medical professions in this country, for if indeed they are many, so is irresponsibility among all quite common, and overall, physicians and dentists have at least committed themselves to serve life.

What is lacking is lacking among all groups. Here, one speaks most of the people one knows-of fellow students and of instructors, of one’s self and one’s parents. What is lacking is a willingness to respond to what the world is asking. This willingness may be defined as individual responsibility, “response-ability’’-the willingness to cultivate the ability to respond.

Responsibility relies first on perception. One must know what is being asked before he can formulate a response. If a patient comes into the dental office with a toothache, the dentist, trained to do so, must diagnose the problem before he can treat it. Thus diagnosis and cure of patient ills become the major foci of professional training.

Yet the larger problem (the crisis of the planet) is not necessarily confronted. A physician may treat his patients with technical excellence only to go home and overeat, beat his children, collect extravagances, or guard and insulate himself and his superiority over the general populace, refusing to perceive his real place in the world. Men may be quite responsible profes- sionals and totally irresponsible otherwise. This behavior is schizoid; the individual who does it has a problem. And how many persons deal with their own such problems responsibly? Probably very few.

There was once a time in history when, no doubt, responsibility to the call for survival was automatic, even for man. If the primitive did not respond to what was required of him, he died or was killed.

Now, however, responsibility must be consciously cultivated. Knowledge has given man- kind the choice of responding to the needs of the planet or ignoring them. But what is forgotten is that humanity is a unity, as the earth is one planet. Either all survive or all perish. What is needed for survival is a willingness to perceive and live according to the structure of life and its demands-personally and globally. Most people do not even see the crisis.

Cultivating the ability to respond is an individual project, but through the ages survival by means of adaptation and consciousness has been difficult. The encouraging aspect of the

*Submitted in behalf of the undersigned (and with his permission) by his professor, Samuel J. Wycoff.

Vol. 35, No. 2-Spring Issue 139

challenge now is that the knowledge of how to change as individuals is available. It need only be sought to be known. The professional is first of all a person, and a person who is able to respond to his own problems will have the knowledge of how to respond to those of others. The funda- mental issue of dentistry is the same as with any profession. The issue is not dentistry; it is humanity.

-Leslie Johnson First-year dental student University of California San Francisco

THE EDITOR EMERITUS STILL SQUAWKS

For Your Information

“The old stereotype of small labor against big business has given way to big labor against big business and has helped to foster an oligopolistic environment that nurtures inflation.” This illuminating sentence by Robert L. Weingarten in Financial World for December 25, 1974, so irritated this Emeritus Editor’s appreciation for simple writing that he saved a bit of his time for comment. He said to himself “What in the name of all that makes for ready understanding do those 29 words communicate?”

To learn more about “stereotype,” when used as a noun, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language was dragged over to a big desk to serve as the “authority” for any surgery indicated. This dictionary is an unabridged publication, put together finally in 1969 by a competent editorial staff, a board of five linguists, a “Panel on Usage” of 107 persons, and the assistance of 92 consultants who represented six learned specialties. Now a “stereotype,” variety noun, can be used to designate a small galaxy of items, even if “stereo” divorced from type, is a mere “system for reproducing sound.” When wedded to “type,” however, it can be a “metal print- ing plate,” an “over-simplified concept,” any “person or thing who or that typifies,” “anything which conforms,” an “unvarying pattern,”an “unvarying manner,” or a “person lacking individ- uality.’’ Knowing seven of the items which the word stereotype may suggest, the reader is per- mitted to engage in a guessing match to determine which one is intended.

Bouncing now to “oligopolistic,” as discussed by the “authority,” one will find that “oligo-” is a prefix which the Greeks coined to indicate “few” in such words as the noun “oligopoly.” Oligopoly made such a nice jingle in the ears of economists that they adopted it some years back to designate a condition of the market in which sellers are so few that the action of any one seller is bound to affect price materially and provoke a measurable impact on competition. Profits, higher than usual, then can persist in such an oligopoly because it behaves as a monopoly. The attentive reader may have guessed at once “oligopolistic” mere- ly is an adjective spawned by those who enjoy the noun.

At this point, together, one might agree to stop stunning the audience by one’s sophistica- tion, and seek some simple (not the “simplistic,” so popular with the learned ones) substitute for the original sentence. May it not, hence, be agreed to disregard “versus,”inasmuch as the readers of this Journal are dentists, not lawyers nor scholarly students of Latin, and could one not revert to a rugged bit of expressive Anglo-Saxon heritage? One then might use “against,” if one can forget “Smith versus Jones” in Washtenaw County’s Circuit Court.

Perhaps one also should spend a moment on “foster” so that it can be met as a verb, not a prefix. The “authority” suggests that one choose from “to bring up,” “to rear,” or “to nourish,” but not “to relegate to a foster home.” If one uses “nurture,” the third choice, however, it might be mistaken for proponents of breast-feeding, or expose ourselves to some redundancy when we reach the word “nurtures” farther east in the original sentence where it feeds inflation.