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Ben Salentine, affiliate director of well being sciences managed care on the College of Illinois Hospital and Well being Sciences System, hasn’t been weighed in additional than a decade. His medical doctors “simply type of guess,” his weight, he mentioned, as a result of they don’t have a wheelchair-accessible scale.
He’s removed from alone. Many individuals with disabilities describe challenges to find physicians ready to take care of them. “You’d assume that medical areas can be essentially the most accessible locations there are, they usually’re not,” mentioned Angel Miles, a rehabilitation program specialist with the Administration for Neighborhood Dwelling, a part of the U.S. Division of Well being and Human Companies.
Not solely do clinics typically lack the required tools—reminiscent of scales that may accommodate individuals who use wheelchairs — however at the least some physicians actively keep away from sufferers with disabilities, utilizing excuses reminiscent of “I’m not taking new sufferers,” or “you want a specialist,” in accordance with a paper within the October 2022 problem of Well being Affairs.
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