Schizophrenia at the A.M.A.

The American Medical Association, long under attack by liberals and now by the radical left as an obstacle to medical progress and a bastion of money-minded reaction, displayed a split personality at its annual convention in Chicago last week.

Hoping to ward off a repetition of last year's invasion by protesters, the A.M.A. had scheduled an opening-day public forum at which consumer groups were invited to air their complaints. The tactic failed. Immediately after the call to order, 30 to 40 dissidents took over the platform and microphones, elected their own chairman, and turned the forum into a farce. While the panel doctors looked on as helpless captives, the forum dispatched a delegation--consisting of spokesmen from the Medical Committee for Human Rights, the National Welfare Rights Organization and several Women's Liberation groups--to hand up an inflamed indictment of the A.M.A. to the House of Delegates. The band was turned back by guards.

Despite its firmness in refusing to entertain such protests, the house instructed the A.M.A.'s board of trustees to study two conciliatory proposals: to set up a special committee to hear consumers' complaints and to organize a council representing various ethnic groups.

Two Directions. The association was also schizophrenic about other matters. Trustees had proposed a radical change in the A.M.A.'s stand on abortion: to accept the operation as ethical in states where it is legalized and to treat it as a strictly medical matter between a woman and her own doctor. After impassioned debate, marked by the threat that 35,000 Roman Catholic members would resign, the House of Delegates moved in two directions at once. It liberalized the code so as to make abortion acceptable for social and economic reasons in addition to the current narrow medical grounds. But it inserted a restriction that the patient's physician must consult two other doctors before acting. Opponents charged that this requirement would discriminate against the poor. It may also expose doctors to censure and disciplinary action by county medical societies in Hawaii, where abortion on demand is now legal, and in New York, where it becomes legal this week (sec preceding story).

While the delegates repeatedly proclaimed the A.M.A.'s intention to try to make medical care available to all, they backed away from a resolution to encourage newly licensed physicians to serve two years in an inner-city or rural area of crucial medical need in lieu of military service. Also sedulously avoided: any endorsement of group practice or prepayment for health care. Instead, the A.M.A. reaffirmed its "faith and trust in the private practice of medicine and pride in its accomplishments." That was not likely to cure anybody's ills --including those of the A.M.A.

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