Free Clinic

FREE CLINIC

The kind of medical care that you get, like everything else in America, depends upon how much money you have to pay for it - not on the actual needs of your illness. If you' re sick you can bring in top specialists, stay in the best hospitals, and command a lot of attention. If you have an average income you spend years sweating out hospital and doctor bills, treated by doctors who almost never make house calls, and instead drive Cadillacs and take trips to Miami. Doctors who pass out pills like M and M's, and help thereby to turn a pretty profit for drug companies, whose products are periodically taken off the market after its discovered they cause some disease. And if you're really poor you're at the mercy of ghetto clinics, with inadequate facilities and wretched conditions, incapable of matching the quality of care available if you could pay for it. Evidence props up from time to time of experiments performed on clinic patients without their knowledge - in Chicago one hospital had a regular procedure of sterilizing mothers on welfare when they came to have babies.

The emphasis on drug companies and their products makes American medicine curative, instead of preventive. True people's medicine is preventive, it goes after the cause of medical problems instead of simply trying to find a cure with this or that drug. Like prescribing tranquilizers instead of correcting the social conditions and inequalities which breed mental illness, or looking for a cancer cure instead of working to eliminate the chemical agents in our air and food which, evidence shows, cause cancer in the first place.

The Free People's Clinic, 302 Liberty St. , exists to give adequate medical care to people who can't afford it at the usual rates, or who want to deal with doctors that won't freak out at their hair or whatever it is they've got„ People's doctors who explain what they're doing to educate people to prevent disease. The Clinic has its own pharmacy and can fill prescriptions given by doctors on the staff for free. (though donations are a big help.) They have their own laboratory, too. There's regular V.D. counseling, sex education and pregnancy advice, control information. a baby clinic, and nutrition information.

Hours are: Monday-Thursday, 7-9:30 p. m., Saturday, 1-3:30 p. m. Come Early! Phone 761-8952.