and the association with CFS. The following background from the New York
Times is on Regina M. Benjamin who was confirmed by the senate for the post
of Surgeon General
Dr. Regina Benjamin, founder of the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic in
Bayou La Batre, Ala., has been chosen to be surgeon general by President
Obama.
Dr. Benjamin is nationally known for establishing the clinic in Bayou La
Batre, a small shrimping village along the Gulf Coast. Dr. Benjamin kept it
open during two hurricanes.
In 2002, she became the president of the Alabama Medical Association, making
her the first African-American woman to be president of a state medical
society in the United States. In September 2008, she was one of 25
recipients of the $500,000 "genius
awards,"<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/arts/23fell.html> awarded
by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
She completed her residency in family medicine at the Medical Center of
Central Georgia. She is a graduate of Xavier University, Morehouse School of
Medicine and the University of Alabama School of Medicine.
The titular head of the U.S. Public Health Service, the surgeon general is a
largely ceremonial post used by numerous administrations to communicate
important health messages to the public. The office itself has only a
handful of staff and must rely for research and support on the National
Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Benjamin has been described as a throwback long thought to be extinct: a
country doctor with a heart, and with a willingness to make house calls. She
serves an isolated pocket of Alabama that is desperate for doctors. About 80
percent of her patients live below the poverty line.
She opened her own practice in 1990, paying the way with late-night shifts
as a traveling doctor in emergency rooms. But she soon realized that she
needed to know as much about business and government red tape as she did
about anatomy, so she made the 250-mile round-trip commute to New Orleans
twice a week to earn her M.B.A. While in school, Dr. Benjamin discovered a
little-known provision in a 1977 health clinic law that made Federal money
available to help pay for the operation of a clinic or office in places like
Bayou La Batre (pronounced lah BAT-tree), where medical help was badly
needed.
Dr. Benjamin grew up in the little town of Daphne, not far from Bayou La
Batre. Her family owned land that was gradually sold off. She was raised on
food from the nets, like fried mullet and shrimp, and never even knew she
was poor.
She did not grow up wanting to be a doctor. In high school, she heard the
term "international lawyer," and thought it sounded good, so she wrote to
Yale Law School. "They said it might be a good idea if I went to college
first," Dr. Benjamin recalled in a 1995 interview in The New York Times.
To help pay for her schooling, she signed on with the National Health
Service Corps, which pays tuition in return for a commitment to work three
years in places in dire need of doctors. They sent her to Bayou La Batre.
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