What Are You Waiting For? (The Scientist, Vol:10, #6, p. 10, March 18, 1996)
It is my experience that clinicians and scientists explain their reluctance to become personally involved in advocacy for medical research on the basis of one or more of the following rationalizations: "My efforts won't make any difference." "I don't know how." "I don't have time, and besides, it's not seemly to do so."
Rarely do I hear that advocacy isn't necessary, least of all in these times of unprecedented threats to funding of the National Institutes of Health, but advocacy is usually regarded as somebody s job. If indeed it were ever true that advocacy is the exclusive purview of only a few (deans, presidents, society leaders, voluntary health organizations), that system is not working any more!
If we don't all become comfortable with the fact that advocacy is part of our jobs now, funding will ...
