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Hospital Offers Black Woman White Foot

The Department of Health has since offered to pay for and fit Nicholls with an "acceptable artificial limb", the paper reported.
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Fair enough, a bit silly to offer her a white one in the first place really. Makes you wonder though. If the health authorities concerned have backed down and agreed that she can have a black foot then, if i'm unfortunate enought to need one, can i request a green one? Or better still one with the design of my muscles veins etc. tastefully painted on the outside? This is a consumer society. Designer limbs!
 
Yes, we must add the weight of that standard non-black foot to slavery,
to apartheid, to lynchings and all forms of racial discrimination.

We must feel bad about it, because at heart we are all guilty.

That non-black foot shall go down in the annals of infamy. :rolleyes:
 
Are you all being sarcastic? Or am I getting you all wrong? I genuinely thought it was dreadful to offer the poor woman a white foot.
 
Dreadful? It is dreadful to lose a foot, granted. But if I lost one
of mine, the colour of the prosthesis would be immaterial.

It's not as if sandals would be on the cards.

The rest is cultural cringe. :)
 
James Whitehead said:
That non-black foot shall go down in the annals of infamy. :rolleyes:
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I take your dry point Mr Whitehead. A foot in the annal of history! Good title for a book...
 
The Atlas Of Avoidable Death is the best book title I ever came across. Don't bother ordering it though as it's boring as hell.

I generally dislike the media angle on stories like this, anything that tugs at the heart strings eg dying children, cancer 'victims' etc get plenty of column inches at the slightest whiff of inequity.

Anyone else can go to hell.

Marie
 
It could happen to you

If I were to lose my prosthetic tooth or my eyeglasses, I would be virtually unemployable, and yet neither of these are covered by my medical insurance, while plenty of nearly useless stuff is. This is an anomaly, injust though it may seem.

But offering only white prosthetic devices in a country with a substantial non-white populations smacks of saying "the white majority are first class citizens, everybody else is second class and can take what they get or afford to pay for themselves".

I suspect that prosthetic eyes are not offered in "brown" only, although 90% of the Earth's population is brown-eyed, and a solid majority of the British population are as well.

Unless all prosthetic limbs are custom-made, nobody can really expect a perfect match of complexion, but imagine the pubici out-cry if the limb offered was black!

"Mrs. Brown Eyes, I am sorry that the National Health's reconstructive surgery assurance does not cover female body parts due to lack of demand--the people being stupid enough to lose their genetalia being 99% men--but we have a nice big penis we can give you. Do you want that it black, tan or glow-in-the-dark green with a musical tip?"
 
I feel all Dickensian now,
"Have we run out of thick black socks? Is there no prosthesis paint in the land?"

This would be a story of discrimination only if these things were matched
to people's skin tone. They aren't, though the standard colour is a horrid
unnatural pink, nearly as much unlike Caucasian skin as it is to black.

I really can't imagine anyone kicking up a fuss if the standard colour was
black. Not for a foot. A leg might be a bit different, though all the artificial
leg-wearers I have met - three, since you ask - kept them covered.

The eyes analogy is daft and attempts are made to match eyes for obvious
cosmetic reasons, regardless of race. :rolleyes:
 
I must admit, when I first heard this story, my mind boggled a bit.

"You can have any colour you like, as long as it's pink." might have passed muster thirty years ago, but isn't it just a bit of a slap in the face to the poor woman?

Sorry if you want it in something even vaguely approaching your own skin tone, youll have to cough up a bit extra.

Isn't the whole thing traumatic enough?

The NHS should be able to provide plastic limbs in a variety of skin tones, these days, surely?

If I lost a limb, I'd at least want the same sort of service as most everybody else.

Nope. Still a bit of a boggler, thinking about it.
 
James Whitehead said:
Dreadful? It is dreadful to lose a foot, granted. But if I lost one
of mine, the colour of the prosthesis would be immaterial.

It's not as if sandals would be on the cards.

The rest is cultural cringe. :)
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It's bad enough to loose a foot but the blow to the self esteem is often much more damaging in the long run than the simple loss of the limb. Realistic prosthetic limbs help to lessen that blow.

And yes you might wear sandles. A friend of mine married a man who'd had his leg amputated. He got married in a full kilt suit and you really couldn't tell that one of his legs hadn't always been his own. He looked great in the wedding photos.

Cujo
 
One of my friends has a prosthetic eye and the standard procedure seems to be for them to be hand painted for the closest possible match.

The only noticable difference is in the lustre of it, as far as I can tell the thin film of moisture over the surface of the real eye gives it a slightly different appearence.

Marie
 
. . . and I see a world where no black woman and no black man will be
compelled to wear the foot of a false white man! I see it! I may not
go there with you but those Golden Slippers will be waiting for us all!


:p
 
It's not just black people that are p'ed off by the NHS and there light hearted cheapskate atitude to providing amputees with realistic prosthetics.

BBC News July 21st 1999

Why, in the 21st century, shouldn't people be provided with the best technology available and not have to look to paying the sort of up front cash that would pay for a foreign holiday, or for a new kitchen, in the process?

What's so funny about the NHS actually doing what it was designed for? And that goes for glasses, contacts and choppers too.

I'd rather pay tax for customised artificial limbs, than for cluster bombs to blow them off again.
 
True and that is a real story!

So why are we getting the Human Interest tale that would
make a horse laugh? :confused:
 
James Whitehead said:
True and that is a real story!

So why are we getting the Human Interest tale that would
make a horse laugh? :confused:
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Because, they (them) are relying on the general public's cynicism? ;)
 
I saw this story in The Mirror, wondered what the Sun's angle would have been. "Ungrateful black woman rants on at our lovely NHS shocker"?

To have something so alien to your own body attached to your leg must be awful. A prosthesis is an extention of you, and while no-one expects a perfect match, I'd say a vague match is essential.

It doesn't matter if the prosthesis on show or not, that's a very shallow comment that doesn't take into account people's self-image and self-esteem. It's a complex psycholohical issue, and I don't agree with the "shut your mouth, woman, you've got a free leg haven't you?" attitude of some of the people on this thread.
 
Not to belittle this woman's problem, but there are men, women and children around the world who are being maimed by western made munitions, who will in all likelihood receive no rehabilitation or artificial limbs. They will be lucky to scrape a 'living' by begging.
 
Shallow I might be but I'd never mistake a foot for a leg!

A white foot on a black person is far from perfect. If this story helps
to make a more perfect service for all who lose body parts, then it will
be a good thing.

Yet I have tried the thought experiment over and over and come up with
the same result: I must have very low self-esteem or a poor body-
image but the loss of a foot would count for something and the
shade of its replacement bugger all! :p
 
I've worked with lots of prosthesis-users and noticed that the colour is always the same dingy pink. Curiously, I can't recall meeting any non-white prosthesis users so can't comment about mismatched limbs!


I have in the past wodered about skin colour of artificial limbs.
They are made of a shiny plasticy stuff which mightn't take paint very well, or paint might rub off easily. So if the correct colour had to be produced at the casting stage, ie the leg was specially made instead of mass-produced, there'd no doubt be an even longer wait for the limb.

If I'm wrong about the paint, and limbs can be painted to match, what's to stop each NHS area employing just one peripatetic limb-sprayer? It would do wonders for morale among patients and aid their recovery because they should be more likely to accept the new limb.
 
Surely it's right, if they are all to be in one colour, then that colour should be chosen to be an approximation to the skin colour of the majority of the population?

Maybe answer would be for the prosthesis manufacturers to make them all in blue. Then either nobody would complain or everyone could kick up a fuss (no pun intended.)

There seems to be a bit of 'political correctness gone mad' creeping in here.
 
Political correctness gone mad my arse! It's an issue of body image. I seriously doubt the woman in question is even thinking about race, it's about have something attached to your leg that's so obviously wrong.

There are now a couple areas of Britain where whites are the minority, so should hospitals there use Asian skin-toned prostheses to fit the majority of people? I can imagine the fuss if they did! And surely it wouldn't cost that much to keep a selection of prostheses that vaguely correspond to various skin tones?
 
Standard prostheses are all 'obviously wrong'. I would probably be unhappy at being given one. I'd probably like it to be made more like my own skin tone. I'd probably have to pay for it.

I probably wouldn't end up in the 'papers though.

Am I in such a different boat?
 
Emperor Zombie said:
a lot of people appear to be considering the asthetics rather than the phsycological implications.
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Body image problems, aren't real, it's just your imagination.

So, just pull your socks up! :eek:
 
What would be the psychological implications involved in wearing a blue foot, then? Are we saying that it is because the foot in question is white that it is somehow more wrong?
 
Atch said:
What would be the psychological implications involved in wearing a blue foot, then? Are we saying that it is because the foot in question is white that it is somehow more wrong?
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I don't know what you're saying. I'm saying a prosthetic limb should be skin coloured.

Now, what colour would that be?
 
Well maybe the issue is that prostheses in general should be made a bit more realistic, rather than just black people should get black ones. The tone of some posts here bothers me - a "white man complaining he has a flourescent orange prosthesis" story wouldn't be treated in this way.

And maybe the real issue is the NHS should have the money to, without getting stupid, give people the best they can possibly have. Of course we're too busy spending our tax on blowing Iraqi's feet off to afford decent false ones for our own people.
 
Evilsprout said:
The tone of some posts here bothers me - a "white man complaining he has a flourescent orange prosthesis" story wouldn't be treated in this way...
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Why should it bother you? It's just pointing out another example of the cynicism and hypocriscy of the media, not revealing some sort of rascist undertone.
 
Emperor Zombie said:
There's a world of difference I'm sure I don't need to point out between a white foot and a black foot so from there it should be pretty easy for people to figure out the phsychological implications.
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I asked about a blue foot. It's you who are limiting this discussion to one of race.
 
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