Patrick Henry College | Dr. Ben Carson | Newsmakers Interview Series

[Music] [Music] really excited to have as today's guest ben Carson somehow my mother learned that Ben Carson was coming to Patrick Henry College and I've got an email from her I can't believe he's here and I heard from my sister and my nephew and my daughter he wanted to see if I could get him to autograph his his book which is really one of her favorites gifted hands it's a very powerful and inspiring story that made into a emotion picture that that you'll want to see if you haven't already again we're honored to welcome dr. Carson and his wife a candy welcome to you too in 1987 dr. Carson made medical history by separating a pair of Siamese twins who were joined at the back of the head it was an operation that always killed one or more wonder both of the infants yet dr. Carson led a 70 member surgical team to successfully separate the twins who are still living he has before and since spearheaded a number of life-saving surgical innovations that broke new medical ground and have saved thousands dr. Carson has written four best-selling books including the one I mentioned gifted hands he has a worldwide speaking tour and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom the highest civilian award in the United States by president george w bush dr. Carson's is the story of a man born for success and achievement except his life didn't start out that way in fact Gripen poverty was raised by a mother who herself was uneducated but yet somehow instilled in her young son he was struggling mightily in school a love for education and learning that propelled him into honors programs in high school on to Yale the University of Michigan Medical School and toward a truly remarkable medical career today he serves as the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital please give dr. Carson the warm welcome well thank you all for coming I want to start out by doing something that if you've come to previous interviews here I haven't done actually talking very positively about a couple of books you know I'm a I'm a journalist I'm a magazine editor tend to be more critical or even caustic than complimentary but but these these books are really terrific this is this is Ben's autobiography gifted hands came out a couple decades ago but a new edition that's about a year or so old and and just a remarkable book that I run recommend to all of you will I'll be asking about a couple of the highlights but I hope you'll actually read this book and then here's a new one that just out this month America the Beautiful rediscovering what made this nation great and I recommend this also something unusual for me but well you know that these are these are good things let's start with with that difficult childhood that the doctor Vieth was referring to you are your mom actually was 13 when she got married your dad 28 when they got married and when you were eight years old he ran off and she's left pretty much alone struggling to raise you and your brother tell us about that a little bit well you know she had only a third-grade education and so she didn't have a lot of skills so she was very observant though and she noticed that everybody she ever knew who went on welfare always stayed on welfare they never came off of it so she really didn't want to adopt that particular lifestyle so she decided she would work as long and as hard as was necessary to keep us afloat so she worked two to three jobs at a time as a domestic cleaning people's houses she would go from one job to the next to the next leaving at 5:00 in the morning getting home around midnight sometimes we wouldn't even see her for a week because we would already be in bed but times he came home and and she would leave before we got up yet we knew she was there she would leave stuff out for us she would leave food and it was it was it was very important that she never adopted what I call the victims mentality and she wouldn't let us be victims either never felt sorry for herself I think that was a good thing but she never felt sorry for us either that wasn't so good because because she would never accept an excuse and if you came up with an excuse she always said do you have a brain and if the answer to that was yes then she would say then you could have thought your way out of that you don't have to do what Robert or John or Mary or Susan did and you know after a while if people don't accept your excuses you stop looking for excuses and you start looking for solutions so I think that was an extremely perhaps the most important thing that she passed on to me and to my brother you know be responsible and then in the in the fifth grade you're getting zeroes in school you are being considered the dumbest kid in the class and what happened to change that well you know I was I was what's known as the safety net no one had to worry about getting the lowest mark on a test as long as I was there so the kids really liked having me there but my nickname was dummy that's what people called me and I remember once we were having an argument about who was the dumbest person in the school and it wasn't a big argument everybody agreed it was me but but then someone tried to extend the argument - who was the dumbest person in the world and I said wait a minute there are billions of people in the world and they said yeah we know that you're the dumbest one so and and on that particular day to make matters worse we had a math quiz and you had to pass your paper to the person behind you they would correct give it back to you teacher would call your name you had to report your score out great if you got a hundred or 95 not so great if you got a zero and just had an argument about who's the dumbest person in the world so you know I started scheming I said well the teacher calls my name I will just kind of mumble and maybe she'll think I said something and write it down and the girl behind me will think I said something else so when she called my name I said and and she said nein Benjamin you gotta wonder if I know you could do it if you just applied yourself kids I want you to understand what a significant data says Benjamin got none right it had 30 questions if he can get nine right anybody you know and finally the girl behind me just couldn't take it any longer and she stood up and said he said none well of course the kids who are rolling in aisles they were beside themselves and if I could have just disappeared into thin air never to be heard from again in the history of the world I would gladly have done so but I couldn't so I had to sit there and act like it didn't bother me but it did not enough to make me study but it did bother me and you know but but fortunately my mother you know she saw all these failing grades she didn't know what to do but she prayed and she asked God to give her wisdom to know what to do to get her young sons to understand the importance of intellectual development and God gave her the wisdom at least in her opinion my brother and I didn't think it was that wise because it was to turn off the TV and let us watch only to the three TV programs during the week and with all that spare time we had to read two books apiece from the Detroit Public Libraries and submit to her written book reports which she couldn't read but we didn't know that and she put little check marks and highlights and underlines and and and I just hated it and the beginning but you know after a few weeks I actually began to enjoy it because we were desperately poor but but between the covers of those books I could go anywhere I could be anybody I could do anything I began to imagine myself in laboratory conducting experiments discovering new galaxies microcosms I began to know stuff that nobody else knew and within the space of a year and a half I went from the bottom of the class to the top of the class much to the consternation of all of the students used to call me dummy the same ones who call me dummy in the fifth grade would come to me in a seventh grade penny penny penny honey worked as problem and I'd say sit at my feet young sir while I instruct you I was perhaps a little obnoxious but it sure felt good to say that to those turkeys but you know but you know I I had the same brain I just had a very very different outlook at that point and and as I began to read particularly about people of accomplishment it dawned on me that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you in life is you you know it's not the environment it's not somebody else you can actually take control of your own life and I started having a very different philosophy than a lot of the people around me and you know a lot of them would call me names and nerd Poindexter Uncle Tom all kinds of things but I would always shut them up by saying one thing I would say let's see what I'm doing in 20 years and let's see what you're doing in 20 years and they must have believed me because when I graduated from high school they all voted me most likely to succeed which means they knew what was necessary to succeed they were too lazy and trifling to do it themselves and that's what negative peer pressure is all about and the more of our young people we can get to understand that the more people of accomplishment we will see I also want to ask you about the role of GE College Bowl G College Bowl no longer on television was a weekly show about pitting teams of college students against against each other kind of a high-end jeopardy essentially but you watched it it was it was it was my favorite TV program came on at six o'clock on Sundays they would pick two colleges against each other four contestants on each side ask questions about science math history geography and I was actually very good at those things so I wanted to be on college ball but they would also ask questions about classical art and classical music now I got to tell you at Southwestern High School in Detroit if you said something about Van Gogh they would have said put gifts and the divan will go I mean they would have had no idea what you were talking about so you know I had to make an executive decision to the to learn all that on my own I would I would get on the bus go downtown City Detroit Institute of Arts roam through those galleries for days and weeks months until I knew every picture who painted them when they were born when they died what period it represented always listen to my portable radio Bach telamon Mozart and I could send each I thought I was nuts I mean can you imagine a black kid in Motown listening to Mozart you know and I tried to convince him that the mo and Motown was for Mozart but nobody was nobody was believing that and I even decided which college to attend based on college because I had enough money to apply to one college I said I'm gonna apply to the college that wins the grand championship of college ball well that year the Grand Championship was between Harvard and Yale and y'all just demolished Harvard and I don't want to go though school with a bunch of dummies so yeah I applied to Yale unfortunately they accepted me with a with a scholarship but the year I went there was the year college boy went off the air so I know sad but but but years later when I decided that I wanted to be a neurosurgeon and you know I said what's the best place for neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Cushing Dandi Walker all the biggest names the only problem is they only took two people a year out of a hundred and 25 top applicants so how was I going to get to be one of them well it turns out when I went there for my interview the guy in charge of the residency program George odor he was also in charge of Cultural Affairs at the hospital and we talked a little bit about medicine and then we said talking about neurosurgery anyway somehow start talking about classical music and we talked for over an hour about different composers and their Styles conductors orchestras orchestral halls the man was on cloud nine there was no way he wasn't taking me in the program and you know I'd love to tell young people that stir because to emphasize the point that there's no such thing as useless knowledge and you never know what doors it's going to come to open up for you and some people say yeah you overload your brain you I'll tell you as a neuroscientist you cannot overload your brain it is absolutely impossible your brain can easily contain all the information from all the volumes ever written since the beginning of the world and have plenty of room left over so it's just not an issue and then you're at Yale and you are taking the introductory course in chemistry and disaster looms and tell us what happens well you know when I went off to Yale I thought I was perhaps the smartest person in the world and if not certainly in the top five but it didn't take very long for me to be disabused of that by the time that first semester was over I was thinking I was one of the dumbest people in the world and I was failing freshman chemistry I mean I wasn't even close and you can't fail chemistry if you're pre-med you know it just doesn't work so you know the night before the exam the final exam I said lord I always thought you want me to be a doctor but obviously if I fail chemistry I'm not getting into medical school and so could you show me what it is you really want me to do or alternatively and preferably work a miracle well as it turns out the chemistry teacher who was either very compassionate or very sadistic I'm not sure which had declared that anybody who was failing he would give them double credit on their final exam so you were encouraged to really study so I was gonna I was going to memorize that whole chemistry textbook that night before the exam but of course I fell asleep you know probably after page five and I dreamed I was in this big auditorium just me and a nebulous figure working out chemistry problems on the blackboard and I awakened early in the morning and that dream was so vivid I quickly went to my textbook I'm start looking up the stuff I dreamed about and when I went to take the exam the next day and I opened up the text tear test booklet I was shocked because the first problem was one of the ones I dreamed about and the second and the third and the fourth I fit right through the book I aced the exam needless to say I just seen it the night before and you know that had a profound effect on me because I just thank God and I said now I know you want me to be a doctor and I know there's something you want me to do in the field of medicine are you wouldn't have done that and I said I will never put you in that position again and I will study hard I will be diligent and I'll make you proud but that was a turning point in my life and we are going to church at this time or did this tell us about yes I was I was faithful going to church because you know Yale was a very secular institution and you know people of faith are not necessarily the favorite people but I found the church family and which was wonderful and it gave me this ability I needed to get through you know a very secular environment now students here are very diligent always studying day in night and nevertheless occasionally having thoughts of perhaps romance or dating or courtship or whatever now you wrote that you were you were pretty busy and so but but then you you did meet candy here maybe you can just tell us how that developed well I had steadfastly resisted relationships because I wanted to really be able to concentrate on my studies and get through Medical School and then it dawned on me that maybe that wasn't God's plan and so I said Lord the next relationship that comes about I will not resist so please make sure it's the right person so and and you know it turns out that both candy and I were from Detroit and Yale had asked us if we would do some recruiting in the Detroit public high schools and they would pay our way back for Thanksgiving because we were we didn't have enough money to go back home so this is a great opportunity to be able to go home for Thanksgiving and and we were on their dime so we got to go to restaurants and stuff and we say you know we can't like each other but on the way back to to Connecticut we were driving and we were on Interstate 80 and candy had fallen asleep already but about Youngstown Ohio I fell asleep at the wheel going 90 miles an hour and was awakened by the vibration of the cars it was going off the highway into a ravine and I wake and I saw this I grabbed the wheel night started turning it and the car literally started spinning like a spinning town and you know people say your life flashes before your eyes just before you die it's true all these scenes from my life were going and I said you know this is it and then the car stopped in the correct lane on the shoulder of the road just some time to me to pull off before 18-wheeler came barreling through this of course what can do and she said what's going on and i say go back to sleep but but actually we started talking and you know we said you know the Lord obviously spared our lives for a reason and he has something that he wants us to do and that was actually the night we started going together it was the 28th of November and we still celebrate the 28th of each month every month now for that reason and you've been married now it'll be 37 years in July and then medical school the University of Michigan that that was a little traumatic because when I started medical school the first set of comprehensive exams I did very very poorly on to the point that my advisor asked me to drop out he said you know you're not cut out to be a doctor this is a hopeless situation but we can get you into another discipline well that's just what you want to hear after you've spent your whole life since you were eight years old thinking you wanted to go to medical school you get in and your advisor touch the drop huh so I went home to my apartment and I just prayed and I said lord help me and I started thinking what kind of courses do you do well and what kind of courses do you struggle in and I realized I did well in courses where I did a lot of reading and I struggled in courses where I listened to a lot of boring lectures and there I was listening to six to eight hours worth of boring lectures every day so I made an executive decision to skip the boring lectures and to spend that time reading and the rest of medical school was a snap after that and and and years later when I went back there as the commencement speaker I was looking for that advisor because I was going to tell him he wasn't cut out to be in it you know because some people are just so negative negative they can always figure out why you can't do something they can't come up with a good reason why you can yeah by the way this this whole thing about skipping lectures and all that that's only boring majors let's we're going to get to to some current political and policy matters so I just want to jump now to a couple of the innovative things you did as a neurosurgeon including hemispherectomy yes maybe you can tell about that how many of you know what a hemispherectomy is okay a couple people okay well early early in my career I was approached by one of the elderly pediatric neurologists about a little girl from Denver who was having a hundred and thirty seizures a day and nothing they could do could control they even had put her into a coma a pentobarbital coma and he said you know there's a procedure called hemispherectomy that kind of fallen out of favor but she might be a candidate for that and you know I had done some reading about it and I come to the conclusion that the reason that it fallen out of favor is because they didn't really know what was going on particularly in the post-operative period and they didn't have cat scanners back then when it fell out of favor and I said you know we can do this now because we can figure out what's going on and we can react to it and so I did a hemispherectomy on this little girl and it was a huge news story and she was very photogenic as was her mother and it was all over the country and then all kinds of people started coming for him as for ectomy and and in a hemispherectomy you're actually taking out taking out half the brain right and you know we worked out techniques to be able to do it more safely and it went from being a favor something that fallen out of favor to something that is done in virtually all children's hospitals now so I was just privileged to be able to play a role and helping to bring that back there have been many improvements on the technique now from the time when I was doing it and it continues to be improved so that you don't actually even have to take the whole hemisphere out now there are ways that you can disconnect everything but still leave the hemisphere there which greatly reduces the danger of the operation and people we there sometimes the joke about half of your brain tied behind your back or something but but people actually they actually are able to they're actually able to function because of something called plasticity which means that part of the brain that's remains in a young person can actually take over functions from the other side it doesn't work in adults okay and then the opéra separating the the Siamese twins conjoined to at the head yeah I had become fascinated with the whole concept of conjoined twins months before I heard anything about the twins from West Germany the bender twins and I started reading about it and trying to figure out why the results were so dismal and I concluded that it was exsanguination of bleeding at death and talked to a friend of mine the chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Hopkins who had done a lot of experimental work and now clinical work with hypothermic arrest where you actually pump the blood out of the body you cool the body until the heart stops pump the blood out and then you can operate on on the heart for up to an hour before you have to restore the circulation and I said you know if you could do that during the critical part of a Siamese twin separation I bet it would work and then I just put the ideal aside and I said where am I thinking about this in my whole lifetime I'm never gonna see a set of conjoined twins two months later lo and behold here came two German doctors presenting this case to a lot of medical centers trying to see if anybody had a solution because the mother refused to accept the European or commendations that she choose one twin and they went to live one to die exactly she couldn't do it and when I explained what I was thinking about everybody got very enthusiastic and we put together a team and we planned it for five months including little mannequins and all kinds of things and it was a 22 hour operation but it worked and it was really quite an amazing thing and I had told my wife that it was probably going to be a life-changing event for us because you know they say everybody gets 15 minutes of fame well I had already had - 15 minutes of fame with the hemispherectomy and with inner uterine surgery doing an operation on twin baby where it was still in the mother's womb and I said you know if there's a third 15 minutes I said the media's not stupid and they'll say wait a minute isn't that the same guy and then they'll start looking into my background and they say wow can you imagine I said our lives will never be the same and they never have been but fortunately that I've realized that the most important thing is maintaining your relationship with God and allowing him to use you and he's been able to do that in a very effective way and I realized that even though all these things kept happening to me it wasn't because I was so great it was because I was willing to allow him to lead in my life one one thing among anything many things that I said I like and in this book is that there are their personal stories I mean individual patients Miranda Beth who after the operation people wondering if she's going to always be comatose and she wait and she says my nose itches right and so forth Deniz Bobo but you also mentioned some deaths Jennifer Danielle I mean as you think back do you think more about the live saved or the lives that didn't make it well I think about both but the way I've always looked at it it's only a failure if you don't learn something from it and anything that doesn't work out the way you want it to you need to figure out exactly why it didn't work out that way and what could you do to make it better and as long as you look at a failure that way you're likely to continue to advance you know Thomas Edison said he the 999 way the lightbulb did not work you know you just don't give up you know there's the cleaning formula 409 why do they call it that the first 408 didn't work you just keep working at it and then you will be successful if you look at it that way and you're always telling the parents that this may work it may not but if you don't do anything for child's gonna die exactly I'm so yeah the the so called bwa the best worst analysis you know I asked four questions what's the best thing that happens if we do this what's the worst thing that happens if we do it what's the best thing that happens if we don't do it what's the worst thing that happens if we don't do it and by asking those questions not just in medicine but almost any big decision in life it really helps you to hone in on the right answer pretty quickly well let's turn to some to some policy questions particularly in this book there's a discussion of health care and so forth very much in the news and I'm just wondering did as as health care what's called Obama cares that went through Congress did did anyone ask those four questions about that obviously not but you know I would be the first to admit that we need health care reform I mean we spend twice as much per capita on health care in this country as you know most other nations and yet we have terrible access problems terrible efficiency problems and and it's largely because we do things the wrong way you know if you get an appendectomy in New York versus Los Angeles versus percival versus Baltimore different cost different ways of submitting bills different ways of collecting all of which justifies the mountains and mountains of paper and the armies of people that push them around all of whom have to be paid out of the health care dollar absolutely asinine because every single diagnosis has something on the icd-9 code every procedure has something on the CPT code and we have computers which means all billing and collection can be done instantaneously without all of that cost and the reason we don't do it is because insurance companies say well if it were that easy you know some practitioner would say that I did two appendectomy is when he only did one so he get paid twice well first of all very very few doctors would do such a thing and secondly the answer to that is not a gigantic expensive bureaucracy but what I call the Saudi Arabians solution why don't people still in Saudi Arabia you chop your limbs off bit by bit you know well I wouldn't necessarily chop their limbs off but there would be some real teeth in the punishment you know loss of your license for life no less than ten years in prison loss of all your personal assets do you think anybody would even think about it no they wouldn't and they would check every bill seven ways to Sunday to make sure it was right it just would not be an issue just like in Sweden there's no drunk driving why is there no drunk driving in Sweden because the penalties for drunk driving are so severe and are uniformly applied so you know that's how you solve that kind of problem and there are multiple other things that I talked about in health care we have logical ways of solving these problems without making them into a political football and the amount of money that we spent is far more than adequate to make sure that everybody has good health care in this country you were telling me before that you did get a couple of calls from the White House during this whole thing asking for your advice I didn't but what happened well the first call I got I was having quite a decent conversation with the gentleman about what about the ideal that is talked about and some of the other ideals I have and they was pretty enthusiastic and they said what did you do for the president during the campaign and I said well I'm an independent clunk into that conversation well they must have thought better of it a couple of months later I get another call and I'm teaching a class I said well I'm in the middle of teaching a class right now can we talk in about 40 minutes the individual was incensed I mean how could you possibly be doing something more important than talking to the White House so that was the end of that conversation and unfortunately you know that kind of attitude pervades I was talking to David Axelrod about it and he said yeah we have a few people who are perhaps not as professional as they should be working here I wonder where that comes from but at any rate you know I did protest and I and I actually talked to senior administration officials about Obamacare and some of the good things about it like lifetime limits and pre-existing diseases and I said these are things that I think everybody could agreement that perhaps should be placed on the table for a vote but don't just sort jam this gigantic thing through the because it will alienate people I say they will they will not be cooperation in Congress you know for the rest of this administration you'll get nothing done and that's not going to be beneficial to the people of that nation but people were quite stubborn they wouldn't listen and we find ourselves in exactly that situation yeah I'll go to questions for the audience just a moment but let me ask if you were king of the forest and trying to have a more logical medical care system what would be the basics of it well the basics of it would be I would go to the electronic medical record and electronic billing system that I just talked about I would make the government responsible for catastrophic health care and insurance companies only responsible for routine health care because they hide behind the catastrophic thing to keep jacking up their rates and if you've made them responsible only for routine health care you could predict how much money they're going to have to put out and you could regulate them just like you do utilities if you didn't regulate utilities nobody made afford their water or they like either and you know I would in terms of the people who have no health care I would basically set up a system similar to food stamps where you give them an electronic health account and it's replenished every month just like food stamps are but now they would be incentivized not to blow it by going to the emergency room where it cost five times more than it does in a clinic you know when mr. Brown gets that diabetic foot ulcer instead of going to the emergency room he'll go to the clinic they do the same thing in both places but in the emergency room they patch him up and send him out and the clinic they patch them up and say now mr. Brown let's get your diabetes under control so you're not back here in three weeks with another problem and we begin to deal with some preventive care and and that's how we're going to be able to get these things under control it's a lot lots of logical solutions that I talked about in the book for that and for a number of other things for that matter it seems like logic has simply been thrown out of the window and a lot of it stems around what you know special interest groups I say that anything does it that doesn't make sense that comes out of Washington there's a special interest group behind it and they're the one who are driving the bus and we've empowered special interest groups because we have so many people who want to maintain their office all the time so they have to have money all the time and this was not foreseen by the founding fathers because they didn't think people would want to be in office all the time because it was a sacrifice now it's not a sacrifice anymore narrow its gravy and so you know at some point we need to rediscover another constitutional convention okay it's time now for some questions from you all for mics over there raised hand and you'll get it in your hand another mic over here too stunned silence thank you so much for coming today I just want to get your opinion on whether you think that the recent change manding all medical records be basically potential electronic form centralized you think that that has been a good idea no I don't think that you know making everybody's medical records available to the government is good the government is big enough and intrusive enough as it is if you go back and you read the the ideal that the founders had and you'll read a lot of that in this book they had never intended for the government to grow so large and so intrusive and to be so involved in so many parts of our lives and in fact they said that it is absolutely critical if the United States is to maintain itself as a free and prosperous nation that the people be well informed and that the people be active in government what we have done is we've withdrawn we've become much less well informed we get a lot of our information from the media rather than actually understanding the depth of what we believe in and the void has been filled by the government which has grown larger and larger and larger so now we're becoming instead of a nation four of them by the people a nation four of them by the government as that continues we become less of a can-do nation and more of a what can you do for me nation exactly what they had dreaded and hoped would not occur let me just ask well folks our cogitating above further questions they had a had a discussion with one of my son's a couple weeks ago on this question of medical care and I was actually amazingly enough suggesting the division of catastrophic versus versus normal things and he was saying well where do you draw the line how would this actually work out in practice well you have to you have to do it at a monetary amount because so you know I would do it at the $200,000 level when a disease process reaches a point where you've gone to that level that's where the other insurance kicks in right and and the other good thing about doing it that way is if catastrophic health care becomes a government responsibility it forces us to look at it seriously right now you know 40 to 50 percent of health care dollars are spent during the last six months of a person's life now that makes absolutely no sense at all but then we would start you know examining this thing and it has to be go neck hand in hand with tort reform because a lot of the driver is that people are afraid not to do something because they would be sued and so until we get a handle on tort reform we're never going to get a handle on a lot of other cost and you know during the health care debate the administration was saying well you know your malpractice stuff that's about five billion dollars a year no no no that's a tiny fraction of what it is it's it's sort of a whole pyramid of things that are dependent upon it and they're not looking at those things yeah dr. Carson a lot of the students who come to school here at Patrick Community College have been homeschooled and there are a lot of moms and dads also here in the audience who are home school parents and I was just wondering what you would say to that style of education how you would encourage those families well I think home schooling particularly in the current environment can be an extremely good thing because I'm familiar with a lot of homeschooling groups and they've actually learned how to organize themselves so that one parent who is particularly good in one subject teaches actually several kids and and then another parent who's very good teaches kids in another area and they arrange field trips and all kinds of things and they don't have to be bothered with all the political correctness so they can actually concentrate on what they're trying to learn you know in 1831 when Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to you know to study what was going on here because Europeans were fascinated here was a nation barely fifty years old which was already competing with Europe on virtually every level how in the world was that possible so they were interested in finding out well he decided to look at our school system and was flabbergasted to see that anybody finishing his second grade was completely literate he could go out and find a mom man and they could read the newspaper and they could have an intelligent discussion with them and you know you go and look at some of the letters from the wild west you know that were written you know in 1800 look at the grammar and the syntax and the vocabulary of those people you would think it was you know professor alaskey writing those letters you know amazing you know what has changed the way we've dumb things down over the course of time and if you really want to be impressed you know and and there's examples in the book america the beautiful' of questions that you were required to answer for a sixth-grade exit exam in the 1800s yeah I doubt that most college graduates today could pass that exam we've dumb things down to that level and we need to reassert ourselves in the educational arena I'm sure many of you are very familiar with the International surveys looking at the ability of students in multiple countries to solve math and science problems and that we rank right the bottom of that now this is not the way it used to be we used to be the envy of the world starting about the 30s as we started to become more more politically correct we begin to to get rid of the essential things and we started adding in things that really are not particularly important to be taught in school or perhaps things that should be taught in the home but in the process as we've evolved more and more into a politically correct situation we don't even want to talk about what the family's supposed to do versus what the school's supposed to do what the responsibilities are of fathers and mothers and it really has degenerated to that level not because our whole society has degenerated to that level but because the loudest voices and particularly the media has tried to pretty much force that upon people and people have not stood up people have not spoken up you know this country was supposed to be for of and by the people but the people have become silent very much like the people in Nazi Germany were silent most of them did not agree with what Hitler was doing but they kept their mouth shut and you see what happened and exactly the same thing will happen to the freedoms that we enjoy in America and the kind of nation that we've had if people don't speak up they need to rise up they need to say to political correctness take a hike this is who we are this is what we believe in these are the principles that allowed us to become the pinnacle nation in the world in record time and we're not about to throw them out of the window for the sake of political correctness [Applause] there's kind of over here huh okay become a doctor your story really is inspiring sir and I think you for coming to talk to us my question is that should the government regulate moral issues like abortion and stem-cell research should they and if so how well the government should regulate moral issues like not killing people and you know we have a very good moral code upon which our government was based it was a judeo-christian code and it's well established now can you get a little bit too involved in everybody's lives absolutely you can it should not be necessary and you know I believe that people should be allowed to do what they want to do as long as it is not interfering with somebody else's rights now somebody might say to me how can you say that and yet you're pro-choice because being pro-choice means that you're interfering with this woman's right to have an abortion well being pro-life I mean being pro-life yeah some people some people would say that okay okay but what I would say is it seems to me that when you're aborting a baby you're interfering with their baby's rights you know does that baby not have a right to life just because that baby happens to be in the most protected environment that they can possibly be in today abrogate all rights to life and I was talking to the head of the ACLU about this and you know he was talking about how the ACLU is there to speak for those who can't speak for themselves and protect the rights of everyone you know and I said okay there was this woman who came to me she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby was diagnosed with hydrocephalus on ultrasound and they had encouraged her to get an abortion so she was on her way to Kansas which was the only place you could get an abortion that late and but stopped to talk to me before going and fortunately I convinced her to keep the baby the baby was born did have harder stuff with had a shunt play she loves that baby but I said to him I said that baby had many rights would you speak up for that baby 33 weeks that baby could exist outside the womb without support would you speak up for that baby danced around a little bit I said well let me make it easy for you I said we have other babies 26 weeks 27 28 week gas station much younger than this baby but they're already out there in an incubator we're doing all kinds of things how about that baby would you advocate for that oh absolutely no problems with that baby I said so the one that is several weeks more advanced that's in the most protected place it can be you have trouble advocating for that one but the other one you can and he said I realized that doesn't make any sense he said but I believe that a woman has a right to kill that baby until the second it is born and I said would you say that in public he said no but you know that's that's what we're dealing with so you know you you had you have to be able to look at the big picture when you're talking about intrusion into rights a woman do you really have a right to kill the baby just because it's in your body you know it's sort of it harkens back to the argument you know decades ago about slavery what slave owners thought I own this person I should be able to do anything to them that I want well obviously our thinking has evolved fortunately over the course of time but it's the same kind of situation what's your assessment of the medical systems in places with socialized medicine like Canada and Great Britain well interestingly enough a lot of the places with socialized medicine you know Great Britain you probably just heard this week is looking at trying to do some privatization because they're running out of money you know the problem with socialized medicine is that you just can't seem to keep up with the cost over the course of time and the only way to do that is you have to ration and so that's why in a lot of places with socialized medicine if you're 60 years old you may not get a kidney transplant you may not have a hip replacement sorry you're just too old which is absolutely absurd you know we have 80 and 90 year olds who are vibrant intellectually vibrant who are you know contributing to society you don't make those decisions based on age you have to make those decisions based on condition and you know there's some 30 year olds who have you know 600 other conditions which make them non viable you know who would be much less of a good candidate than a 60 year old for that and socialized medicine that socialism in general has a problem of not distinguishing things everything has to be this everything has to be that and when you begin to do that the individualism disappears and that's what America is all about so clearly it's not a system that works for us and you know as as I've stated very clearly in the book there are some things about socialism that are actually good there are many things about capitalism that are good there is no one system that is all good on one system that is all bad but that's why we should have a democracy that's why we should be able to have a debate that's why we should be able to to talk openly not through the constraints of political correctness so that we can chart a course that is forward rather than just always lurching to the right or the left you know in the book I talk about the ego as one of our symbols well one of the things about it is that it has two wings it has a right wing and it has a left wing now you know if it's all right wing guess what happens it veers to the right and crash it was all left wing and to the left and crashes and you know that was one of the symbolisms of the eagle you know there's give-and-take and you know once we learn to do that once again I think we will be able to fly forward rather than continuing to lurch to the right and lurch to the left which is what we've been doing for the last several decades and not making very much progress thank you dr. Carson um as somebody who's interacted with more doctors probably than the average person I know that there tends to be kind of a sense that doc doctors have sort of a reputation for being tongue-in-cheek because you want you want to give people the most honest possible assessment of the situation that they're in and not you know build up false hopes or you know be too overly sanguine about anything but at the same time you want to instill optimism in people and you want to you know encourage people to be hopeful through the kinds of things that you they go through as you're helping them as a doctor so my question is how do you balance maintaining a sense of optimism with your responsibility to be honest and open with people well honesty and openness is by far the most important quality and people know and you know if you've been dealing with a lot of issues you know when people are being honest with you and you know when they're giving you you know a bunch of crap and you know it becomes part of your persona if you truly care now if you don't care you know you know anything goes but if you actually care about people and you have time to sit down with them to explain things to them which is what I always do to make sure that they're a part of the decision-making process okay that way they have buy-in and really no matter what happens good or bad they have buy-in and that's the way that medicine is supposed to be done that's the way that I teach all the students and the residents and interns that I work with in order to do it and if you do that you're much less likely to end up in a lot of conflicts you're much less likely to end up in court because you know everybody's involved in the decision making process not just the high and mighty doctor we all have at some stage the experience of being invited to fill out an organ donation card and I have a friend who as a college student her life was saved because of a liver transplant I'm wondering if you have an opinion as a medical professional about the current ethical atmosphere in the medical profession the trustworthiness of that decision when someone is lying in a hospital grievously injured what is the process the ethical process that goes on to to decide whether that person lives or dies and whether they're a good candidate for organ donation can we trust the medical profession now okay - to save lives virtually every transplant program in the country has an ethics committee associated with it that includes you know members of the medical profession members of the clergy social workers patient advocates in order to be able to get you know all the different points of use for the very reason that if you left it in the hands of any one particular group that had a particular bent to doing something then you're much more likely to have some bias introduced so that's that's the very reason that they virtually all have ethics committees associated with them thank you so much dr. Carson as Sonia wants to become a teacher eventually I was wondering in the fifth grade what do you think would have been the most helpful thing that that teacher could have done to help you succeed okay good question I think I did have a fifth grade teacher that did do a lot to help me if if you saw the movie mr. Jake the fifth grade science teacher you know he came in one day and this was while I was still the dumbest kid in the class and he held up a big black shiny rock and he said can anybody tell me what this is well bear in mind I never raised my hand I never answered any questions so I waited for one of the smart kids to raise their hand and none of them did so I waited for one of the dumb kids to racing and none of them did and I said this is my big chance and up went my hand cuz I had been reading and when my mother made us start reading books I actually started reading about rocks about theology and I actually knew a lot about it nobody knew about this but I could identify perche in Iraq and where it came from and how it was formed so you know I raised my hand everybody turned around in lunch they should look Carson's got his hand up oh this is gonna be good and the teacher was shocked and he said Benjamin and I said mr. Jake I said that is obsidian and there was silence in the room because it sounded good nobody knew whether it was right or wrong they didn't know whether they should be impressed or whether they should be laughing hysterically and finally after he got over his shock mr. Dixon that's right it is obsidian and I said obsidian is formed after a volcanic eruption the lava flows down in history did the super cooling process the elements coalesce the surface glazed-over everybody was staring at me you know they could not believe all this geological information spewing forth from the mouth for the dummy but but I was probably the most amazing person because it dawned on me at that moment that I wasn't really stupid at all I said the reason you knew all those all that information is because you were reading books I said aren't you tired of being called a dummy I said what if you read books about all your subjects can you imagine what the effect would be and from that point on no book was safe in my grasp but but that same day mr. Jake the fifth grade science teacher he asked me to come to the laboratory and he started helping me put together a rock collection and then I got involved with helping take care of all the animals in the laboratory there was a red squirrel a tarantula a jack dempsey fish crayfish all kinds of cool stuff there was a microscope and I started being able to look at the water specimens and seeing all kinds of microscopic creatures and I started learning all their names and you know it really just began to open up science for me and and gave me the incentive to really continue to drive forth and and to become a much better student thank you so much for speaking to dr. Carson you mentioned earlier that a large percentage of funding for medical care is used within the last few months of a person's life I know this has been an issue in my state particularly but how would you recommend that we provide compassionate end-of-life care without breaking the bank okay well first of all we need to recognize when we have a terminal situation and most people in medicine know that already but there are some people who are unscrupulous who do procedures because you know we get paid for procedures there are some people who are afraid that if they don't do something somebody's going to come back and say why didn't you do something so we have to remove the fear of being sued and we have to disincentivize people from doing procedures for procedures sake and looking more at outcomes than we do at procedures that's one of the things that will help enormous Lee and taking care of that group of people we also have to expand hospice care and we have to make it easy for people to be able to go home when they have certain kinds of conditions and to be at home among loved ones and to be kept comfortable and you know we have to you know abandon the phobia of you know somebody becoming a drug addict you know because they're in pain and they're about to die and we don't want to give them drugs too they might become a drug addict give me a break you know they're going to be dead in two months so you know we just need to integrate a little bit of logic and compassion into that care and make it easier and I was talking to to a woman that I operated on this this week yesterday in fact because she had a condition called trigeminal neuralgia a very painful condition of the face the only thing that I treat my dog but her husband had just died two weeks earlier but she was so grateful for the fact that he was able to be home during his last period of time that all the children could come and all the relatives and he was he was happy when he died rather than being poked and prodded and stuck in some kind of unit and so real compassion is being able to allow people to die in dignity and I think we've confused what compassion really is we're going to have to cut this off just want to ask one last question in 1997 when you spoke at the presidential prayer breakfast and you were told by someone don't mention Jesus and you did in 1999 after the terrible shooting at Columbine High School and you're speaking there and you're told not to mention God and you did why do you do that and why is it important for Christians to do that even when they're told don't well because I cannot separate Who I am from what I believe and you know when the when the movie was being made you know the major sponsor said this is not a movie for Christian audiences this is for the general audience so you can't have all this God stuff in there and I just said you know if you want to take God out then take me out and make it about somebody else because it won't be about me and you know I think you know if we are Christians and if we are true Christians then we have to be willing to stand up for what we believe you know very much in the same sense that I said America will lose it so if people don't stand up and talk about who they are the same thing happens with Christians if we don't talk about who we are and and who we are should not be shameful to anybody because the Bible says you shall know that they're Christians by their love and you know if you care about people and you manifest that why would that be something to be ashamed of please join me in thanking dr. ben Carson [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Patrick Henry College

Views: 81,055

Rating: 4.8172922 out of 5

Keywords: ben carson, patrick henry college, siamese twins, neurosurgeon, newsmakers, classical christian, classical christian liberal arts, Marvin Olasky, WORLD Magazine, Newsmakers, Patrick Henry College, Liberal Arts, Christian Liberal Arts, Classical education, Christian College, Private Christian College, Great Christian College, christian, politics, patrick, henry, college, dr ben carson, ben carson interview, dr. ben carson

Id: orY6M0Ex0BM

Length: 65min 16sec (3916 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 20 2012