NY Times Profiles PA

The New York Times today published a profile and photo album of PA John C. Welton, a polio survivor who works in the palliative care unit at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

Now 60, he has survived polio. In 1953, he and two of his brothers contracted the virus on the same summer day at Orchard Beach in the Bronx. His brothers made a full recovery. Mr. Welton did not.

From the neck up, Mr. Welton looks like Santa Claus before his beard turned white. From the chest down, he is atrophied. He walks with crutches, his right leg bearing the weight of his 130-pound body.

Mr. Welton’s spine is curved. His clothes hang on his 5-foot-6-inch frame. Metal braces thicken his legs. He does not wear a long white coat because it might tangle his crutches. Still, Mr. Welton’s appearance is a professional advantage, he said. “A lot of times when I come into the room and a patient sees me,” he said, “there’s this feeling of, O.K., he’s going to understand what I’m going through."

Also, here is the author’s description of the PA profession:

Physician assistants, as some have tartly observed, do 80 percent of a doctor’s job for 50 percent of the pay. (The annual salary averages about $82,000.) They are not legally entitled to be called doctor, although some patients do call Mr. Welton “Doc.”

There are more than 68,000 such practitioners in the country, according to the Physician Assistant History Center, in Durham, N.C. The profession grew out of a desire to use the real-world experiences of combat medics returning from the Vietnam War.

In March, The New York Daily News also published a profile of Welton.

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