The Sunshine Coast ElderCollege presents this year’s Clifford Smith Memorial Lecture with Dr. Michael C. Klein: “Challenging the Medical System: The Career of a Dissident Doctor.”
The free lecture takes place at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 21 at Chatelech Secondary School in Sechelt. All ages are welcome.
Refusing to serve as a doctor in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, Klein came to Canada in 1967 where he established a family practice and became a professor and researcher at McGill University. Klein is feted in the medical world for his research and practice that challenges conventional medical wisdom.
Characterized as a radical physician, Klein has worked and researched in family practice and maternity care. He has been a critic of the health sector, often questioning the value of standard medical procedures. In addition to his insights and innovations, Klein will address the need to protect our health care system from the push for more private care. Such a push risks destroying the basic equity that Klein characterizes “ as the finest expression of ourselves as Canadians.”
Klein is professor emeritus at UBC where he teaches in family practice and midwifery. Career highlights include headships of the McGill Department of Family Practice and Vancouver’s Children’s and Women’s Hospitals. He is a long-time member of the editorial board of “Birth,” a member of the Board of Canadian Doctors for Medicare, senior scientist emeritus at the Child and Family Research Institute in Vancouver working to bring back regulated midwifery, and the recipient of multiple lifetime research awards as well as the Order of Canada. Klein currently divides his time between Vancouver and Roberts Creek.
Sponsored by the Sunshine Coast Credit Union and School District No. 46, this memorial lecture is named after the late Clifford Smith, a widely respected educator and superintendent of schools for many years and a former chair of ElderCollege who was a passionate advocate of lifelong learning.
– Submitted
