11 Aug Disabled marathoners drub runners

Here’s a bit of contrarian sporting news that escaped my attention when it happened April 18:  The 20 fastest finishers in the men’s 2011 Boston Marathon had one thing in common: All raced in wheelchairs.

Our friend Warren Reed highlights this remarkable (but largely unremarked upon) fact in an article for the Journal of Medical Ethics decrying the use of outdated terms about disabilities in scholarly writing by medical researchers. It’s a point Reed has gently chided Contrarian about in the past.

In an informal search of half a dozen medical journals, Reed found 8,680 articles in which the word “wheelchair” was paired with either “bound” or “confined.”

Clearly there are many in the medical profession who don’t understand that wheelchairs are instruments of liberation, not confinement.

In his recent introduction [pdf] to the World Health Organization’s World Report on Disability [pdf], Nobel Laureate Stephen Hawking voices hope that “this century will mark a turning point =for inclusion of people with disabilities in the lives of their societies.”

Notes Reed: “It’s hard to imagine how that might happen if 8680 medical researchers continue to think of wheelchairs as anchors rather than sails.”