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That doesn't surprise me.

Just because someone is a doctor doesn't make them a good person. The more shitty people they're around, the harder it is to be good.

One of my DILs is a woman of color. She was in so much pain but got turned away from two emergency rooms because they labeled her as seeking opioids. Luckily we were able to drive her to a hospital in a nearby town that took her seriously. She had an ovarian torsion. It was quite serious and getting worse by the minute. Thank God for the ER doc at that hospital, who happened to be a woman of color herself.

Off the main topic, but those insurance companies, fuck those people. My doctor is having so much trouble getting a pre-authorization for a medication that I truly need. We've been going in circles for weeks. I'm allergic to one of the ingredients in the cheaper meds and they still want me to rule those out first. Maybe it's just me, but I don't like it when my throat swells shut.

Every time my Drs office calls them, it's like we are starting over from scratch.

I honestly don't know how those people sleep at night.

The Tuskegee experiment did the most damage imo. So absolutely fucked up...

Black Americans were promised free healthcare under the guise of an experiment intending to study the late stages of syphilis (which is fatal). The men were told they were being treated for "bad blood" (a common term at the time), but they were really just provided placebos while the effects of the disease were secretly recorded.

In order to track the disease’s full progression, researchers provided no effective care as the men died, went blind or insane or experienced other severe health problems due to their untreated syphilis.

A man named Peter Buxton discovered the experiment and raised concerns over it's ethical violations, but the review board decided to continue the experiment until all participants had perished and autopsies could be preformed. Buxton was having none of it, and leaked it to the press.

By that time, 28 participants had perished from syphilis, 100 more had passed away from related complications, at least 40 spouses had been diagnosed with it and the disease had been passed to 19 children at birth.

In 1973, Congress held hearings on the Tuskegee experiments, and the following year the study’s surviving participants, along with the heirs of those who died, received a $10 million out-of-court settlement. Additionally, new guidelines were issued to protect human subjects in U.S. government-funded research projects.

This is still a very potent source of lingering distrust of the healthcare industry among Black Americans.

I'm sure I could use some self-reflection, too.

We all can. But that's the difference between us 'cause many don't care to look.

I'm sure none of these healthcare workers think they're being racist at all. It's all played out at a subconscious level. Racism is so baked into society that most people who are being racist don't even realize they're being racist.

You are so 100% correct. This is called implicit racism, and it permeates our society to a systemic level. Healthcare can be a good example, and the U.S. criminal justice system is the best example imo.

One thing that really drives home the systemic implicit racism in this country are studies that have people rate black and white men on how strong/large/muscular and threatening they perceive them to be. The black men were perceived to be more threatening and that use of force was more likely to be viewed as justified. Black and white Americans both perceived the black men to be stronger, taller, and more muscular than their equal-sized white counterparts. Source

Another study found that people view black boys as older than they are, and that they are more responsible for their actions than white boys, whose actions were more likely to be excused by the belief of childhood innocence. So our society essentially strips black boys of their perceived childhood innocence. Same Source

I was kind of shocked when I first learned that black patients have measurably better health outcomes when they have black doctors. Ideally I'd like doctors to just not be racist, but in practice I think training more black doctors is the best way to improve care for black patients. It still involves dealing with racism, but I suspect it's easier to deal with it in medical education than in the whole medical profession.

It really sucks that conversations like this are needed.

That's wild that cholesterol isn't part of a standard physical where you are. I've had mine checked yearly since I was 18.