Housecall with host David Doman, MD, invites guest Tuesday Cook, MD, FACS a noted Bariatric Surgeon and active with The Maryland State Medical Society or MedChi is here do discuss how to help deal with the BIPOC challenges of practicing medicine.
Dr. Cook attended Howard University College of Medicine in DC for her medical degree and general surgery residency for several reason. Howard helps People Of Color (POC) in terms of healthcare. Dr. Cook could see people like herself and could directly improve her community, which she is surrounded by at Howard. She was confident in attending and training there since Howard University Hospital (HUH) has been a prestigious Historically Black College (HBC). Over the course of its 145-year history of providing the finest primary, secondary and tertiary health care services, Howard University Hospital has become one of the most comprehensive health care facilities in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and designated a DC Level 1 Trauma Center.
Dr. Cook believes a big part of her Howard training was to learn the patient as a person too. BIPOC who came for treatment saw people like them and felt comfortable that they would receive appropriate care and information. They may have mistrusted healthcare in the past from mistreatment and secret experiments like the Tuskegee Study, Henrietta Lacks, and the creation of the modern vaginal speculum. A patient/physician concordance is necessary in order to have cultural competency by having explicit bias training for all physicians, so patients would have more trust in general. This would lead to better outcomes and since there isn’t enough BIPOC physicians for BIPOC patients it is why we must have better healthcare system exist, in ever institution in the US, to have enough diverse physicians.
Racial diversity is lacking in academic positions in Universities all over the US as well. Within these communities discouragement exist. Increasing rank and leadership roles are passed by regardless of working as hard or harder, then having more publications, and then still no recognition or placement. Which can be disheartening.
What is Microaggressions?
Microaggressions are more than just insults, insensitive comments, or generalized jerky behavior.
They’re something very specific: the kinds of remarks, questions, or actions that are painful because they have to do with a person’s membership in a group that’s discriminated against or subject to stereotypes. And a key part of what makes them so disconcerting is that they happen casually, frequently, and often without any harm intended, in everyday life.
Microaggressions can effect you in many adverse ways like your performance, physical and mental health, self-esteem, or achievements in your career. Continuous cycles then decreases the effects a BIPOC physician would have on patients healthcare and improving a patients outcome.
What is BIPOC?
Black and Indigenous People of Color
Is a person-first language. It enables a shift away from terms like “marginalized” and “minority.” Used in order to undo Native invisibility, anti-Blackness, dismantle white supremacy and advance racial justice. “BIPOC” emphasizes, more specifically than the term “People of Color (POC).
What is Black Tax?
The life expectancy of black people in the US that has decreased from dealing with all of the effects of social determinants in health that exist from just being black in the US. It’s well known in Medicine that your zip code says more about your health, than genetics.
Also, “Black tax” is referencing how BIPOC must work harder and pay more to receive the same benefits and opportunity as their White or non-Black peers in their careers.
The “Black tax” phenomenon has increased with the COVID-19 crisis. Unfortunately, increasing the cost of being Black in America.
Who are some Significant BIPOC in the Medical Field?
In 1721 thanks to the wisdom passed on from Onesimus, an African slave sold to Cotton Mather, an influential minister in Boston. When Mather asked Onesimus if he had ever had smallpox back in Africa, Onesimus described the practice of variolation to prevent smallpox epidemics.
In 1939, Charles Drew developed novel methods of separating plasma from erythrocytes and dramatically which increased the shelf life of plasma to two months. Although plasma lacked the oxygen-carrying capacity of whole blood, it was an exceedingly useful product for the replacement of volume and clotting factors, especially in victims of trauma and war.