Beyoncé had fucking preeclampsia that shit will KILL YOU and people are really trying to all women that narrative. the maternal mortality rate of Black women is higher than any other woman in the United States. she a Black woman could have died and y’all trying to center this into some bullshit. Black women die everyday in childbirth and soon after and that’s after reconciling that we’ve been experimented on and sterilized against our will historically. now currently we cannot even have healthy babies and cannot even speak about it without people trying to bogart that narrative like… she could have DIED. a rich ass Black woman, so imagine what the everyday Black woman goes through dealing with obstetric medicine and the healthcare system it’s appalling.
The same thing happened to Serena Williams. She kept insisting to her doctors that something was wrong after she gave birth to her daughter. They didn’t believe Serena and she almost died.
Here’s some not so fun facts. The US has the highest rate of infant and maternal death rates in the developed world. You’re more likely to die here giving birth or within the first year of birth than a so called third world country.
Also there’s been research that proved doctors and health care workers are less empathetic to black patients because they’re biased in believing black people can tolerate more pain. Who knows maybe that’s why more white people are addicted to pain medications and there’s a “epidemic” because they received more empathy?
That lack of empathy causes black patients to get less pain medication and get misdiagnosed because their heath concerns fall on unsympathetic ears. Also that lack of empathy spills over to the justice system. Blacks are most likely to receive more harsh sentences and youth offenders aren’t perceived as young children. They’re more likely to be sentenced as adults.
The bottom line is rich, famous, poor etc if your black you have to be more diligent in choosing your healthcare provider. If someone doesn’t believe in your pain then don’t stop until you find a doctor that has your best interest at heart. Healthcare workers aren’t exempt from bias or racism.
women and black people absolutely get worse care – so if you’re black AND a woman, guess what. yeah. This shit needs to change.
One of the ways they are working on studying and creating that change is by using VR training for health care professionals. See, right now, they hire actors to come in with “symptoms” and be normal, or difficult, or leave symptoms out etc etc, for diagnostics and patient care training, and that leaves a lot of wiggle room for a person to assume it was something not race or gender related about that person that threw them off their game or whatever.
But with VR, you can LITERALLY have EVERY SINGLE aspect of a training patient be EXACTLY the same, except their skin color, or gender, or whatever. So then during training, you can be like “hey Mark, did you know that your success rates are noticeably lower when we control for darker skin color? Analysis indicates that the darker their skin color, the less you listen to their description of their symptoms” and Mark can’t think it was anything about the person/actor and has to admit to the inherent and unacknowledged racial bias he is displaying. Like “no Mark, you diagnosed correctly with Karen and not with Ayesha and they are both identical computer programs whose only difference is name and skin color. Yeah, it’s the same voice reading the same script and everything. Face yourself and grow, Mark, or stop training to be a doctor”
This ↑ ↑ is a great first step in holding healthcare professionals accountable. What sense does it make to take The Hippocratic Oath or The Nightingale Pledge if they’re going to give lesser care because of skin color?
When healthcare workers are biased they put their patients at risk. Their employers should do whatever it takes to make sure they have the best doctors on staff and this is a good start.
The war on drugs is rooted in racist policies . The failure of the war and drugs is obvious. We need to find a better solution, because people of color should never be the victims of racist policies. White Americans are more likely than black Americans to have used most kinds of illegal drugs, including cocaine and LSD. Yet blacks are far more likely to go to prison for marijuana, which is not a hard drug. Moreover , even when white people get caught , they get less time in prison.
…is that Rachael Leigh Cook, the same actress who did the original anti-drug ad when she was a teenager?
