What Grinds My Gears

For those of you that have seen Family Guy, I am going to go on a rant about “what grinds my gears.” What really grinds my gears is the lack of actual health care in America. We go to the doctor, where they take the Hippocratic oath “to treat the ill to the best of one's ability, to preserve a patient's privacy, to teach the secrets of medicine to the next generation,” and so on ...But it feels like they don’t actually mean it.

Let me expand on why I started feeling this way. If you follow the world of fashion and hip hop you will know that Kim Porter, age 47, a black women, died in November 2018. Kim Porter was a fashion model, actress, and mother of 4 children, 3 of which she shared with music mogul Sean P. Diddy Combs. Reports stated that Kim had been complaining of chest pains to her doctors weeks prior to her death from cardiac arrest. 47 years old is quite a young age to suffer a fatal heart attack.Since Kim was famous (you can google her if you to know more about who she was) her story got a lot of attention. But this story is not unique. I went down a rabbit hole and started googling other stories like hers. There was way to many to count. I started wanting to know how could this lack of care be happening. I found an article published in 2016 in the National Academy of Science claiming that in their research they found that doctors believed that there are biological differences in the way black people and white people felt pain, and because of this offered incorrect treatment plans for their black patients (Hoffman et al., 2016). It makes me wonder when will this end. People, regardless of black or white, are losing their lives, children are losing their parents, parents are losing their children. If you are a doctor, or you strive to be a doctor, you should learn first to recognize and out set aside your own bias and treat people to the best of your ability.

Hoffman, K. M., Trawalter, S., Axt, J. R., & Oliver, M. N. (2016). Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(16), 4296-301.