Browse Points of View

In a post-Roe America, Black women will be disproportionately affected by the lack of abortion access and overrepresented in pregnancy-related deaths. A Black physician aims to ensure that her patients can choose for themselves.

Despite renewed awareness of deep health disparities, many of the clinicians who had gathered for a talk on obesity chose to leave afterward, rather than stay to hear about implicit bias and risk facing the uncomfortable aspects of themselves and our health care system.

In the quarter-century since H. Jack Geiger implied in an editorial that racism in the medical profession was contributing to health inequities between Black and White Americans, medical education has inched forward, but health equity remains elusive.

To address root causes of health inequity, the University of Pennsylvania Health System developed a year-long experience in which community health workers mentor and educate executives about the realities of injustice and partner with them to create structural change.

At our medical institutions, we immerse trainees in a two-tiered system. We teach them that some kinds of patients see residents and other kinds of patients see attendings. And worst of all, we teach them to pretend not to notice.

When a Black, nonbinary Ob/Gyn residency applicant didn’t match to a position, they reexamined their experience: Was the discrimination their grandfather had overcome to become Arizona’s first African American board-certified physician still at work decades later?

Code switching involves adjusting one’s style of speech, appearance, behavior, and expression to optimize others’ comfort, in exchange for fair treatment. As a Black physician, the author has found code switching essential to her success in academic medicine.

We were supposed to be talking about these Black teenagers’ aspirations to become doctors, not their fears about becoming patients. I wanted to tell them not to worry, that they could trust all doctors. But I didn’t. Because they can’t.

Standing between the author and a residency match was an act of contortion: conveying her passion about closing racial disparities in maternal health without triggering a “White fragility” response in her interviewer. And she’d finally gotten the interview she feared.

In vaccinating low-risk employees early, leaders of some U.S. health care organizations violated their duty to promote public health and contributed to the narrative that powerful people in health care are willing to serve their own interests ahead of society’s.

Although a policy of prioritizing the caregivers of medically fragile children or adults for vaccination against Covid-19 should not replace efforts to directly vaccinate eligible people with chronic disease or disability, the approach has wide-ranging benefits.

Susan Moore, Chaniece Wallace, Breonna Taylor. In 2020, even as Black people continued to die and get killed at disproportionate rates, Black health professionals continued to show up every day during the dual pandemics of Covid and police brutality.

Top government officials were among the first people vaccinated against Covid-19 in the United States. But prioritization frameworks do not grant government leaders special status, and giving them priority raises important questions of fairness and transparency.

When we hyperfocus on a few historical racist atrocities, we ascribe current Black health experiences to past racism, rooting our present in immovable past events and undermining efforts to combat mistrust. Everyday racism, by contrast, can be tackled in the present.

Covid-19 has devastated refugees and asylum seekers in U.S. federal detention centers, and the Trump administration has devised a workaround for vaccine distribution that jeopardizes the prospect of immunizing detainees, further endangering this vulnerable population.

Persons with substance use disorders — particularly those in living conditions that increase Covid risk — should be prioritized to receive SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, and vaccine-rollout plans should account for specific barriers to uptake in this population.

When a virtual White Coats for Black Lives “march” was disrupted by racist intruders, the organizers persevered. The diverse perspectives and collective support that allowed them to move forward are the tools needed for the long game of antiracism.

Mental health conditions are ubiquitous, and it is critical to seek help for them. For Black people, however, help comes with substantial risk. One manifestation of this risk ended Daniel Prude’s life, but it does not have to end his story.

Reversing the effects of hundreds of years of racism is a daunting undertaking, but academic medicine can begin by adopting an antiracist approach to training and supporting physicians with adequate representation, increased influence, and institutional resources.

“We’re Black,” said my teenage patient’s aunt, “and we know how the system works.” Having lived her life in a system that didn’t work for people of color, how could she see my unilateral decision to make her dying nephew DNR in any other way?