11 Jan Knock down anti-Black racism in medicine, two powerhouse advocates tell health-care sector in new CMAJ article
“I’ve been to the emergency department and been told I wasn’t having a crisis. They didn’t believe me until I threw up on myself. It turns out I had a blood clot and the vein was twice the normal size” — unnamed Black man quoted in an Ontario Ministry of Health report in 2017.
When rapper John River went to a hospital emergency room in 2017 with shortness of breath and severe headaches, he was treated like he was faking his symptoms to get drugs. When he turned to social media for help, well-wishers told him how he and his family acted and dressed at the hospital would impact the kind of care he would receive. No hoodies, for instance. His mother tried to button a dress shirt on to him as he lay unconscious on a stretcher. He was eventually diagnosed with a spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak from a prior procedure.
For years, Black people have shared, with data scientists, governments, academics, journalists and each other, terrifying stories of not being believed in hospitals, of receiving substandard care, of feeling like they were left to die.
In this COVID-era, race-aggregated data showing Black people disproportionately impacted by the virus has rightly raised awareness and alarm over the impact of racism across systems leading to that outcome.
“The field of medicine can no longer deny or overlook the existence of systemic anti-Black racism in Canada and how it affects the health of Black people and communities,” write OmiSoore Dryden of Dalhousie University and Onye Nnorom from the University of Toronto.
In a Canadian Medical Association Journal article released Monday, the two powerhouse experts in the field of anti-Black racism in medicine say the health-care system needs to focus on — and redress — not only the reasons that send Black Canadians to hospitals but how they’re treated when they get there.
Despite protests against anti-Black racism this summer, despite the UN expressing concern in 2017 of the plight of Black Canadians, “the impression that we got is that many Canadian physicians did not think that anti-Black racism is a problem in Canada,” Nnorom told the Star. And that “most physicians do not have an understanding of how racism operates as a system such that some groups are disproportionately disadvantaged.”
With this article, Dryden said, the authors aimed to “tell practitioners and clinicians that your patients are not just bodies in front of you. They come with experiences. One of the experiences your Black patients come with is anti-Black racism.”
Read the full article by at Toronto Star of January 11, 2021!