Why are we letting history repeat itself?

The old stereotypes about minorities in medicine still have not been dispelled. When we are not participating in the system, then how is the system going to get better care? 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi, Angie Clemens here, the host of the Can I Brow Your Skin podcast? And here in April, we are talking about minority health, and we're gonna jump right in it. Why do minorities have, especially black Americans, why do we have such a distrust of the health system? History. And, you know, we have Henry Henry Adelax, and then you you have Marion Sims, and he is a lot of people call him the um founder of gynecology. I call him the modern torture of black women that led to a whole medical field on its own. Because let's be honest, the whole idea of so many of the stereotypes comes from the the fact that how um black people were treated in this country from the very beginning and foundation, from the whole idea that we don't feel pain and uh it's just and that that's one of the things that pisses me off so much is being someone in the medical field and the fact that current, current, not 30, 40, 50, 60, 100 years ago, current graduating medical students, these are people entering the residency, these are people who will become doctors in the next well, practicing physicians and attendings in the next few years because they're already doctors if they're going into their residency. Um, anyway, um they think that the pain threshold of black people is different than that of other races. And then there is um a survey that was um done by the Association of American Medical Colleges in 2020 that said that black women and men do not need as much pain medication as others. These are residents, these are people who are helping in care, and another one, which is even worse or better, depending on how you look at it. I don't know. I think it's worse. In 2016, the Journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, residents and medical students thought that black skin was thicker than white skin. And I will tell you, I am a difficult poke. Um, my my my veins are are huge and juicy. You can see them. And I tell people all the time, I'm a difficult stick. And people will say to me, Oh, I can see it. I'm like, you can see it, but you will not be able to find it. You know, get you know, I have this technology now called vein finder, where they can actually use um digital technology to see the vein. And um, especially when I was um being poked like a freaking lab rat when I was um hospitalized for a while a couple years ago, you know, people would like fish around. And I had once one of the worst sticks of my life happened recently, and I was I had a whole bruise around my arm, and I got a welt that was about two inches long from someone being such a horrible phlebotomist, and um, and this was just from giving blood for a basic CBC, like just run-of-the-mill uh blood test, and the phlebotomist that was sticking me, who I kept telling, you know, please, you know, I'm a hard stick, I'm a hard stick, please be careful, please be careful. And they just poked the cowboy shit out of me without heeding anything I said. And it's actually kind of funny because they say that you know, doctors and some nurses make the worst kinds of patients. And so I'm cognizant of that. And so whenever I'm in the hospital, whenever I have to see a medical professional, I listen. Actually, I was talking to one of my good friends recently. Um, she's a physician, and she was going through some some health things, and then she was saying how, you know, one of her doctors came in the room and pretty much was saying, I am the doctor here. Like, this is my ship now, and made her listen to what they were saying. And it was funny to me. And then she said after that specialist appointment, she went back to see her normal PCP and she went in there with only, you know, like a sl a small number of questions for her. I'm like, uh-oh, you're getting better, only that many. Because sometimes we allow our education to make us want to guide our health care. And I think a lot of people are like that. It's like a builder. You know how to build, and you have someone doing something on your house. If you don't like the way they're putting in a bolt or a splint, I have no idea, guys. Um, because I I I do I do some things around the house, but I will not do construction work at all. What's absolutely not. But you're gonna say something, and so it's that same kind of thing. One of the things I want to talk about is, you know, I want to mention Henrietta Lax. And a lot of people, if you're in science, you've used the Gila cell. And I I use the HELA cell. I actually made some really cool um discoveries using the Gela cell. I actually I differentiated the HELA cell using um some uh anyway. But Henrietta Lax was um this poor woman who had cancer, a very aggressive cancer. Um thermal uh thermoscientific actually obtained her cells illegally and propagated them. She died poor and unable to afford a lot of her medical care. Well, in 2023, her family finally reached, and it's a non-disclosed settlement, and um and so you know, it's it's one of those things where there is something negative that happens, and years and years later you get a positive out of it. But this woman died decades ago, and you know, it is a good thing that her family finally got their dues. Um, I I will tell you that using a Gila cell in my research was something I never knew the story behind it until well after uh the research I did on it, the discoveries I made using those sales. And then I actually looked up after I found out about the Gila sales, about the other cell lines I was using, like Cho, which is just a uh Chinese hamster ovaries, what Cho stood for. And so as I'm looking at all the different cell lines I was using, um I I I realized that this was the only illegally obtained cell line that I was using. And it sat very wrong with me as you know, once I started reading the history, and you know, there's books about Henrietta Lax. And she she will forever live on because the research done on her cells and the discoveries she helped her cells helped make are enormous, and she never had a say in it, and that bothered me, you know. Uh, and you know, as a female, gynecology is something I have no choice but to participate in, and the fact that the gynecological field was built on the torture of black female slaves because there was no anesthesia used, and this that man, and a lot of people will call him a doctor, he was a torturist, a rapist, and an asshole, was cutting into people and onto people without anesthesia, and people like, oh well, these discoveries, fuck his discoveries. You tortured women for years for your discoveries. And one of the things that, and so many misconceptions still are founded from his work, because if you're a woman who's ever gotten a caposcopy, you know that's done without anesthesia and no numbing, no nothing. And for those of you that don't know what a coposcopy is, it's a biopsy of the cervix. And so imagine, because you remember um the special episode that I did, um, where I was saying that male genitalia is just uh external versions of female genitalia. Imagine someone coming and taking a punch, you know, a nice little hole out of one of your happy little organs um with no anesthesia. You would have an absolute fit. And so that's what they do to women every day. I I remember my very first copscopy, and you know, you just go into the into the gynecologist, they throw you some into some stirrups, you know, natural instinct is try to cover up your bits, and they say, Ling your knees out further, further, further, and they get head deep in your crap, they open you up with a speculum, they go on with the tool, punch, pull out a piece of your cervix, and then they say, Bitey, and how's the end of it? But these are the types of things that were happening and how this whole field got developed, and it's absolutely horrific. But I will say that out of all of the negative things, I want to give a shout out to a Dr. Joel uh Burville. He's from Yale and SO1 from HMF. No, but um, he is doing some amazing, amazing things with his social media platform, and he calls himself the uh medical myth buster, and he spends his entire page talking to dispelling BS things about people with melanin. Um, one of the more common things that I remember just off the bat about his pages with Lyme disease and tick bites. Everyone, if you've been an outdoor person, you're in a rural area, they always tell you to look for the bullseye pattern because that's what a tick bite looks like. But not in brown people. That's not what it looks like at all in us. And I actually know a couple people that got bitten by a tick and it didn't look like a bullseye. So they didn't think it was a tick bite, end up developing Lyme disease. And so that was one of the that's actually one of the reasons why I came upon his page and he talks about how medical illustrations need to include a variety of skin tones. And I absolutely agree, and that's why I'm shouting out his page by name, because he does really, really great work. And so that's one of the reasons why I think it's very important for people of color to actually go to the doctor, help with illustrations, help with increasing the knowledge of people coming out of medical school. Because right now, there's only 3% of us out there in the field, and the major saturation of people in medicine, they don't have the knowledge, they don't know what to look for on our skin. And so when you have us not going to the doctor, you have us not participating in illustrations in the field, you don't have us educating us. That's where you get all these disparities, and that's where you get all of these problems that come out. And the last thing I want to um actually mention for those of you that don't know, everyone knows emergency medicine. We've all seen an ambulance, some of us have been in ambulances, but fun fact uh 1967 was when the first ambulance came to the United States. It was actually called Freedom House. And it was because a lot of black people would not have emergency um care. People would not, if most people back in that day, you would call a cab and a cab would take you to the hospital. Well, cabs wouldn't come for black Americans to get to the hospital. And so what we ended up doing as a community, and this was in Pittsburgh, they actually trained each other to come in a vehicle to pick up black people where they were shot, whether they were beat, whatever happened, to actually take them to a medical facility that would see colored people. So you're welcome, America, because the first ambulance service here in the US were by a bunch of black men who were trained to take each other to the hospital. So when I say we need to start training each other, I mean getting back to that. We need to see the doctor, we need to train each other, we need to help people teach and learn how to care for us and our skin and what diseases look like in us. So stop being pussies, go to the doctor, help each other out, talk to each other, make a green book if you have to, but we need to care for ourselves, teach people how to care for us, and build a community where it facilitates us wanting to go into the field. I remember when I went to college, medical school, everything at a PWI. I was one of maybe one in my class, 500. If we got a big enough class, I'd see someone else, but we need to do more. And so this is my call to action. Besides, like, subscribe, comment. Thank you. Bye.