Sheila Ramanathan is a family physician.
“I want to see the doctor. Not you. I don’t like your kind. I want to see a white doctor, a man,” a patient gasping for air in an emergency room says to the dark-skinned resident assessing her vitals.
“Speak slowly, I don’t understand you people,” a male patient says as an ethnic attending discusses a complicated procedure to obtain consent.
“Are you sure you are old enough to be a doctor?” …
Physicians have a long history of discriminating against patients, and racial discrimination only scratches the surface of current problems facing patients who seek access to care. The Tuskegee Syphilis trials demonstrated how the medical community exploited and compromised the trust of African American patients. Recent research indicates that out of a study of 222 residents and medical students, about half demonstrated false beliefs concerning biological differences between white and black …
My eyes flitted down to the electronic medical record in front of me. I was conducting a physical assessment of a patient new to my clinic and the area. The forty-five-year-old male sat down before me, and I noticed immediately that he was morbidly obese and sweating profusely. I tapped away as he rattled off his various diagnoses which included: cervical radiculopathy, depression, chronic low back pain with radiculopathy, and …
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