TED Talk: The Problem with Race-Based Medicine
Social justice advocate and law scholar Dorothy Roberts has a precise and powerful message: Race-based medicine is bad medicine. Even today, many doctors still use race as a medical shortcut; they make important decisions about things like pain tolerance based on a patient's skin color instead of medical observation and measurement. In this searing talk, Roberts lays out the lingering traces of race-based medicine -- and invites us to be a part of ending it. "It is more urgent than ever to finally abandon this backward legacy," she says, "and to affirm our common humanity by ending the social inequalities that truly divide us."
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Books and eBooks
Medical Bondage by Call Number: WP 11 AA1 C778m 2017ISBN: 9780820351353Publication Date: 2017-11-15
The Women Who Caught the Babies by Call Number: PHX Reserves WQ 11 AS9 G812w 2019ISBN: 9780997772074Publication Date: 2019-09-01
Battling over Birth by Call Number: WA 310 AA1 O61b 2018ISBN: 9781946665119Publication Date: 2017-12-02
Legacy by
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uche Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organisation of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbours, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives. What Dr. Uche Blackstock did not understand as a child - or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mother's footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school - were the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face. Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock's odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician - to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Call Number: WA 300 B533 2024ISBN: 9780593491287Publication Date: 2024-01-23
Under the Skin by
From an award-winning writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributor to the 1619 Project comes a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of our nation. In 2018, Linda Villarosa's New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa's article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore. Now, in Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to "live sicker and die quicker" compared to their white counterparts. Today's medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading.
Call Number: WA 30 V722u 2022ISBN: 9780385544894Publication Date: 2022-06-14
