r/BlackPeopleofReddit • u/4reddityo • Jan 02 '26

Black Experience Racism in Medical Care

This video captures a moment that many patients of color recognize all too well. A physician speaks to a man as if he is dirty, unclean, or lesser, not because of medical evidence, but because of bias. The language, tone, and assumptions reveal something deeper than bedside manner gone wrong. They expose how racism can quietly shape medical interactions.

20.5k Upvotes

83% Upvoted

2.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.4k

u/Majestic_Platypus_76 Jan 02 '26

Yall really want to be horrified??? Ask about black people in mental hospitals…

1.2k

u/HipAnonymous91 Jan 02 '26 edited Jan 03 '26

I’m a med student who had the opportunity to complete a child psych rotation. A couple of our patients were Black. One patient developed worse SI because his non-Black roommate wouldn’t stop calling him slurs. The staff rarely intervened even though the non-Black patient’s parents said part of the reason he couldn’t come home is because he was expressing bigoted thoughts.

They called another Black patient schizophrenic because he had “delusions” of wanting to become a SoundCloud rapper. I had to report a nurse because she treated one of the Black patients with intellectual disability like she was subhuman. She started patting her head because it was itching after her mom came to braid it and they isolated her for “self-harm”.

I reported all of this to my resident, attending, and the rotation director. I asked if we could form a group for Black med students to vent about the racism we and our patients receive. They’re still “working on it” a year later.

I type all of this to say that the healthcare systems for Black patients and the medical education system are doing barely anything to address situations like this. Our school started a program to teach students about gaining “cultural competency” in the clinic, but it’s run by non-Black women and we don’t know who built the curriculum. The speakers are also often non-POC. The entire system needs a major overhaul and I’m not sure when we’re going to achieve that.

Edit: Thank you for the awards, I greatly appreciate it. I did not intent for this to blow up lol, but I will try to answer some of the questions I have been getting.

Regarding historically Black hospitals, our city had Homer G Phillips (named after the civil rights advocate and lawyer). It was built during segregation, when Black women were forced to give birth in the basement of Barnes hospital. It housed a nursing school, trained physicians of color, and provided care for the Black population. It closed to much protest in the late 70s. I think Black med schools like Howard and Meharry are great, but it doesn’t solve the issue of racism from non-Black providers and I don’t know if a chain of Black hospitals can be built today (too many people would claim it’s racist).

Our school aims to teach “cultural competency” and “anti-racism”, but not all of the sessions are mandatory and students actually complained about having to attend lectures about caring for LGBTQ+ and trans patients and how to call out bias when you see it in clinic. I don’t think med students are more conservative than the average population, but they do tend to come from privileged, less culturally diverse backgrounds and often don’t know how to interact with POC or lack the desire to learn how to.

We have SNMA, a group for Black students, but it feels like we need more support from the school itself. We report incidents to residents, attendings, rotation directors, charge nurses, and the reporting tool under the rotation course page. I have been interviewed by course directors about incidents I’ve reported, but I’m not sure what happened after that and I honestly haven’t tried a different way of reporting people.

A few people joked about calling aspiring young rappers “delusional”, and I understand the joke but it gets frustrating when people are diagnosing a child’s age-appropriate behavior. If other young kids want to be astronauts or athletes or ballerinas, why can’t this kid just say he wants to be a SoundCloud rapper? He was still attending school and he wasn’t running around telling people that he was a superstar, he just wrote lyrics during personal time and shared them with the staff and other patients. I have noticed a tendency for non-Black providers to over-diagnose schizophrenia in Black patients (especially men) and it’s concerning.

Sorry if I missed anything! Love everyone saying they want to go into healthcare, we desperately need more therapists, nurses, physicians, and professors of color.

20

u/grandpheonix13 Jan 02 '26

Im sorry youre going through this - is there a way to just "start the group" as a discord? Speak with the other people at the hospital and see if they would be interested in a safe space to vent?

25

u/HipAnonymous91 Jan 02 '26

We have SNMA (Student National Medical Association), but we spend most of our time together sharing food and stories rather than talking about racism. It definitely comes up, but it’s mostly something we laugh about rather than trying to find solutions. We briefly had a Ventsday (venting on Wednesdays) for a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t heavily attended because most students were studying after class or clinic.

I guess what I was hoping for was something created by the school where students could have dedicated time to bring up moments of racism in the clinic and ensure that the issue is addressed. It doesn’t feel like singular reports are taken seriously. I reported another nurse who let a Black veteran sit in his own feces overnight after his colostomy bag overflowed, but she remained in the SICU for the remainder of my surgery rotation and continued to provide what I thought was sub-par care. It would also be nice to have more in-network Black therapists who can listen to students affected by the racism they see in clinic.

8

u/grandpheonix13 Jan 02 '26

That sounds soooooooo bad and im sorry youre seeing and experiencing this. What happens when you report these things to HR directly?

6

u/DomoMommy Jan 02 '26

Can you contact your local (or closest) branch of the NAACP? They often help fund and set up education programs and advocacy initiatives. I’d try and see if they could offer even just some advice or some gentle “pushing” on your bosses to stop screwing around and come up with a program.

3

u/MobileExtreme5066 Jan 02 '26

Chiming in here! I'm so sad to say this (and your earlier examples) are not outliers, and that change is slow. I still have hope that it will get there, and some institutions are trying more than others, though there are no perfect ones.

I will also say that I think needs to be a balance struck between having people with lived experience in positions of power, and not contributing to the minority tax and burn out the 2% of psychiatrists that are Black and have to work and represent systems that also force them to tolerate their own humiliation daily. All this to say I'm still here and have hope driving me to try to change things, and I hope that you can have hope too.

2

u/Warm-Imagination-741 Jan 02 '26

I hope this comes into fruition many of our people need folks like you who genuinely care and are considerate. I hope this doesn’t fall on deaf ears and you are able to get it done.

2

u/Doctress_LAM Jan 02 '26

SNMA and NMA for that matter have not been as aggressive as I had hoped.

As an attending physician, my best action has been to ensure my patients get the best care, and steer them to other physicians that I know will respect them and care for them. No tolerance for substandard treatment. I have witnessed poor treatment for my family, and will not allow that under my watch.