Maeve Hickey, COM ‘23
What we’ve been experiencing in the past few months is the unmasking of racism and how it affects social determinants of health through the lens of COVID-19. Racist policy across systems in our country affect access to care, healthy food, fair-wage employment, higher education, which then affect the health of individuals. These inequities in medicine have always been present, spanning from adverse Black maternal and newborn outcomes, to the underrepresentation of Black attendings, administrators in hospitals and medical education to race-based medicine which has its roots in slavery and continues to exist today.
We have seen COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black communities, especially in Maine, which has the largest disparity in COVID-19 cases based on race. We have also seen the impact of the
coronavirus on Asian-American folks who have been subject to racism and microaggressions through political rhetoric and societal misconceptions of the virus.
We have reached a point where people who have been privileged are noticing these disparities in health, in police violence, in education, and other systems, and want to take action on how to overcome the racist policy our country has been built on. Those who have been advocates for a long time on these issues, often BIPOC advocates, have carried this work for far too long.
This metaphor comes up in the gun violence discussion a lot that “this is our lane” since people in healthcare interact with gun violence survivors. It also applies to racism. People in healthcare exist in a system that has tested on people of color, without their knowledge or consent, to find safer medical procedures and medications and it was a doctor that advocated for slavery on the basis of assumptions that Black people had a lower lung capacity, so it was healthy for them to be enslaved. It is “our lane” to talk about racism in medicine and how it affects the health of our patients. It is on us to recognize and check the biases we hold within ourselves based on our privilege, whether it is being white or wearing a white coat, to prevent it from adversely affecting the safety of our patients. Though checking the biases within ourselves is not enough to challenge medical racism, because it weaves its way into all aspects of our patient’s lives. It is important to normalize conversations around social determinants of health, and how they may be disproportionately impacted by racism when we think about a patient’s care. We need to conduct research that reflects the populations across the United States so that BIPOC communities have equitable representation in medication studies. We need to challenge race being included in boards questions which leads to the jump of certain diagnoses.
“ It is “our lane” to talk about racism in medicine and how it affects the health of our patients. -Maeve Hickey, COM '23