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Hey, I really liked this post!
I absolutely agree with you that it is humbling to hear of a medical doctor’s own struggles with health despite his extensive training surrounding the subject. It’s something that nobody would really expect, since we all want our doctors to somehow be super-humans with super-bodies and super-brains too./ I mean c’mon, is that too much to ask? /
Of course! The burnout experienced in the medical profession is insane, and this is partly due to the crazy expectations placed on them in a system that doesn’t allow them to care for everyone that walks into their clinics. Like Tweedy mentioned on his rural rotation, there are people who can only visit the doctor once a month with chronic illnesses and the doctors they see aren’t always able to prescribe them what they need due to insurance issues. Structural issues like these seem to be everywhere, and I loved how you related it to his quote about facing his family’s past. Truly, chronic health problems like hypertension of mental health issues can be intergenerational because they are comprised of an extra-biological social component in addition to just genes being passed down from parent to child. Factors like income are determinative when it comes to health, and class mobility in America is extremely difficult when those living in poverty are often denied the resources to lift themselves out of it. Often times they’re disadvantaged even further by poorer education, welfare services with myopic criteria, and a lack of access to affordable healthcare. I guess your post just really made me think about how great it is that Tweedy’s education allowed him to reconcile his family’s past health issues, but how many people sadly don’t share this same experience.
I thought that our lecture on understanding racism and the political economy’s effects on health, illness, and survival this past Wednesday was really relevant to this section of the Tweedy reading. Demographic and class factors play a huge part in who is at risk, who receives care, and what quality of care they actually experience. In Black Man in a White Coat, Tweedy mentions a story about three New Yorkers (of varying social classes) that each have a heart attack at the same time and the different journeys they experienced. The New York Times found that the wealthy heart attack patient recovered quickly with little to no complications, the middle-class man had a minor complication, and the working-class woman suffered many complications that made her recovery slower and more difficult. Clearly, the amount of money that one has available greatly changes their level of access to high quality medical care. Statistics and stories come into play here; we need both in order to understand trends like these, and how class factors are intersectional with those of race. Both stories and statistics are necessary to track the quantifiable information in order to structurally adjust social programs and institutions, while stories are very important to showing the more personal effects that illness, race, and class-factors can have on people.
I think Tweedy does an amazing job tying race not only to medical care, but also to medical education. African Americans receive a vastly different quality of medical care in comparison to whites, and this stems from cultural biases as well as structural hurdles. Tweedy conveys multiple times the anxieties that he feels each time in the lecture when he hears that African Americans live at a greater risk for many diseases and conditions. I think that the great disparity in quality medical care necessitates a discussion of structural competency. Many of the students in medical schools were historically, and remain today, largely white. Tweedy mentions being one of approximately six black students in his class at Duke, one which was praised as their most diverse and talented classes yet while anyone can see that clearly that class was dominated by one or two racial groups. The doctors that are subsequently put out into the world then don’t reflect the diversity of the citizens they serve. I think it’s really important that our medical system and its values reflect those of the individuals placing their trust in it, both in racial and ethnic diversity and ideologically
