When my friend became pregnant with her second child, her nausea was so bad she thought she was going to have to terminate her pregnancy.🤰🏾 She went to the doctor several times asking for help with her symptoms but they kept sending her home without help or treatment, as if they didn't believe her 😮😡 She felt like they were treating her as if she was just complaining of usual morning sickness even though she explained over and over how intense and debilitating it was -she was barely able to eat or hold food down and had lost 15 pounds, during a time when she should have been gaining, not loosing weight.
After several trips to the hospital, she was finally able to get the anti-nausea medication she needed, but when she needed more they blamed her for her symptoms. She was told that she was eating the wrong foods and doing things she wasn’t doing.
She felt helpless. The doctors weren’t listening and they showed no empathy 😔
🤱🏾Black mothers often find their self-reports of painful symptoms overlooked or minimized by doctors (Owens & Fett 2019)
A 2016 study revealed that 50% of medical students & residents believe one or more of the following about people with black skin:
❌They have a higher pain tolerance
❌Their skin is thicker
❌They have less sensitive nerve endings
😮 😰
All of which are completely FALSE‼️
(National Academy of Science 2018)
👉🏽 Another study found that docs are twice as likely to underestimate Black patients’ pain and less likely to prescribe the necessary medication (Hoffman et al, 2016)
In order to prevent this from happening in the future we all have to be aware of it, not just doctors and not just the people suffering because of it, but all of us. It's up to society as a whole to hold medical institutions accountable just like we are trying to do with the criminal justice system.
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My goal in sharing this info is to shed light on the situation, speak up for those who aren’t heard, listened to, or believed, and make anti-racist allyship a verb.
Listen to Black Women (and all WOC), believe them, validate their experiences, and speak up for others.
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