It is time to start firing racists. Start with Dr. Susan Moore’s doctor.
I’m just going to come out and say it: Black people continue to die in the care of institutions of power and influence because these power structures (or the people within them) do not experience meaningful punishment for killing us.
It’s why we keep seeing cops shoot an unarmed man in the back on a Tuesday and walk the streets of Anytown, USA 30 days later.
It’s why we continue to see Black women die soon after participating in the health care system in any meaningful way.
And it’s also the reason why Dr. Susan Moore is no longer with us.
Dr. Moore, a black woman and mother of a teenage college student who fair she graduated from my high school, alma mater, was running a private primary care practice in Carmel, Indiana when she went to the hospital specifically for complications associated with COVID-19. She remained in the hospital under the care of a doctor she identifies as Dr Eric Bannec (your research record), who refused to offer him both the treatment for COVID that he obviously tested positive, and the pain he reported.
Throughout your time in the hospital she documented her treatment in a FB post, your own recommendations for your care, and what the doctor’s responses were. She documented how she was sent home despite not being in a condition where this decision was safe. Within hours of returning homewas admitted to the emergency room a second hospitalwhere she could not be saved.
She looked into the camera, barely able to get more than four words out without pausing, and told us, “He told me, ‘You don’t qualify…you should go home right now.'”
Dr. Moore rightly says, “I hold…if I were white…I wouldn’t have had to go through that.”
This is a woman who took the energy and time to document her care in the hope that someone she would be penalized for what she knew was coming.
In a statement written by the hospital system’s CEO, Dennis Murphy, Dr. Moore was called a “complex” patient who “bullied” the staff. He went on to state, “I don’t think we failed in the technical aspects of caring for him,” because somehow death is not indicative of a hospital failing to provide care.
What happens to the doctor who clearly ignored your request for pain relief? Am of Indiana-have been indiscriminately prescribing pills to years for profit, but now Do doctors suddenly have a conscience and want to question the prescription of something? Why am I supposed to believe this is simply a concern for addiction, rather than wanting to force a black woman, her professional partner, into submission? Or worse yet, watch her writhe in pain, as if she couldn’t possibly be prescribed a non-habit forming medication?
Why does this monster still have a job? Why would an institution put its name behind its defense?
Because we haven’t gotten far enough to a point where racism causes a penalty fee. Are people losing their jobs? Are people losing their wealth? Are they losing their hard-earned licenses?
Is the hospital system penalized in any way for this loss of life? especially Thus? Are your donors backing out? Are they losing patients, sponsorships, associations?
Are the other doctors talking? No? Is it because they are being written for doing it?? Are hospitals penalized for doing that?
We have not reached a point in this society where enough people care about the harm done to Black people, because there is no empathy for Black people yet. If you don’t see us as people whose shoes you might one day find yourself in, you don’t feel like there’s a mistake to right. If you don’t feel like we are people experiencing painIt doesn’t feel like there’s a person standing before you that deserves aid.
When I wrote about getting Black people to trust the health care system again, trust doctors and science again after a legacy of horrific treatment, I made it clear:
Changing this climate of conspiracy and mistrust […] it requires regulation that penalizes those who violate our rights to consent to care, and that significant punitive restitution be paid to those who have suffered… and the media must find out and report it when it happens. We have to see that people care enough about us to preemptively protect us from harm, and that those who are hell-bent on harming us will be forced to suffer a consequence. and pay refund.
There are endless situations in the United States where harm is done to people, and that harm continues because the benefits still outweigh the penalties. In health care in the United States, the more often a black woman is involved in the medical industry, the more likely it is that her death will come sooner than it should. Her doctors will almost certainly rule out her pain. She will be led to believe that she is less serious than she is of hers, and they will send her home and tell her to ignore it instead of giving her the tools to self-assess. And because of that, she won’t be able to fight for the most valuable thing she could have: her life.
And the health system continues to function, as if this pattern is not real and scary, as if there is simply nothing to do.
If you read the comments on Dr. Moore’s posts, you’ll be inundated with comments about how whites go through th-hear. I don’t want to hear the downplaying of Black women’s experiences in the comments section where we discuss the loss of a Black woman. That is No solidarity. I want to hear “I’m so angry that this is still happening, we really need a change in our health care system.” I want you to do it do something about.
If medicine is all about money, then it’s time people start losing their money when they do injustice to black people. If the horrible and atrocious treatment of this woman does not justify the firing of this… this doctorSo what does he do?