The medical racism I've experienced over the last few days has filled me with disgust. I'm just tired of this shit.

[brainchild]

Now that I'm in a little bit of a better headspace and in less pain, I'd like to address some of the "that's not racism, that's just ED being ED" comments in this thread, some of them from doctors who seem to have come here to defend their collective honor or something, I don't know.

First of all, if you're not black, and you're responding to a black person who is complaining about racism in any capacity, you really need to check yourself before you fix your lips (or in this case your fingers) to argue why that isn't the case; you yourself have your own racial biases to work against and need to keep that in mind, no matter your qualifications. And even if you are black, there is internalized racial bias to contend with due to decades of living in an environment that has been systemically racist, before dismissing the concerns of other black people complaining about racism they experience.

Secondly, I did not and could not give a full and perfect account of the hospital setting and interactions at the hospital, despite such factors most likely impacting my perception of how I was being treated while I was in the ED's care on a subconscious level, such as:

• Discrepancies in the tone and body language of the ED team members when interacting with adjacent patients whose races appeared to differ from mine compared to when the ED team members were interacting with me
• Discrepancies in the ED team members decisions to offer treatment for acute pain for adjacent patients whose races appeared to differ from mine compared to the ED team members' negligence to offer treatment for my acute pain

Keep in mind that the above factors are not precisely quantifiable in the sense that the patient who believes that they are experiencing racism can precisely measure the delta between how they are being treated and how other patients are being treated, and for many patients of color, such discrepancies are often simply regarded as "racist background noise" because we don't have the time nor luxury to complain about them, document them, or give much attention to them, especially when we are in need of medical attention. Nevertheless, such factors, in part, comprise the lens through which we view how we are treated in cases of potential medical emergencies.

In my case, there were multiple issues with my first visit that indubitably should have never happened:

• Neglecting to offer treatment for my pain, despite me exhibiting clear signs that I was having bouts of acute pain in my right flank
• Lying about the CT results (there were actual gallstones, not just sludge, and kidney stones were still present and needed to be passed), and this misconduct was not uncovered until my second visit where the only black doctor I encountered investigated the issue while everyone preceding her acted as if I merely didn't understand procedure
• Neglecting to address chest pain issues, despite it being a strict policy for this specific ED (and is indicated on a red sign at the entrance that such symptoms should be treated as a medical emergency)
• Releasing me without treatment for the pain

And when you look at the above facts and filter them through the context of the discrepancies in the interactions I experienced compared to other patients who appeared to be of other races, it is difficult to argue that it isn't at least possible that the poor care I experienced at that hospital wasn't at least partially racially motivated.

And finally, I did not make this thread to prove that I experienced medical racism, nor did I make this thread to complain that all of my health problems weren't fixed by the ED. I made this thread to vent out of frustration as a black patient who has been through this shit way too many times, while hearing of white folk who go to the same hospital without experiencing such problems (aside from the general unpleasantness of being treated at an ED).

Proving medical racism is very difficult without systematic methodology because poor treatment at an ED is almost always multivariate, and I can't provide a comparative statistical analysis that controls for all non-racial factors every time I have a bad ED experience. Having said that, as a black person, what I do have is experience. Plenty of it. I've been to all kinds of EDs over the course of my life and some are definitely worse than others. Visiting the emergency department is never going to be a pleasant experience, but it should be a humane one, and sometimes I am treated humanely, and sometimes I am not. I don't expect people who haven't experienced medical racism to know the difference between just having a generally shitty experience at the ED and experiencing medical racism, but I can assure you that I do, and the experiences aren't remotely the same. Sorry if I wasn't able to articulate all of these points in my original post, but I honestly wasn't in the right headspace to remember that as a black person, I have to be super fucking careful/thoughtful with how I explain shit if I don't want to be dismissed out of hand. I'll try to remember that next time.