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[SuperMatt]

Black Doctor Dies of Covid-19 After Complaining of Racist Treatment (Published 2020)

“He made me feel like a drug addict,” Dr. Susan Moore said, accusing a white doctor of downplaying her complaints of pain and suggesting she should be discharged.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Gutwrench]

BTW, she was a doctor herself and yet those caring for her didn’t listen to her, obviously because of her skin color. [/URL]

Why is it obvious?

 

[Mark]

Racist doctors refuse to treat a black woman properly, leading to her death from COVID-19. BTW, she was a doctor herself and yet those caring for her didn’t listen to her, obviously because of her skin color. It’s not kneeling on a man’s neck, but it is a death directly attributable to racism nonetheless. And Trump made it MORE acceptable to be racist, not less.

Black Doctor Dies of Covid-19 After Complaining of Racist Treatment (Published 2020)

“He made me feel like a drug addict,” Dr. Susan Moore said, accusing a white doctor of downplaying her complaints of pain and suggesting she should be discharged.

www.nytimes.com

@SuperMatt thanks for the article.
it was a devastingly heartbreaking article to read.

systemic racism, and, in a lot of instances, gender bias and socio-economic class prejudice, within the health care delivery system.

quote
Dr. Moore tested positive for the coronavirus on Nov. 29 and was admitted to the hospital, according to her Facebook post, which she wrote on Dec. 4.
She wrote that she had to beg the physician treating her to give her remdesivir, an antiviral drug some doctors use to treat Covid-19.
Dr. Moore said she received a scan of her neck and lungs after her doctor denied she was short of breath, despite her telling him she was, and after he told her he could not justify giving her more narcotic painkillers. The scan detected problems — pulmonary infiltrates and new lymphadenopathy, she said — and so she began receiving more opioid pain medication. But she said she was left in pain for hours before a nurse gave her the dose.
“This is how Black people get killed, when you send them home and they don’t know how to fight for themselves,” Dr. Moore said.
Dr. Moore’s experience highlighted what many Black professionals said they regularly encountered. Education cannot protect them from mistreatment, they say, whether in a hospital or other settings.
Born in Jamaica, Dr. Moore grew up in Michigan. She studied engineering at Kettering University in Flint, Mich., according to her family, and earned her medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School.
endquote

thanks for the article.
we do our part to remember her here.

 

[Gutwrench]

The Dunning Kruger Effect in action.

 

[Gutwrench]

Maybe if the article was a one-liner, you would have read it.

Maybe if you weren’t the focus you’d understand it.

 

[User.45]

The Dunning Kruger Effect in action.

Your laziness if painful to watch.

 

[Renzatic]

Yeah, I'm failing to see how Dunning Kruger applies to this thread, since no one here is claiming expertise on anything.

 

[User.45]

Racist doctors refuse to treat a black woman properly, leading to her death from COVID-19. BTW, she was a doctor herself and yet those caring for her didn’t listen to her, obviously because of her skin color. It’s not kneeling on a man’s neck, but it is a death directly attributable to racism nonetheless. And Trump made it MORE acceptable to be racist, not less.

Black Doctor Dies of Covid-19 After Complaining of Racist Treatment (Published 2020)

“He made me feel like a drug addict,” Dr. Susan Moore said, accusing a white doctor of downplaying her complaints of pain and suggesting she should be discharged.

www.nytimes.com

It's a tough one that is hard to interpret without access to the records.
Disparities in healthcare are a very well known issue. I think most of us do our best to fight it. First thing is to acknowledge its existence. Then to recognize it in real life, then to reassess what and how to do differently. What opens a can of worms here is that Blacks getting subpar treatment is usually considered a manifestation of socioeconomic status/power conflated with race. She was a family doc, so she's an outlier in this equation and that disturbs a lot of us a lot more than just the "usual Blacks get subpar care" problem.

Dr Moore's case isn't necessarily trivial, but there are parts that seem to be. Remdesivir overall doesn't seem to be very effective so there i feel like an argument whether to give nearly ineffective treatment or not. Some of the things she states, like a CT angiogram are kinda routine and let's say for someone who is hypoxic and tachycardic is a legitimate test to run to rule out pulmonary embolism that requires anticoagulation (and is a definite thing to consider in a hypercoagulable state such as COVID). So the question is whether she didn't mesh well with the treating team and she would have gotten all these or not.

Pain management is also an issue. There was a school of thought according which "pain was the 5th vital sign". In reality it's a very complex issue because you give stronger and stronger pain medications, sometimes unnecessarily and you DO hook people on narcotics (see opioid epidemic). Vitals.com provider ratings are largely a reflection as to which doctors refuse narcotics (if unnecessary). Now to complicate this, one of the side effect of opioids is inhibition of the respiratory circuit in the brainstem, so you can tank patients on narcotics who have compromised breathing, but you can also potentially help them if they are so short of breath that their work of breathing is exhausting their breathing muscles.... Not easy at all. However, good communication usually mitigates this.

Now what's more straightforward here is that AFAIR she died within 2 days of her discharge. In peacetimes what some colloquially call a "bounceback" is readmission within a few days (I think it's 1 week officially) and is penalized by medicare as it suggests an "unsafe" or premature discharge. We are talking about 2020 though, so the adequacy of this discharge really depends on the hospital's load and again only straight forwardly inappropriate on an individual level, but to judge it on a hospital level, we need to know how their bed situation and how their ER looks.

My impression here is they souped her up, had good numbers for a day, discharged her the moment they could. And again it's COVID. Things can take unpredictable turns.

 

[User.45]

Assume I’m an idiot. Explain to me what I’m missing. Spell it out in painstaking detail so a tiny mind like mine can comprehend it.

I don't think @Gutwrench is able to go beyond the "it's easy to be a couch expert, so stop criticizing others" comment. So if we bring Dunning-Kruger into this thing, as a card carrying expert I say it is meaningful to discuss the complexities and issues in the system.

 

[User.45]

Yeah, I'm failing to see how Dunning Kruger applies to this thread, since no one here is claiming expertise on anything.

I am...to an extent.

Assume I’m an idiot. Explain to me what I’m missing. Spell it out in painstaking detail so a tiny mind like mine can comprehend it.

I don't think @Gutwrench is able to go beyond the "it's easy to be a couch expert, so stop criticizing others" comment. So if we bring Dunning-Kruger into this thing, as a card carrying expert I say it is meaningful to discuss the complexities and issues in the system.

 

[Scepticalscribe]

Is race (or ethnicity) the only issue - or the only possible explanation - here?

Or, could it be a case of a conflation of both race and gender?

Over the years, I've read a number of articles which have argued that the pain experienced by women visiting their doctors, or presenting to hospital seeking admission, was sometimes dismissed, disregarded (as though they were not sentient - or serious - or remotely credible human beings capable of describing or expressing what they felt, or, as though they were not deemed "valid" witnesses advocating in their own cause) and appropriate treatment - or diagnosis - or pain management was offered belatedly or not at all.

 

[JayMysteri0]

Is race (or ethnicity) the only issue - or the only possible explanation - here?

Or, could it be a case of a conflation of both race and gender?

Over the years, I've read a number of articles which have argued that the pain experienced by women presenting to hospital admissions was sometimes dismissed, disregarded (as though they were not sentient - or serious - or remotely credible human beings capable of describing or expressing what they felt, or, as though they were not deemed "valid" witnesses advocating in their own cause) and appropriate treatment - or diagnosis - or pain management offered belatedly or not at all.

I thought that it ties into two other things. The myth about Black people & pain & the greater number of Black women dying during childbirth/pregnancy compared to others.

 

[Gutwrench]

Why is it obvious?

Your laziness if painful to watch.

Still waiting.

 

[Gutwrench]

Yeah, I'm failing to see how Dunning Kruger applies to this thread, since no one here is claiming expertise on anything.

Dunning Kruger encompasses ignorance not merely expertise.

People’s ignorance is invisible to them.
Erroneous beliefs, insufficient background knowledge, confirmation bias feeds their continued ignorance. And they’re lack of awareness is the point.

The conclusion in the op is an example.
There is no support to the claim it’s ”obviously because of her skin color.”

An article is a single perspective from the plaintiff. Yet the incompetent thinkers are accepting and making further claims based on it. It demonstrates how the enlightened are deficient in critical thinking.

 

[SuperMatt]

Health Equity

What CDC is doing to promote fair access to health.

www.cdc.gov

Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care - PubMed

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[Renzatic]

The conclusion in the op is an example.
There is no support to the claim it’s ”obviously because of her skin color.”

In general, I try to avoid most conversations about race and racism on the internet, since they tend to boil down to arguments between people who will go out of their way to point out the racism allegedly inherent in every seemingly innocent thing, vs. people who will refuse to acknowledge racism even when it's slapping them in the face with a klan hood. It's a topic worthy of discussion, but any attempt at such online rarely ever amount to anything more than static and noise.

As far as this story goes, I have no reason to believe that this woman is playing the race card for sympathy or attention. Now it's possible she could be misattributing the actions of someone who's merely rude and dismissive as being racist, but given that she's a doctor herself, well aware of the usual standards and procedures she was denied, and there are documented issues of black people being treated unfairly by medical professionals, I see no reason to dismiss her story outright.

I take everything with a grain of salt, but won't doubt something for the simple sake of doubt.

 

[User.45]

Still waiting.

You can find my detailed assessment above. I'm still waiting for a meaningful contribution from you.

Dunning Kruger encompasses ignorance not merely expertise.

People’s ignorance is invisible to them.
Erroneous beliefs, insufficient background knowledge, confirmation bias feeds their continued ignorance. And they’re lack of awareness is the point.

The conclusion in the op is an example.
There is no support to the claim it’s ”obviously because of her skin color.”

An article is a single perspective from the plaintiff. Yet the incompetent thinkers are accepting and making further claims based on it. It demonstrates how the enlightened are deficient in critical thinking.

...and no, it's not obvious. The systemic issue however is. Also, I, as someone who spent 3+ years doing purely inpatient medicine can be considered an expert according to that Dunning Kruger curve. It's also ironic that you assume most of us are unfamiliar with their work...I've read the paper and some of its iterations too. I can tell you that you've contributed NOTHING to our conversation by bringing it in. You are just building on my impression about you that your words are hollow and you are either lazy to back them up, or you just unable to do so. Neither of these reflect on your critical thinking skills to support your positioning yourself to criticize others'.

Don't worry, I expect nothing more substantial in response than what https://perchance.org/cliche generates.

 

[Gutwrench]

A legend in your own mind.

No answer is noted.

 

[Gutwrench]

..and no, it's not obvious.

Precisely.

More-so it’s merely a one sided claim.

 

[Gutwrench]

As far as this story goes, I have no reason to believe that this woman is playing the race card for sympathy or attention.

I have no judgement on the merits of her claim. I asked the op what was so obvious.