Category: Public Health & Policy

Medicine vs. racism: white coats for black lives

Six years ago, Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, MO, igniting the White Coats For Black Lives movement. I was a medical student at the time. As we prepared for a die-in in protest of Michael Brown’s death and the officer’s acquittal, my medical s…

Why racism is a public health crisis

On May 25, 2020, the world was already reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic with a lockdown with no end in sight, when a video taken on a bystander’s cellphone went viral of a man being arrested by several police officers, put on the road in a prone posi…

Medical students in solidarity: Black Lives Matter

Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. George Floyd. We speak their names out when they no longer can. As a medical student, I have learned and recognized the many prejudices underlying our healthcare system against persons of color. Racism runs rampant in hos…

Health care workers have a role to play in Black Lives Matter

Health care workers need to start talking about white people killing black people, and here’s why: every victim of racial violence will be seen by a health care professional at or near the time of the event. We in the health care community are often th…

How to mitigate risk and foster resilience among vulnerable populations during COVID-19

Over the past two months, health professionals and community advocates have brought to the fore of national attention what has been the lived experience of many within black and brown communities for ages — racism kills. The substrate of structural rac…

George Floyd: Framing police brutality through the lens of an emergent public health crisis

Those who knew George remembered him as “a big man with a heart to match” and a “good friend,” “good person,” and someone who “took care of people.” Tragically, George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020. …

COVID-19, Georgia, and racial disparities: Do all lives still matter?

I learned to call Atlanta home after college. It was at Grady Memorial Hospital that I first shadowed doctors, and decided that I would go to medical school. Two and a half years into being an ATLien, I cried inconsolably because it was time to leave. …

Health care workers should not be targets

It has been a week since terrorists broke into the maternity ward in Dashte Barchi, Afghanistan and killed 24, including women, newborns, and a midwife, and injured 16. One woman who had tried for seven years to get pregnant watched as her newborn was …

COVID exposed this state’s mangled health care system

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it revealed a troubling paradox in Vermont’s healthscape. Monopoly-creating laws and regulations (like the Affordable Care Act and the Certificate of Need program) have artificially reduced the state’s health facil…

COVID is not a great equalizer

Some media outlets and public figures have heralded the ongoing pandemic as a great equalizer, referencing the pathogen’s indiscriminate spread and disregard for national borders and tax brackets. The sobering mortality statistics, however, dispe…