The professor asked, "Can you fix that light?" The patient said, "I don't want a (N-word) taking care of me." These and other experiences of being a black doctor were described in , a best-selling book in 2015 by Duke University psychiatrist Damon Tweedy, MD. 番茄社区 caught up with him again at the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting, where he talked about the book and the challenges still facing African American physicians and other professionals.
Following is a transcript of his remarks:
It actually came back over several years. It started, actually, towards the end of residency when I finally had some kind of downtime, and it's really a story about my journey through medicine, through medical school and residency as an African American male. It's a story that really tells the narrative of what my own journey was like as a doctor, but also the story of patients, their navigating the healthcare system.
As a black man, a very tall black man entering the medical world, people see me and the last thing they're thinking is me as a doctor. As an early medical student, one of my first experiences was a professor asked me to fix the lights in his classroom, mistaking me in that capacity. Another incident as a young doctor where a patient said he didn't want an N-word doctor taking care of him, so there's all these sort of kind of difficult experiences you grapple with. Medical training is hard no matter who you are, and then there's this added element by virtue of being black. That's one big piece of the story. Another aspect is sort of the story of patients and all the sort of challenges they face in sort of the blatant and subtle discriminations that occur.
I think from a larger level, as an institution, how is the institution approaching your issues like that. Some of the encounters that I faced, I had the support of my institution where a patient might say they don't want a black provider. Someone higher on the chain than me would say, "Well, you're at this place. This is an academic center. You see this person or you see no one." That kind of support is really important.
My field is psychiatry. The audience here is oncology, but this is an issue that's relevant to all. I'll just give you a couple examples. As a psychiatrist, about 3% of providers are African American, and in oncology, it's about 2%. The population of African Americans in the country is 13%. In many of the larger cities where young doctors train, we're talking 30%, 40%, 50%, so these issues come up in all sorts of ways.
I feel like there's this sense that among doctors who've gone to school for many years after college -- medical degrees, MDs, PhDs -- there's just a sense that somehow they are too smart to have these sorts of limitations. When the reality is these limitations, these biases, impact everyone. All of us have them. In my story, I'm candid about my own biases. I mean, I think it's something that we all have to kind of frame and understand, and I sort of use my own experience as a window into that larger discussion.