Extra History

Do No Harm: Black Medical Exploitation (108x1)

: 04, 2021

Doctors often run into difficulties when reaching out to communities of color and the black community in particular. Outside of the regular financial barriers to healthcare, there's a greater lack of trust & faith that the health care system is meant to help. And this skepticism has a very real and very painful history behind it. From the early days of gynecology to the Tuskegee Experiment to the eugenics laws of the 1920s and even the unacknowledged contributions of Henrietta Lacks, there is a long history of exploitation of Black Americans in the medical system. And if there's any hope of rebuilding trust, we have to first acknowledge what has been done wrong in the past... and how that still influences beliefs in the present.