Tag: racism

Sign saying immigrants and refugees welcome

Anti-immigrant Sentiments Affect Immigrant Health

Posted on | by Carey Jackson, MD

The rhetoric around immigration has again reached a fever pitch. It did after 9/11, it has repeatedly, and it has again. Migrant children fleeing intolerable gang and domestic violence in Central America have crowded the Southern border. Refugees fleeing Syria are swarming over Eastern Europe and a chronic flow of migrants from East Africa stream north and cross the Mediterranean in precarious flotillas. The West feels under siege and frightened. There are many with distinct political agendas that capitalize on this fear and propagate unwarranted anxiety for their own ends. We see this in national political debates and we see it daily in local politics.

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Sign saying "We are not criminals, we are hard workers"

Profiling Populations and Health Disparities

Posted on | by Carey Jackson, MD

“There it was: AIDS as the litmus test for nurses and physicians, a means of identifying who would and who wouldn’t. I had seen this before in Boston…..

“So,” I asked, “is this kind of stuff still going on now, with Gordon?”

“Hell yes! Except they know who is and who is not willing to take care of a patient like Gordon. I am willing. Mary is willing. And quite a few others. But I don’t think they should take advantage of us for that reason. It’s convenient for them. Because if they bitch and moan and if they don’t take care of the patient right, then I feel like I have to step in. I can’t let that happen.”

Verghese, Abraham. My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story. Vintage, 1995.

Through this exchange with a nurse, Abraham Verghese recalls attitudes in the 1980s among medical staff engaged in the care of the first HIV patients in rural Tennessee. His remarkable memoir of his years as an Infectious Disease specialist during the early days of HIV recapturesthe palpable possibility that contamination with HIV was a death sentence faced by many in operating rooms and on medical wards, a belief held by some among medical professionals and civic leaders. In repeated vignettes Vergesse describes how these attitudes affected the resources and care gay men received.

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