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Russell Ledet Is Working to Combat Racial Disparities in Health Care | Teen Vogue

Insomnia and worry had me wide awake at 3am. Should I get up? Maybe turn on my iPhone? This article gives me so much hope that maybe, just maybe, I can go back to sleep, but not before sharing!

“Every person in health care should read Medical Apartheid [by Harriet Washington]. They should know the history of what has propped up a lot of medical progression. Take into account obstetrics and gynecology, which historically experimented on Black women. We can talk about when the first person arrived and spread a virus in the United States, but how about the times we operated on patients without anesthesia? Or the experimental procedures that were done to move forward [with] birth control?

“The mistrust in our community around medicine is, to some degree, justified. When we talk about ending health disparities, we need a very socially conscious clinician to build trust back to where we can provide care at the level we have access to in the U.S. If people are noncompliant, it’s possible they don’t trust the system. Clinicians that are not socially conscious can’t interact with patients in a socially conscious way, and that plays a role into how care is given and how care is taken.”

Congrats, Dr. Ledet. Please #KeepOnKeepingOn!