While I was in Richmond attending the national conference of Black Girls RUN!, I saw social media discussion of a piece that engages know-your-place aggression. Now that I’ve had a chance to read it, I have no doubt it will make a difference in the care people receive from doctors. That’s so gratifying! And I appreciate folk like Dr. Iwashyna who step up in this way. By the time it makes it into print like this, there’s no measuring how much it has made it into how he moves in the world.
Quoting from Dr. Theodore J. Iwashyna’s column for the New England Journal of Medicine website:
“What had just happened? The MICU fellow’s expertise had been discounted in a way that had nothing to do with the quality of her clinical judgement.”
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“...our task, as a faculty, is to build a medical culture where it never occurs to a doctor to dismiss another colleague’s clinical judgement based on their demographic characteristics. Even if such put-downs remain in the broader culture, they do not belong in our profession…”
Full text here.
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