Doctors Are Not Superheroes!
The impacts of the “perfect doctor” narrative on medical experiences of Black Women.
Doctors are portrayed in heroic fashion no matter where we look. In our families, we’re pushed to be doctors, on TV the surgery room calls for adrenaline-filled scenes, and in our sickness, our doctors become all-knowing beings we listen to carefully.
However, this characterization of Doctors as all-knowing, morally driven beings falls short of the realities that are faced by Black women in America in their times of sickness and pain.
Dorothy Roberts’s article “The Dark Side of Birth Control” highlights just one aspect of the ways in which Black women are subjected to a unique intersectional experience in their medical lives. She highlights that the late 19th century was spearheaded by the Eugenics movement and the notion that genetics determined factors such as personality and intelligence (59). Finding its home in the United States, Eugenics eventually began to focus on sterilization as a way to limit the population of children being born that would require public assistance (70). While this was due to economic crisis, the undertones of race became potent as attention turned to Black reproduction, and interracial child birth “tainting” white people. Roberts goes on to address how the work of Margaret Sanger and others began to focus on negative Eugenics, and push the idea of birth control programs in the South that were “black controlled” so that they would be a familiar face of deception to push less reproduction in these communities (78). While this did disregard the efforts Blacks already were making to increase birth control as a right within their communities, the notion of birth control began to be shaped as a means of controlling reproduction of Black people, rather than framing its advocacy in women’s rights (80).
For Black women, medical offices are yet another reflection of the lack of care, trust, and protection our country has for them.
While the image of Doctor’s as heroes is a very popular depiction, this is not the case. Doctors, like the rest of us, are subject to personal biases that influence the treatments they give out, and at the same time are subjected to a system of practices that reinforce popular biases. Doctor’s also are a lot more human than we make them out to be. “To much of the public… medical error is fundamentally a problem of bad doctors” (Gawande, 2007) and the actual ways mistakes happen in medicine fly under the radar. The problem here becomes that we begin to give doctors the opportunity to practice and change policy in ways that push political agendas rather than actually delivering help to their patients.
In reality, Doctors are not as prepared as we make them out to be. In fact, the purpose of medical school tends to be for training for uncertainty more than it is methodology. When describing the experiences they have, most doctors explain that from the moment they start medical school, the practice of medicine feels like “digging a hole in the sand” (Fox,1988). According to the book “Training for Uncertainty” by Renee C Fox, Doctors aren’t given a curriculum with answers. Medical school simply exposes them to medical uncertainties so that they may learn to approach them in a mature, professional manner. Hence why there is often a huge factor of malpractice that gets swept under the rug. One dangerous example of this can be seen when Dr. Gawande speaks of her mistakes when delivering emergency care to patients. For her, a tracheotomy led her patients’ airways to close and almost killed her. Another doctor in the cancer department of her hospital biopsied the wrong part of a patient’s breast, delaying diagnosis (Gawande, 2007). However, these are not the kind of scenes you see dramaticized on Grey Anatomy. Instead, we characterize our experiences with doctors who mess up as them not being good at their profession.
The problematic nature of doing this is that it allows us to not question the agenda of doctors and push the notion that they have the best intentions for society at heart. The paternalistic relationship that gets formed here becomes problematic in the way it enables doctors to take advantage of the lack of protection for Black bodies, especially Black women’s bodies.
The most prominent example of this lack of protection is at the center of all cancer cell research in HeLa cells. HeLa cells refer to a group of cells extracted from Henrietta Lacks, A Black woman who received care at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore Maryland. Doctors not only abused her lack of education and social status, but also did it in the name of possible medical progress. In her research about Henrietta, Rebecca Skloot examined the ways doctors conducted experiments on Henrietta with consent, and the harm it did to her family despite the medical progress it made. Skloot goes on to tell Lack’s story; she was a patient whose cervical tissues were partially removed to contribute to cancer research (Skloot, 2013). When Dr. George Gey extracted her tissue samples, he found that her samples (unlike those he’d experimented with before) multiplied. He’d been looking for this immortal cell line. Henrietta’s cells then began to be used for research on cancer. Not only was Henrietta unable to walk away from her situation (as this experimentation was framed as part of her treatment), but her family was never fully informed of the intentions of the study, nor did they receive any benefits from it despite doctors profiting millions of dollars from them (one vial of HeLa cells costs about $25). They are still used today for research.
The worst part about the story is that Lack still died at an incredibly young age because of her inability to have proper health care access, and her family still faces problems with access to health care, proper treatment, and financial issues despite these huge contributions their mother made. When looking deeper into Lack’s story, we see the danger in characterizing doctors as these heroes with the best intentions of society. The lack of compensation, attention, and clarity in Henrietta Lack’s experience with her medical professionals was completely overlooked for the sake of the breakthrough the doctor felt her cells would contribute.
The reality we are faced with here is that the ways we view doctors must change. While we would like to believe that doctors are these all-knowing figures who have only the best of interests at heart, doing this contributes largely to the platform doctors are given to exploit Black women and other people of marginalized groups with little-to-no repercussions. If we want to protect Black women, we must look at the institutions which exploit them, and hold them accountable. As evident in the writings of Skloot, Roberts, and others, Black women suffer most from the characterization of doctors as these perfect beings, as medical science and institutionalization has often been framed within racial hygiene, and perpetuating a racist, hegemonic agenda. We must stop giving doctors the benefit of the doubt, reevaluate our stances on the veracity/reliability of healthcare, and call for a more clear communication of methodology from our health care professionals. Until then, Black bodies, and especially the bodies of Black women will continue to be mere test subjects for medical research, and the implicit biases of medical professionals will continue to neglect care for Black women.
