Week 4 reflection

 This week I learned specifically about racism and medicine, which was obviously disheartening. It was very interesting learning about how racism was internalized in medicine, and I keep learning over and over again how important textbooks are to medicine. Its a niche subject so often the first contact med students really get with how it should work is with the textbook, so for my end of the semester presentation I think I am going to focus on textbooks a bit more. I've also noticed it's easier to write with being able to write like I'm talking to an audience because I can put more thoughts into it, so being able to use you would be great. Writing without anger and just putting the facts down makes it a bit harder to write as it feels less authentic. For my presentation I'm very excited to be able to talk from my perspective. Anyway the more I learn about it the more enraging it gets. My favorite quote from this week is this "“To be white in America is not to have to think about it. Except for hard-core racial supremacists, the meaning of being white is having the choice of attending to or ignoring one’s own whiteness." It relates so well to what I am talking about in medicine because a lot of doctors simply can ignore their bias as it really does not affect them unless if it turns into a sentinel event. How can we see racism in the field of medicine, and how does it affect doctors as well as patients were my questions from last week. We can see racism in the inequality of medical care between races and lack of representation, and it really does not affect doctors much until it becomes a sentinel event, whereas it constantly affects the patient and their care in the future. My new questions are: are there any defining events in medical bias? and how are textbooks specifically effected?