Week 6: reflection

 This week I was originally going to try to do more recent history of bias, however I have discovered that there is quite a bit to unravel within the last one hundred years. This is true particularly with the U.S, where I have decided to focus on because this is where I am currently living but also because it shows some of the most bias as a country and has many different viewpoints that are always ripping at each other. With that in mind, I decided to focus more on people of color in medical history. The myth that black people feel less pain has by far been one of the most influential myths in medicine and has some of the most contributing factors including colonization and the Jim Crow laws which have contributed to racism and false beliefs. I found that J Marion Sims is one of multiple offenders of using this myth to justify hurting other people in the name of medicine, which is entirely offending and painful as the whole point of medicine that it is a humane practice and using medicine to justify these actions goes against everything it should stand for. My questions last week were "How is more current history related to past history in medicine, and is medicine quick changing or slow changing, even in the very progressive time we are in right now". My answers to the first question is that racism is largely caused by colonization, and the beliefs that sprung from that are continuing on, causing more events such as Jim Crow. Because they keep repeating themselves in a cycle the beliefs from the past are hard to escape, and the roots of medicine are still based in racism, causing the after affects to still affect us today. Medicine is slow changing, because our base knowledge in medicine is very old. After all it wouldn't make sense to re-do all these old experiments which we already know the results to. However the way many experiments and treatments were written included racist and sexist beliefs, and they also had a lack of women and people of color that were studied. So symptoms that might only appear on women or might not appear on black people weren't written in. In order to change the base we have to set aside people to not work on new research and instead restudy old research, which is very time consuming. It's hard to overcome anything when classes and education of medicine are based in old beliefs which are incorrect. However the beliefs of doctors on stereotypes are rapidly changing due to society becoming more progressive, which will hopefully cause less overlooks of symptoms which may lead to worsening diseases or illnesses. My questions for next week are: what is the history of sexism in medicine look like? and at what point did women stop becoming the healers?