Unfortunately, the recent horror/comedy movie Get Out, written by Jordan Peele, only scratched the surface regarding the real exploitation and experimentation of people of color within the medical and psychological industrial complexes.
This history has purposely been hidden but the historical and present day impacts are still with us. Mainly, the high levels of distrust of the medical system on behalf of many people of color and the high health disparities influenced by the lack of cultural diversity and racial justice.
These two factors in turn influence access and utilization, chronic disease management and overall health equity.
The following are multiple instances throughout recent history wherein people of color were utilized as literal guinea pigs in order to advance medical research and profit gain:
— The father of gynecology, J. Marion Sims, used the reproductive systems of enslaved black women who developed health issues due to forced intercourse and forced childbirth to further his medical research and develop surgical processes and instruments.
— The psychological industrial complex thrived off of the sharecropping and "chain-gang" system. With unlimited access to poor blacks trapped in poverty, early psychiatrists would perform forced lobotomies on innocent individuals, leaving them incapacitated afterwards. Presently, the pharmecutical industry is wreaking havoc on marginalized communities due to the lack of ethnic pharmacology.
— Tuskegee experiments, where dozens of black men were willingly untreated and willingly injected with syphillis for researchers to study how the disease destroys the body. Many of these men died or developed psychological disorders.
— Forced sterilization. After reconstruction, white scientists developed the American Eugenics Society in order to spread pseudoscience about genetic inferiority among black and brown peoples. They developed standardized tests that they used against people of color in order to sterilize them and even dumped birth control into the water supplies of minority communities to eliminate reproduction.
— Henrietta lacks, a poor black woman from the 1940s south who was denied proper medical treatment and ended up dying from late stage cervical cancer. Her cells were stolen from her body without permission and ended up furthering the fields of genetics, cancer research and genetics because her cells were literally immortal and allowed doctors and scientists to facilitate research that was previously impossible.
In short, the medical system itself is a form of trauma for marginalized communities. From the emphasis on profit to the emphasis on scientific breakthrough, marginalized communities are constantly caught in the crosshairs of systemic racism and capitalism.
For us to achieve health equity we must realize this system is doing EXACTLY what it was designed to do and will never be able to appropriately serve marginalized communities appropriately.
Eliminating trauma within the medical system and achieving health disparities must be two-fold:
- Develop community-based and community-lead solutions
- Develop a long-term plan for dismantling the inherent and reoccurring themes of exploitation, experimentation and exclusion within the medical system itself.
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