“What is your preferred pharmacy?” These can be really relieving words or very stressful ones. Is this a solution to your problems, or just a way to cope and live life a little easier? Or is it an incomplete answer for your needs?
I’ve noticed that many people find doctor’s appointments complicated. Some feel shame about telling the truth. The doctor could be from the same ethnic background as you, so you don’t want to tell them that you smoke. Or you could be in a busy clinic that accepts Medicaid and is pushing you out, like the pills they prescribe you. Why is it so hard to find a physician who can see you for you?
Women and racial/ethnic minorities are 20% to 30% more likely to be medically misdiagnosed than white men, according to the lead author of a 2023 BMJ Quality & Safety study, as reported by KFF Health News: https://kffhealthnews.org/race-and-health/medical-misdiagnosis-women-minorities-health-care-bias/
My point is that medicine is often treated as the whole answer when it should be only one part of it. I don’t want a band-aid. I want a plan.
Roxane Gay, a Black author, writes about this in two essays about her body and her weight-loss surgery: “What Fullness Is” and “My Body Is a Cage of My Own Making.” She describes not being seen as a person but as a fat person, someone severely overweight, someone who looks like she needs fixing. She is not being looked at as just Roxane Gay, who is genuinely trying to figure out what can make her healthy. I’d add that healthy doesn’t have to be synonymous with losing weight. She describes doctors “always trying to ‘treat’ my weight before anything else.” Doctors told her she wouldn’t live to 40, then 50, and her family pushed her toward surgery.
After surgery, she describes being cold and exhausted from eating only 1,200–1,500 calories. She writes, “I am filled with regrets because everything has changed, but everything is exactly the same.” In “What Fullness Is,” she says, “I am empty, but I know what fullness is.” To me, that doesn’t sound like the definition of healthy. Healthy means being cared for as a whole person, not only as a body to fix. Her next step wasn’t another procedure. She goes back to therapy to deal with what the surgery didn’t fix.
In “My Body Is a Cage of My Own Making,” she compares weight to skin color, because it is something you cannot hide, and no one can see you apart from the body you are in. Separately, my own view is that being healthy is about what’s underneath, not what’s outside. She also says she built the cage herself, which complicates blaming doctors alone, since she partly blames herself, and that self-blame is part of the harm. Doctors who look at the body first and the person second are part of how bias happens. As a Black woman, Gay falls into both groups the stats above cover, and what she describes is the same kind of bias.
So am I really trying to hear, “What is your preferred pharmacy?” No. I’m trying to hear a solution. For me, the solution is someone who listens, explains the plan, and treats me as a person.
