Sharma, who is of South-Asian descent, said American medicine is already a lonely place for Black and brown doctors, but added “when you're Black and brown, doing justice, anti-racist work, you're even more so alone.”
“In recent years, I definitely had an uptick in friends who have, like, literally received death threats,” she said. Manisha Sharma, a California based family medicine physician, keeps a running tally of colleagues who are active in the social justice movement and have received hate mail and worse, and says it is widespread. There’s little data documenting the number of social media and death threats directed at doctors engaged in anti-racism work in medicine, but Dr. They are also among a cadre of doctors across the country who are confronting mounting intimidation on social media, and threats of violence. Morse and Wispelwey are part of a growing number of doctors nationwide leading programs to make the medical profession more inclusive and to improve health outcomes for communities of color. And then most recently last week when a white nationalist and neo-Nazi group showed up at our hospital.”
He said the intimidation began in the spring of last year with “really extensive threats, not just to us personally, but to our hospital. “This is what triggered this whole backlash,” Wispelwey said. The doctors were promptly denounced by a guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program, who derided their advocacy for prioritizing non-white patients for certain procedures as “political eugenics.”Ī reader posted The Boston Review article on Twitter where it received hundreds of retweets, including, Morse said, “by some right wing person, basically describing Bram’s and my work as racist or as somehow unfair to white people.” Morse and Wispelwey published an article in the March 2021 Boston Review, titled “An Anti-racist Agenda for Medicine” that laid out their approach to health care based on a medical model of critical race theory, and calling for "medical restitution" for Black people, who have long been excluded from first rate care. That program is one of many initiatives developed by Mass General Brigham under the heading United Against Racism that serve as roadmaps for delivering services to underserved communities. That led to a study that showed a probable link between institutional racism and heart failure consequently a program was established at Mass General Brigham that aims to improve access for Black and Latinx patients who historically have not had equitable access to specialized cardiology care. Wispelwey and Morse were among a group of doctors at the Brigham in 2015 who questioned why data showed Black and Latinx patients with heart failure were more likely than white patients to end up in general medicine rather than the cardiology unit, where patients have better outcomes. we want to actually make sure our patients are taken care of in the best way possible right now.”
“We can't wait until these predominantly white institutions sort of come around. “And so we wanted to take a race-explicit approach,” Wispelwey told GBH News. Wispelwey said his team found it was hard to address institutional racism in medicine - such as disparities in how patients are admitted for heart surgery - using “racially blind” methods.
“And I think ultimately in the COVID era, part of what that means is a real serious push to make inequities more visible.” “What I'm trying to do is hold the medical industrial complex accountable for the harms that it's caused to communities of color and to other communities and push for racial justice and health equity in all of the institutions that I'm involved in and in partnership with the many communities that I serve,” Morse told GBH News.
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