A friend of mine experienced a near-miss just this year. A young female doctor of color prescribed her a medicine that would have been harmful given her condition. She received a phone call later in the day telling her not to pick up or take that drug. If she had missed that call for whatever reason, something very bad might have happened.

The kicker: the doctor should have known not to prescribe that drug based purely on my friend’s chart. It wasn’t some complicated or rare interaction. It was literally “if patient vitals are x, do not prescribe y”. And the young diversity doctor missed it.

Having been exposed to the healthcare profession a decent amount over the course of my lifetime, I can confidently say that most doctors are simply technicians. They fuck up a lot, and a lot of people die, but there’s almost always plausible deniability and very little accountability.