Diana

“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.

Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“How can I accept a world where over a million people will die this year for want of a cure that has existed for nearly a century?”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“In 2016, a group of doctors surveyed 222 white medical students and residents on their beliefs about their patients’ bodies, asking them to judge the veracity of statements such as “Black people’s blood coagulates more quickly than whites’ ” and “Blacks’ nerve endings are less sensitive than whites’.” Half of the students and residents ascribed to at least one of these false beliefs. Like the doctor who brutalized John Brown, 40 percent of the first-year medical students and 25 percent of the residents agreed with the statement “Blacks’ skin is thicker than whites’.” These beliefs had real-world consequences: when given two mock medical scenarios, one featuring a Black patient and one featuring a white patient, the students and residents who endorsed more of the false beliefs assumed that the Black patient felt less pain than her white counterpart. Worse, they were less likely to adequately treat the Black patient’s pain than they were the white patient’s. Even now, medicine seems in thrall to Mitchell’s assertion that not all pain is equal, disbelieves the essential truth that the “capacity to suffer” is a human universal.”
― Pria Anand, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains

“Medical students are taught to imagine a binary: doctor and patient, science and faith, objective truth and superstitious fallacy, us and them. Our morning rounds are an exercise in telling and retelling patients’ stories in a way that explains their illnesses, cloaked in the sense of objectivity offered by a white coat. But the stories told on these rounds are just as prone to false truths as the reports of an amnesia patient, subconsciously shaped by our priors, our communities, our own narratives. On rounds, a woman’s pain might be recast as anxiety, for instance, while a vitamin deficiency born of alcohol use might be regarded as a deserved punishment.”
― Pria Anand, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains