Unbelievable staff and doctors! They actually CALLED me to discuss my labs. It took me 3 years…read moreto get in! It was worth it!

Please , please, please view the "Color of Care". The…read moreexecutive producer is Oprah Winfrey and it's airing on the Smithsonian Channel on May 1st. It resonates strongly with me as I am currently fighting white incompetent racist medical "professionals" in California to transfer my medical records to UCSF, so that I can obtain adequate medical treatment. I received better medical care in the Appalachians during graduate school. In this struggle I have been ignored, chastised for advocating for myself, threatened with police action because I requested (numerous times unsuccessfully via phone) for them to forward my medical records and a required doctor referral for a much needed mammogram to real medical professionals in the Bay Area. The clinic even sicked their Black attack dog (office worker) to tell me that [she didn't appreciate me playing the race card because she is Black]. (It's always the Black women who come for me first). I told her to study racism to understand how stupid she is. She is the one who threatened to call the Sheriffs on me for requesting my records in a manner she didn't a appreciate ... a Black Karen. Smithsonian Channel synopsis of Color of Care: "Racial inequity shows up in every dimension of health care," says Neel Shah, an assistant professor in obstetrics and gynecology at Harvard Medical School and chief medical officer of Maven Clinic, a pioneering virtual clinic for women and families. "The thing about maternal health that has made it the galvanizing focus of my whole career is that the wellbeing of mothers is a bellwether for the wellbeing of society as a whole." The physician lent his expertise to Color of Care, a new documentary from the Smithsonian Channel about racial disparities in health--and how to address them. The program will delve into these issues and how the covid-19 pandemic laid bare the issues facing the nation. We asked Shah about the historical roots of the connections between race and wellness. If you're a Black person in America today, you're three to four times more likely to die in childbirth than if you're white, irrespective of education or income; in New York City, you're 8 to 12 times more likely to die. In part, that's because of the difference between access to resources for someone living in the Bronx vs. the Upper East Side. Like other institutions, medicine requires representation at the highest levels of people who share the lived experiences of those who we're trying to serve. And historically we haven't had that, but everything from editorial boards at leading journals to the leaders of top health care institutions, we're starting to empower the right leaders. And second--this is where I'm putting all of my professional energy right now-- we want to use technology to get to a place where, for the first time in the world, your ZIP code doesn't have to be your destiny. It's not as though an app is going to fix health care, but there is an opportunity to use digital devices as portals into health care services.