Dr. Uche Blackstock’s personal story at the intersection of racism and medicine

By Kiara Santos | WURD Radio

Dr. Uche Blackstock is a second-generation Black physician with a new book that explores how racism intersects with health care in the United States. In a conversation with Dr. James Peterson on Evening WURDs, Blackstock outlined the key messages in her book, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine. Blackstock upends long-held beliefs of healthcare through deliberate research and experience. Motivated in part by the grief of losing her mother – a fellow Harvard graduate and Black physician – Blackstock was moved to unveil the racism within the American healthcare system.

Blackstock’s words ring heavy in her interview: The chronic stress of racism ages us and makes us more susceptible to environmentally related diseases, Blackstock says. Anti-Blackness rhetoric has reverberated through centuries of American healthcare and practitioners, and the collateral damage is still felt today, she says.

“ When I reflect on when my mother was being treated for her acute myelogenous leukemia, one of the oncologists told her, ‘It looks like you were exposed to radiation early on in your life.’ So we know how environmental racism plays out and we know that that’s more likely to happen in our communities,” Dr. Blackstock told Dr. Peterson.

Blackstock revealed that she was misdiagnosed as a patient in the same healthcare facility she studied and practiced in during her time as an undergraduate at Harvard.

After admitting herself to the emergency room, doctors downplayed her pain and neglected to do a thorough diagnosis. The consequence, Dr. Blackstock said, led her inflamed appendix to rupture. She was eventually given an emergency operation and was bedridden for four weeks, missing crucial school time.

“Looking back on that, I , was I not being listened to right? Appendicitis is often missed, but it’s often more likely to be missed in women and in Black people and other people of color – and it’s just because in our health system we are often not listened to, that our concerns are often minimized and ignored,” she said. “Part of the reckoning within Legacy is that it provides a kind of full catalog of the various ways in which Black people have been exploited and discriminated against in our healthcare system.”

Blackstock also shared how a widely circulated and racist medical report caused collateral damage to Black livelihood, wealth and education that has transcended generations. The Flexner Report, written by Abraham Flexner in 1910 and sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, led to the closing of five of seven Black medical colleges. The largest Black medical school, Leonard Medical School, closed in 1915. Blackstock views the event as “destructive.”

“ It’s estimated if those five medical schools had remained open, they would have trained between 25,000 and 35,000 Black physicians,” Blackstock said. “I cried because I thought about…the impact that those tens of thousands of physicians would have had on our communities. Tens of thousands of Black physicians who may have trained, maybe thousands more saving who knows how many lives. It’s hard to wrap our heads around it.”

Despite the setbacks, Dr. Blackstock outlines solutions to heal, advocate for and bring resources to marginalized communities. Her solutions begin with racial concordance, or patients sharing the same racial or ethnic background as their doctors, which she said tremendously boosts livelihood and health outcomes.

Listen to more of Dr. Blackstock’s journey and research in her interview with Dr. James Peterson below: