Last Sunday, Last Week Tonight TV show host John Oliver started a discussion on a serious reality in a rather humorous way. He started by showing a video of how women and people of color get unfair treatment in the healthcare system. "It's true," Oliver says to show his support for the women in the videos. "If you are a woman and/or a person of color in the US, you may well have a very different relationship to our healthcare system than a white man," he continued.
"So frankly," Oliver starts to make a sarcastic comment, "who better to talk at you for 20 minutes about this than me," he says as he gestures his thumbs toward himself, "the whitest of white men." After a series of witty jokes, he then continues to express his willingness to talk about the matter.
Oliver proceeds to discuss gender bias by saying how the female body has been so often judged and misconceptualized, in the past and until now. He goes on by saying that while there has been a lot of improvement in how people perceive the female body, we still have a long way to go when it comes to healthcare. Often times, when a woman goes to the doctor and complains about pain, her pain is assumed to be because of hormonal imbalance.
Historically, medical studies would refer to the male body, so it is factual that doctors know less about the female body, as Oliver explains. A video is later shown where neurobiologist Larry Cahill tells a woman that she is essentially him "with pesky hormones" which Cahill initially believed was good enough reason to look at the male body for medical studies. To this, Oliver mockingly responded with the statement "women are just men with hormones, children are just tiny men, dogs are just furry men, and volcanoes are just men who ejaculate lava." Cahill later on disovered that gender actually did influence the human brain and is now focused on research about biological sex influences on the mammalian brain and body.
In the past, there has been a study on the uterus and estrogen, but unbelievably, all the subjects used in the study were men. Katherine Leon, once went to the doctor for having a heart attack but was sent home by the doctor with a misdiagnosis, this unfortunately happens to one out of seven women. This is only a few from the list of items that cause faulty medical outcomes.
After talking about gender bias, Oliver proceeds with the second prominent kind of bias in medicine-racism. He goes on to talk about mortality gap, which is exemplified by the fact that there are 83,000 excess deaths in the African-American community every year. It was also surprisingly evident that ignorance in biological differences between races has been rampant. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences three years ago, 25 percent of residents thought that the skin of African-Americans was thicker than that of a Caucasian, 14 percent thought that their nerve endings were less sensitive, and 17 percent thought that their blood coagulated at a faster rate. Another study published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information says that African Americans were 34 percent less likely than Whites to be prescribed opioids for medication-a truth that was experienced by Wanda Sykes after she got a double mastectomy.
Dr. Neel Shah of Harvard Medical School explained that women of color giving birth, have a 75 percent higher chance of mortality, because of the sad truth that doctors are less likely to believe that you are in pain. Oliver described this act as "disbelieving them to death" which he said was heartbreaking.
Oliver stressed that no one should be given bad healthcare just because of their sex or race, an idea which he believed everyone agrees with. "What can we do?" was a question posted by the TV show host to the people watching. He then follows this with a comical answer saying, "Ideally, we simply figure out a way for no one to ever get sick again, thus making trips to the doctor an embarrassment of the past."
On a more serious note, he mentioned about how California cut the mortality rate of pregnant women in their state by half by simply standardizing healthcare and how everyone else could follow suit.
