Medical Apartheid

4/5 – The way black Americans have been mistreated for the past 300 years is almost laughable. This book was no different as I did chuckle at the unfathomable atrocities inflicted upon us. You literally must laugh to keep from crying. I have a deeper understanding as to why our people are so against medical care. There is so much generational trauma we need to heal from to get to a better place, but I feel the damage is done. We are/were used as guinea pigs to test surgeries and medications, but once it has been perfected, we are excluded and not able to reap the benefits. However, I wish the author would've expanded on certain subjects, such as BMI, and kidney metrics as I have recently learned the ideologies behind those are racist. There was more that could've been included in the book, but what the author gave was enough to make me question everything going forward.

I'll be honest, I don't think I can write a review for this book because it'll make me ragey all over again. This is a very difficult book to read not only because of all the racism, bigotry and unethical exploitation of Black people for medical experimentation, but also for us to reconcile with the fact that many progresses in treatments that have been made over the years have been possible because of this exploitation. And that can be a hard pill to swallow.

But we all need to know this history upon which the world of medicine's advances have been built on. I had only previously known about the Tuskegee Syphilis trials and a bit about how the birth control pill came to be, there are so many other things that have happened over the centuries that will horrify you. So while I don't know what trigger warnings to mention for this book, just know that it's worse than many bad things you can imagine but it's important to be read and known by everyone.