The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by HBOBoasting an exceptional cast and production team, and based on Rebecca Skloot’s critically acclaimed 2010 nonfiction best-seller of the same name, this HBO Films drama tells the true story of Henrietta Lacks, an African- American woman whose cells were used to create the first immortal human cell line, known as HeLa. Told primarily through the eyes of Lacks’ daughter Deborah (Oprah Winfrey) and journalist Rebecca Skloot (Rose Byrne), the film chronicles Deborah’s search to learn about the mother she never knew, and to understand how the unauthorized harvesting of Lacks’ cancerous cells in 1951 led to unprecedented medical breakthroughs, from cancer to polio to radiation to AIDS, changing countless lives and the face of medicine forever. With a supporting cast that includes Renée Elise Goldsberry, Reg E. Cathey, Courtney B. Vance, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Leslie Uggams, Reed Birney, Rocky Carroll and John Douglas Thompson, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a story of medical arrogance and triumph, race, poverty, and deep friendship between the unlikeliest of people.
Publication Date: 2017
Jessie Sleet Scales & the Black public health movement by Hanes, Patricia, Academic.Patricia Hanes discusses Black nursing leaders, like Jessie Sleet Scales, including the segregation and social barriers they faced, and their inspiring influence in shaping the profession of nursing, particularly in impoverished and marginalized communities.
Stockpiling Black Genes by Ashby, Wally, director; Cannady, James, producer; Cannady, Sheryl J., producer; (1933), Tony Brown, producerIn this edition of Tony Brown's Journal, Tony Brown and his guest, Dr. Floyd Malveaux, discuss a DNA bank, genetic diseases, and environmental health hazards. Howard University, a historically Black institution in Washington, D.C., plans to create the largest repository of DNA from 25,000 African-Americans in order to reduce or eradicate the many diseases that plague the Black community. Dr. Floyd Malveaux, dean of Howard University’s College of Medicine, discusses this new medical initiative.
Publication Date: 2003
Podcast Playlists
Note: You will need to create a Spotify account to listen to full episodes. Many of these podcast episodes are also available wherever you get your podcasts.
Videos
De-Biasing Medical Education: A Checklist MethodologyDuring this webinar, Dr. Caruso Brown discusses how medical education content suffers from implicit, and sometimes explicit, bias with regard to race, ethnicity, gender and other characteristics. Further, medical education may play a role in reinforcing false beliefs about biological differences between racial and ethnic groups. Such beliefs then affect how students and trainees treat and interact with patients. However, faculty members who devise curricular content in undergraduate medical education may be unfamiliar with concepts such as social determinants of health (SDH), health disparities and structural competency, unaware of how SDH intersect with their areas of expertise, or inexperienced with discussing bias in the classroom. Inspired by the success of checklists in some efforts to improve patient safety and quality, we developed a tool, in the format of a checklist, that faculty members could use when developing or reviewing any type of content for medical students in order to identify and address bias before it reached students.
How racism makes us sickWhy does race matter so profoundly for health? David R. Williams developed a scale to measure the impact of discrimination on well-being, going beyond traditional measures like income and education to reveal how factors like implicit bias, residential segregation and negative stereotypes create and sustain inequality. In this eye-opening talk, Williams presents evidence for how racism is producing a rigged system -- and offers hopeful examples of programs across the US that are working to dismantle discrimination.
The problem with race-based medicineSocial justice advocate and law scholar Dorothy Roberts has a precise and powerful message: Race-based medicine is bad medicine. Even today, many doctors still use race as a medical shortcut; they make important decisions about things like pain tolerance based on a patient's skin color instead of medical observation and measurement. In this searing talk, Roberts lays out the lingering traces of race-based medicine -- and invites us to be a part of ending it. "It is more urgent than ever to finally abandon this backward legacy," she says, "and to affirm our common humanity by ending the social inequalities that truly divide us."
Why skin disease is often misdiagnosed in darker skin tonesSkin is one of the most powerful predictors of health, yet nearly half of all new dermatologists admit to feeling uncomfortable identifying health issues on darker skin tones -- resulting in poorer health outcomes for patients of color. In this crucial talk, TED Fellow and dermatologist Jenna C. Lester shares her effort to extend medical training beyond its current limited scope and ensure all medical students get trained in the full spectrum of diseases as they appear in all patients, regardless of skin tone.
Why your doctor should care about social justiceIn Zimbabwe in the 1980s, Mary Bassett witnessed the AIDS epidemic firsthand, and she helped set up a clinic to treat and educate local people about the deadly virus. But looking back, she regrets not sounding the alarm for the real problem: the structural inequities embedded in the world's political and economic organizations, inequities that make marginalized people more vulnerable. These same structural problems exist in the United States today, and as New York City's Health Commissioner, Bassett is using every chance she has to rally support for health equity and speak out against racism. "We don't have to have all the answers to call for change," she says. "We just need courage."
