Category Archives: Flexnor Report

We Must Speak Up; We Must Speak OUT

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I add my voice to the growing number of health care professionals and medical societies condemning the newest human rights violation by the Trump administration against our transgender community. The urgency of this issue is paramount! To deny health care rights during a global pandemic is both inhumane and absurd. Our trans patients and colleagues are already vulnerable due to the health disparities inherent in our system and biases from healthcare practitioners. Not only are out trans patients affected but all patients who fall under any part of our QUEER community in the past, present or future are at risk, making it even more difficult to be open and honest wit our health care providers.

Gender based and transphobic violence includes racism, murder and hate crime. It disproportionately affects black trans lives, especially black trans women. In the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprising and Covid19 the reversal of transgender health protections puts an immediate threat to black trans patients, and all trans BIPOC patients who identify as gender neutral or non-binary.

This recent action should be met with a call to arms from all medical professionals, including attending physicians, resident, medical students, nurses, APPs and staff. We must to do our best to provide trauma-based compassionate medicine and NEVER deny care for transgender patients nor any LGBTQ patients. The personal views of providers in any setting (outpatient, clinic, hospital or otherwise) must not be allowed to interfere with the right to health care. The recent COVID pop-up hospital in a Brooklyn park that denied transgender and LGBT care is an atrocious example of what the Trump administration is suggesting here.

There is a dearth of education for healthcare professionals from the earliest academic levels. Health disparities, intersectional oppression, and implicit biases of language, systems and structures have to be called out and addressed to stop this cycle of ignorance. Silence is clearly violence, and we cannot in good faith stay silent and allow conservative politicians to sacrifice health protection in the names of transphobia and racism – not now or ever again.

  • Kaiser Kabir OMS4 Lincoln Memorial University
  • Masina Wright, DO PGY1 University of New Mexico Hospital, Internal Medicine
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(Least)* Complicated

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Walking the tightrope between being a current MSII medical student and a Naturopathic Doctor is a delicate balance sometimes. I never know whether my career as an expert in alternative medicine is going to be a blackball or a gold star because of the very mixed opinions people have about my former profession in the medical world. My plan, heading into the first day of medical school was not to tell anyone my (second) degree when I started (my third degree) at UNECOM, but it was announced in orientation so my cover was blown.

Being a ND in general is pretty complicated – working outside of insurance in most states is a financial challenge for patients as well as doctors, and public knowledge about the profession is highest on the west coast of the US and Canada, and in more affluent areas of the NorthEast. Many people get excited when I say I am a doctor, then look back blankly when I tell them what kind of medicine I practice(d). People who know the field have reactions that are pretty love: hate. Lots of lovers, quite a few haters, and an ever-growing population of quiet converts who realize that, as one anonymous Twitter medical student said in my recent Twitter Flaming on the topic: people who are interested in alternative medicine are usually trying to take care of their health and make themselves feel better.

IMG_6031I have recently been made aware of a woman who attended a west coast Naturopathic Medicine College who has turned against the profession “with an inside view” and who is engaging in aggressive muckraking. She is getting recognition and validation as an “insider” to Naturopathic Medicine as she did complete our 4-year postgraduate degree before she quit and moved to Germany. She has started a petition to defame the profession worldwide. The unfortunate thing is she lives outside the US and is not accountable for US or CDN slander laws. What she is doing is poignantly effective because she has inflamed the haters. One doctor in particular is a physician and educator with the influential Doctors in Training Boards Exam Review Series. He has a large Twitter following and has enthusiastically joined in the slander of the Naturopathic Profession. I worry about how his “expert” personal opinion will effect future generations of physicians who have not considered their professional opinions of Naturopathic Medicine due to lack of exposure.

Big media like Forbes has jumped on the “tin foil hat” bandwagon by supporting her claims that botanical medicine, nutrition, physical medicine, homeopathy, mind/body practices and stress management are invalid sciences without evidence. The American and Canadian federal Naturopathic associations have both started a counter-petition against these muckracking efforts.

All of this is personally upsetting for me. It stirs a complicated turmoil of emotions, injustice, pride, and frustration that mixes my own choices with a very clear working knowledge of the weight that “the big lie” technique can carry in the world of propaganda. All of this comes at a time when “Functional Medicine” and “Integrative Medicine” are the new darlings of allopathic medicine alongside epigenetics and the microbiome.

Newsflash: Functional Medicine and Integrative Medicine ARE evidence based Naturopathic Medicines, researched by and for NDs originally.

Naturopathic Doctors are systematically being defamed and slandered while our actual practice techniques are being picked up and renamed and celebrated for their effectiveness.

I feel helpless in the face of this complicated adversity. I made my personal choice to add an Osteopathic Degree to my knowledge base because there was more to medicine I wanted to know – pharmacology, emergency medicine, psychiatry, and other facets of transgender medicine I need additional training on. I know the great value of Naturopathic Medicine and so do a great number of North American consumers. I suppose I need to trust that the greater good will prevail in the end…. but that may not help me or my career path when I am placed in a hospital as an MSIII or resident with an attending like the Internist above who hates everything alternative and Naturopathic medicine stands for.

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