When The People Who Keep You Well Are Making You Sick
Obtaining Health Care Safely in the Pandemicene
First, a caveat: this piece is long. There aren’t a lot of profound truths in the following paragraphs, but there is a lot of nitty-gritty advice along the lines of “If they do X, you say Y.” It’s gotta be granular, this time, because the devil is in the details. But as with any advice, some individual suggestions may or may not work for you. You may find some ideas helpful and others not, or find them helpful some of the time, but not always.
Accessing health care can be a very fraught enterprise, for a lot of reasons. Many people (including women, BIPOC, LGBTQ folks, people whose first language is not English, folks with disabilities or chronic illness, and those who are uninsured) are especially likely to find navigating the healthcare industry challenging because so many providers hold implicit biases that make it hard for patients to be heard and respected.