A Black Doctor Died of Covid After Accusing the White Doctors and Staff at Indiana University Health North Hospital of Racist Treatment (ignoring symptoms, requests for pain meds, disbelieving her)

NGHR TREATMENT FROM RACISTS. From [HERE] and [HERE] A Black physician died of Covid-19 weeks after she described a White doctor dismissing her pain and concerns about her treatment as she lay in an Indiana hospital. 

Dr. Susan Moore passed away on Sunday due to complications from Covid-19, her son told the New York Times. The internist died about two weeks after she shared a video in which she accused a doctor at Indiana University Health North Hospital (IU North) of ignoring her complaints of pain and requests for medication because she was Black, even though she was both a patient and a doctor herself.

In a video that was posted earlier this month, she filmed herself from a hospital bed and recounted her experience at IU North. Moore said her doctor brushed off her symptoms, telling her, "You're not even short of breath."

"Yes, I am," Moore said in the video, which she shared on Facebook December 4.

She had to beg to receive remdesivir, she recalled in the video, the antiviral drug used to treat patients who are hospitalized for Covid-19 and are not in need of mechanical ventilation.

And despite her pain, the doctor told Moore he might send her home, she said, and he didn't feel comfortable giving her more narcotics.

"He made me feel like I was a drug addict," she said in the video. "And he knew I was a physician."

Moore had also posted updates on her Facebook page along with the video.

Moore, who was an internist, said her pain was "adequately treated" only after she raised concerns about her treatment. She was later discharged from IU North, but returned to a different hospital less than 12 hours later, she wrote on her Facebook page.

"I put forth and I maintain if I was White, I wouldn't have to go through that," Moore said.

A spokesman for IU North confirmed to CNN that Moore was a patient at the hospital and that she was eventually discharged, but declined to say more about her, citing patient privacy.

"As an organization committed to equity an reducing racial disparities in healthcare, we take accusations of discrimination very seriously and investigate every allegation," the spokesman said.

Moore's story speaks to a broader issue of what experts call implicit racial bias in health care toward Black patients. Studies have shown that Black patients are in some situations prescribed less pain medication than their White counterparts. And a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine attributed unequal treatment in part to "enduring racist cultural beliefs and practices."

The article cited a 2016 study that found half of White medical students and residents "held unfounded beliefs about intrinsic biologic differences between Black people and White people," falsely believing the pain of Black patients was less severe than White patients.

"Acceptance of this inequitable treatment as 'normal' is historically rooted in and supported by the belief that Black people are intrinsically disease-prone and, implicitly or explicitly, not deserving of high-quality care," the authors of the New England Journal of Medicine article wrote, comparing the issue of racism in medicine to racism in policing.

Racial disparities in medical treatment have been further underscored by Covid-19, which disproportionately impacts communities of color.

To a "majority of physicians, predominantly who are White in the United States, the perception is that African Americans do not need as much for pain," said Dr. Ala Stanford, a pediatric surgeon and the founder of the Black Doctors Covid-19 Consortium. [MORE]