Nearly 80 percent of all autoimmune patients are women, and yet it takes a woman five years and five different doctors on average to finally receive an autoimmune diagnosis.
In those five years without treatment, women face irreversible damage to their bodies as the severity of their disease begins to ramp up. By the time they finally receive a diagnosis, itâs gone from an early-stage disease that could easily be managed to a chronic debilitating condition.
Five years of your body attacking itself.
In the 1900s, women got a hysteria diagnosis. That diagnosis was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual in 1980, so in 2026, women instead get an anxiety diagnosis.
Women are seven times more likely than men to be misdiagnosed and sent home from the hospital while in the middle of having a heart attack. Black women are three times more likely to die in childbirth than anyone else.
It wasnât until 1993 that women of childbearing age were allowed to participate in clinical trialsâbecause a potential fetus was deemed more important to the state than a womanâs ability to access equitable, quality medical care.
This week, the House Education and Workforce Committee held a congressional hearing titled âTraining Activists, Not Physicians: The Impact of DEI on Medical Schoolsâ
D.E.I. = Diversity, equity, inclusion.
For normal people, that just means teaching doctors to treat every human being with basic, equal dignity. It means teaching medical students not to make fatal assumptions based on what a patient looks like.
Women die on a routine basis because of gender and racial bias in health care. This week, our elected representatives sat in a stuffy conference room to state that they do not want the doctors of Americaâs future to have a diverse, equitable, and inclusive practice.
If youâve ever read the book 1984 by George Orwell, youâve heard the concept of doublethink. Orwell defines it as the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
This concept was supposed to remain fiction. A warning of what could happen. It was meant to be a guidebook for politicians or corruption. I want you to keep this in mind as we talk about what happened in this hearing.
The hearing kicked off with a speech from a Republican from Michigan named Tim Walberg. Heâs the chairman of the committee.
He told the room that the real problemâthe âdeeper problem,â as he called itâisnât a broken, profit-driven healthcare system. No, the real concern is the âactivist infrastructureâ of medical schools putting people into racial categories. He claims that diversity is being used to discriminate.
And then, he took it a step further. He claimed that teaching diversity and equity is actually whatâs inciting âpervasive antisemitismâ on campuses. Why? Because, according to Walberg, D.E.I. labels Jewish people as âwhite,â and therefore âprivileged and oppressors.â
Tim didnât give any actual evidence of this happening. He did not list any schools, any classes, or any actual cases where this happened. It is a strange world we live inâwhere our congressman can make extreme claims without evidence.
What we saw Tim do today is very similar to what Stephen Miller had recently done when targeting the landmark Olmstead v. LC case earlier this year. This is the legal case that let disabled people out of institutions and into their homes and the community. Both use the same argument: that equitable care towards one group means that youâre being discriminatory against everyone else.
âAre we going to teach medicine or are we teaching social justice?â asked Rep. Owen Burgess, a Republican from Utah.
Medicine is social justice. Think about it. If a working-class kid comes into the ER with severe asthma because his family can only afford rent right next to a corporate chemical plant, treating the root cause of his asthma is social justice. If a womanâs heart attack is missed because decades of medical textbooks were based entirely on male bodies, teaching future doctors to recognize her symptoms is social justice.
Social justice is not a political buzzword. Itâs the modern-day politicians who have assigned this word to their narratives surrounding identity politics. But in reality, social justice, as it is and always has been, is the right to equitable conditionsâwhether school, voting rights, or healthcareâfor every single person in America.
Burgess Owens was born in 1951.
He didnât grow up reading about segregation in a history textbook like most of us. He was actually born into it. Not only that, but he grew up in the same America where Black people were legally barred from holding office, drinking from the same water fountains, and even receiving care in the same hospitals as white people.
When he was a child, a Black person having a medical emergency would be turned away if they went to the âwrongâ hospital, a âwhites-onlyâ hospital. And when these segregated hospitals refused care, it led to the deaths of hundreds of children, mothers, fathers, and grandparents.
So, the communities responded by creating their own hospitals. In these institutions, they treated Black patients, had Black physicians, and would also treat white patients who needed it. Social equity is the only reason Burgess Owens is allowed to hold office, or even receive healthcare in the same building as Rep. Tim Walberg.
âAnd you do teach biology?â
Letâs talk about Representative Mary Miller of Illinois.
Social justice is the reason she can vote, hold office, and seek medical care without being locked in an asylum for being hysterical. White women were unable to vote until 1920. And while they could technically hold office, state and federal governments skirted around legality, arguing that the 19th Amendment only applied to the voting booth, not the halls of power. In states like Oklahoma, the legal battles to keep women out of elected office dragged on all the way into the 1940s.
It was even harder for Black women. It was not until 1968âyears laterâthat Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman ever elected to Congress.
Mary Millerâs questions were loaded around her upset with some university courses using the term âpregnant people,â questioning the physicians about their credentials and knowledge.
If you are a working-class woman in this country, getting pregnant means you are about to enter one of the most predatory, expensive, and dangerous medical systems in the developed world. It means deciding if you can afford a $15,000 hospital bill just to deliver a child. It means going back to work two weeks after a C-section because the politicians in Washington refuse to guarantee paid family leave.
Mary didnât mention that.
On June 24th, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade. The next day, Mary Miller took that time to stand next to Trump on a campaign stage, calling it a âhistoric victory for white life.â
White life
Her staffers stated the Congresswoman simply âmisread her notes.â She meant to say âright to life,â you see.
When normal people make a mistake reading out loud, what do they do? They stop, blink, and they correct themselves. If you accidentally say something entirely different from what you meantâespecially something as jarring as substituting âwhiteâ for ârightââyour brain catches it. You say, âExcuse me, I meant right to life.â
But watch Mary Miller. She claps instead.
I think one of the most ironic things here is that this committee started out by stating that diversity groups cause anti-Semitism. Yet only two days into her 2021 House term, Miller issued a prepared speech to the conservative think tank Moms for America, where she quoted Adolf Hitler saying:
âEach generation has the responsibility to teach and train the next generation. You know, if we win a few elections, we're still going to be losing unless we win the hearts and minds of our children. This is the battle. Hitler was right on one thing: he said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future.ââ
â Illinois Rep. Mary Miller, January 5th, 2021.
On January 7, Miller's office tweeted that her remarks had been intended to compare alleged youth indoctrination efforts by âleft-wing radicalsâ to those of Hitler.
âLeft-wing radicalsâ are not the ones quoting Hitler. Left-wing radicals arenât the ones speaking about âhistoric victories for white life,â either.
âWeâre so determined to be diverse that weâre willing to take unqualified people, and we put them into our institutions.â â Rep. Randy Fine
In April 2023, an ethics investigation found that Randy Fine abused his constituents when he tried to withhold state funding from Special Olympics Florida in the city of West Melbourne because of a personal feud with a school board member.
So what exactly counts as a qualified, Representative Fine? Is it a deep commitment to public service?
Is it voting to cut Affordable Care Act subsidies, leading to millions of Americans losing health insurance? Or is it voting to cut Medicaid, raising costs and cutting off health care access for thousands of Americans, even though increasing access to health insurance was a campaign promise you ran on?
Is it quality to illegally vote for your fellow representatives who arenât present?
Is it quality to refuse to move to the district that you represent? Or is it doxing a school board member in your communityâsharing her personal phone number and telling people to contact her, leading to her home being vandalized and her life being threatened?
Remember, these are the same politicians who held a whole congressional hearing to scream that teaching diversity makes people discriminatory. They clutch their pearls over college syllabuses. They claim they are deeply concerned about hate.
Meanwhile, what is Randy Fine doing?
That. He is also publicly calling for the mass expulsion of all Muslims from the United States. He routinely labels Muslim Americans as âterroristsâ.
Randy Fine also openly calls for the starvation of Palestinian children, and the for dropping nuclear weaponry on them. Is discrimination the problem, or is it okay as long as itâs directed at the ârightâ people?
So the next time they tell you who the âextremistsâ are, and the next time they tell you that being diverse is discriminatory, remember Randy Fine. Remember exactly what kind of people are running this system.
My autoimmune disease, while dxâd and the root cause of early heart disease/failure, has never been treated. When you have one of the âbiggiesâ they tend not to spend time on the rest of the stuff bothering your system, probably figuring youâll be dead soon anyhow.
There is something deeply deeply wrong with somebody who throws around the word 'nuked'.