Author Event: Negligent by Design - Vanessa Grubbs, MD

Frugal Bookstore welcomes Dr. Vanessa Grubbs to discuss her latest book, Negligent by Design: Anti-Blackness in American Medicine and How to Address It. Join us for a meaningful and urgent conversation. This event will include a reading and Q&A session. Signed copies of Negligent by Design will be available for purchase.

About Negligent by Design:

A searing critique of medical racism and a powerful call for health-care professionals to make real change in their field, written by a leading activist and doctor.

Unequal access to care. Misdiagnosis. Mistreatment. Medical gaslighting. An increasing number of studies show the profound impacts racism has on communities of color—particularly Black Americans. But these disparities in health care and wellbeing are not the result of a handful of uninformed or malicious doctors: racism in the medical system is institutional, woven into the very fabric of diagnostic criteria and even hospital infrastructure. Medicine denies fair treatment to Black patients not in error…but by design.

Drawing from extensive research, in-depth interviews with medical students and resident physicians, and over twenty-five years of experience as a medical doctor, Dr. Vanessa Grubbs argues that the reason racism in medicine continues to go unchecked is because it is in fact the standard of care. Any attempts to dismantle medical racism through “placebo” efforts such as forming diversity committees or releasing statements condemning racism will fail, she says, because they don’t address the reality of how the institution of Medicine has been, and continues to be, negligent when it comes to the treatment of Black people.

Dr. Grubbs skillfully unpacks the three core problems of how our health-care system currently considers the race of patients, which she identifies as being “race based,” “race disregarded,” and “race denied.”

• When medical diagnoses and trainings are race based, they lead doctors to make different treatment decisions for Black patients, and create a dangerous disadvantage.
  
• At the same time, medical textbooks and trainings may inappropriately disregard race in cases when it does matter, like failing to include pictures of how rashes may appear differently on light and dark skin—leading to misdiagnosis and death.
  
• And finally, many medical institutions still deny the extent to which racism is an issue at all, resulting in fewer Black physicians and disastrous outcomes for Black patients.

Calling on her medical colleagues to join her in working against the negligence of American medicine, Dr. Grubbs lays out a pathway to true equity and inclusion in health care: getting to the root of the underlying fears and insecurities that have led to racist medical negligence; recruiting and retaining a diverse physician workforce; and forcing Medicine to commit to the cultural humility necessary to rebuild, not just replaster, a broken institution. (Penguin Random House)

About Dr. Vanessa Grubbs:

I'm a country girl from Spring Lake, North Carolina, youngest of six and the first college graduate and physician in my family. As a naive high school junior deciding to become a doctor, I had no idea the twists and turns my career would take.

I received my undergraduate and medical degrees from Duke University. After my primary care internal medicine residency at Highland Hospital of Alameda County Medical Center in Oakland, California, I stayed on as faculty but was soon bitten by the “research bug” and decided to leave Highland for the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) general medicine research fellowship, but not before meeting the man I would marry a year later—a few months after giving him my left kidney in 2005.

The experience of becoming a kidney donor led me to continue my training in nephrology. I completed the UCSF general medicine research fellowship in 2006 and the UCSF nephrology fellowship in 2009, then joined the nephrology faculty as Assistant Professor at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. I was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017.

Witnessing disturbing realities in nephrology in general and kidney failure specifically, ultimately drew me to palliative care and extended my writing from research to creative. I’ve written and spoken in international forums on palliative care in nephrology.  I am among the 2017 cohort for the Cambia Health Foundation Sojourns Scholar Leadership Program and the 2018 cohort of the California Health Care Foundation’s Health Care Leadership Program.

But as a result of my desire to focus on my writing and a series of “microaggressions,” I quit my clinical research day job in 2019. I soon learned many other Black physicians were enduring much more devastating racism, so I founded Black Doc Village, Inc—a non-profit organization dedicated to stopping the disproportionate dismissal of Black resident physicians.

I’ve written two books. I live with my husband, and our two “pittie” puppies in Oakland, California. ( https://www.thenephrologist.com/about)

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