In October 2018, the Twitter hashtag #DoctorsAreDickheads began trending after YouTube blogger Stevie Boebi released a video discussing her years of experiencing medical gaslighting and dismissal, as well as her eventual diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. The hashtag was started by Wren Frey, formerly known as K. Sauder, in response and solidarity with Boebi’s experiences to foster a wider conversation about these issues.[1] Other social media denizens (predominantly women, people of color, and people with psychiatric conditions) used the hashtag to express their own frustrated histories of medical neglect and abuse. The hashtag has been part of a larger discussion of implicit and explicit bias[2] amongst physicians that prevents them from providing adequate medical care to patients with marginalized identities.[3] The discourse empowered by #DoctorsAreDickheads exposes the ways that our cultural rhetoric of normative health has material consequences for those most vulnerable to (cis)sexism, fatphobia, and stigma against mental illness.
Team Members
Rua, Laila
Associated Funding
- Partially funded by SSRC Just Tech Fellowship (2022-2024)
Calls for Participation
inactive
Associated Publications
- Williams, Rua. “The Real Dickheads: Investigating the Source of Patient-Physician Conflict in the United States.” Just Tech. Social Science Research Council. June 5, 2024. DOI: doi.org/10.35650/JT.3070.d.2024.
- Any system that denies a patient’s right to choose the details and conditions of their care, any system that denies a physician’s expertise and prioritizes their clerical work over their clinical efficacy, is inherently obstructive to care and productive of death. Patients and physicians need a coalition with which to revolt—to destroy the embezzlement scheme enabled by contemporary insurance policy. Right now, patients can’t trust physicians, because physicians treat patients as part of the administrative burden that has broken their profession.
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