Sick and Tired - Garcia, MD Richard

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Résumé :
Jazz, the quintessential American art form, serves as a blueprint for these personal essays that wrestle with inequalities in medicine based on race. Sick and Tired is a collective of stories, personal essays, letters, vignettes, and song, as it were, that challenges the concept of race, itself, and considers the possibility of American action toward addressing real, physical differences in health outcomes between the races. Poverty, to be sure, is important in understanding unequal health realities in America; but race, itself, persists even in the face of whatever progress so far. This is gruesomely and predictably demonstrated in the current pandemic.As with jazz, the audience is most critical here. This book addresses the rhetorical triad - speaker, speech, audience - and calls upon the audience, the way the preacher calls upon the pews, to join in the solution to the human condition rooted in millennia of conflict with the other.Dissonance is the word in bebop jazz. These chapters are rooted in science, social science, and literature. At once, they call upon the audience to participate in would-be solutions that promise to vary across the varied communities. That is, the responses will be particular, like the audience participating in live jazz.These personal essays are intended for an audience interested in race, health outcomes, healthcare costs, and a literary approach that suggests artistic ways into the quagmire, and human catastrophe, of race and medicine.

Biographie:
Richard Garcia, MD, a pediatrician, has published numerous articles in medical and academic journals. He is a national speaker on health disparities based on race that includes a recent TEDx Talk, Race, Medicine, and Jazz. His previous book, On Race and Medicine: Insider Perspectives, was published in 2015. Sick and Tired - Race, Medicine, and Jazz is the follow up collection that advances the concept of jazz as a template for how a concerned audience might create solutions to health disparities based on race. Originally from Stockton, he lives in southern California with his wife and three children.