This dialogue will include a presentation on the historic roots of the MIC which has given rise to the racialized medical ableism we currently face. We’ll also discuss the HJC’s current work, including its launch of the US’s 1st national Medical Abuse Hotline and Know Your Medical Rights campaign. The presentation will be followed by open discussion and resource sharing to connect people with ways to support the revolutionary work for health justice, especially at the intersections of disability and climate justice.

Questions we will explore together:

How do we define medical abuse, medical injustice and the MIC? What injustice have you or people you love survived in the MIC?
How have we internalized medical ableism and medical racism rooted in the MIC?
What are current tactics to resist and transform the resistance the MIC in our lives and relationships? How do we grapple with the contradiction of striving to transform the the MIC when most or all of us are dependent on it?
How do you imagine true care and support to look and feel like in our communities? What legacies of resistance can we look towards to make these dreams realities bodies and lives?
How do projects such as HJC’s Medical Abuse Hotline serve as powerful sites of disruption to the MIC?

This dialogue is for those of us who are unfamiliar with these concepts, as well as those who are already tapped in to the work of HJC, or other health/healing justice, disability justice, and radical healing work (such as therapists, social workers, body workers, herbalists, doulas). This dialogue is also for those of us who are medical providers, who attempt to access medical care, or who have experienced medical injustice (or have a loved one who is a survivor).

Dialogue Notes (post-presentation):

• Working within and outside system to support healthcare practitioners and people with access and treatment
• Many well meaning practitioners who are carrying out the system, hard to see institutionalized -isms
• Drapetomania
• How do we do reform model?
• Want to build alternative parallel systems until there is sufficient capacity for this to crumble
• Histories of colonization
• Textbooks that counsel differential pain med prescription, for Jewish people, for Black people
• Institutional racism and ableism
• Non-consensual sterilization
• Patterns of complicity that have become increasingly monetized and normalized
• History of lung capacity meter
• History of speculum
• Military industrial complex and medical industrial complex created notion of normal human body and sent it around the world
• BMI developed in slave states, in order to be able to tax the property of enslaved people, used BMI
• Act UP so much community organizing around how research happens
• Studies are incredibly white and incredibly male
• Whose pain is considered legitimate?
• In movement we envision, people are involved from our homes, involved from hospital beds, in a lot of different ways, not just about being in the streets – we center access, racial, gender and disability justice – access love and liberation
• Understand racialized gendered ableism
• HJC’s tactics
• Our communities lost a major shero Carrie Ann Lucas, who died because denied life-saving medication
• Bill Pease a major mentor and leader, who predicted his own death
• In rage and grief knew it was beyond time to take action – DJ activists come together, honor Carrie, Bill and others we have lost of the decades
• Medical abuse hotline idea was born – a catalyst to expose and transform
• Data justice, created by us – used to create systemic change, used to stage protest,  impact litigation like class action lawsuits, redistribution of wealth, part of larger community organizing strategies
• 1 in 4 people in US have to ration insulin, with health insurance – life threatening, early stages of pending litigation
• Corporations making billions of dollars exploiting vulnerability
• Anarchist collectives cropping up teaching how to make own insulin
• How to generate these medications to scale in safe ways?
• Pushback around how resource-intensive it is to create medications – what would world look like?
• Create less disabling society so we are less sick
• Could have paid time off when ill, so flus don’t spread as much as they do
• Could put moratorium on chemicals, causing cancers and neurodegenerative conditions
• Will take generations to bounce back – our ecosystems and our bodies
• Influenced by Cuba, smaller scale, if you imagine breaking things down in US to Cuba size, much more horizontal and pluralistic – strong healthcare that synthesizes western health care and botanical healing – innovated a lot of interesting research in neuroscience, cardiovascular, all hospitals have herb gardens, work with curanderas – privacy byt not secrecy, not sequestered, organized as co-ops of collectives
• Friend visiting Belize, got edema and went to doctor, amazing care for $3, no one treated in racist way – gave meds, diet, supplement, recommendations for activities
• Long-term vision of worker run health co-ops, own the means of healthcare, cardio doc working with curandera
• Solidarity with Do No Harm coalition
• Help reduce stranglehold of corporate polluters
• Huge growth in autoimmune diseases, neurodegenerative, others, tied to enviro issues and intersectional injustice
• Want pharmaceutical co-ops – leverage there, so many scientists want to help and don’t have so much control over their labor
• Needle Exchange started in 80s out of a van – would not have imagined in my lifetime that we’d be here today with safe injection sites
• Lot of nursing staff coming from Philippines and other countries
• Curriculum to work for equity and justice within system
• Multigenerational, multigender, multiracial training teams
• Medical-legal control apparatuses
• Nurses work so hard, save so many lives, don’t have a lot of control – amount of weight & surveillance on them, such suppressive system for workers at bottom of the hierarchy
• Deep care and compassion and commitment people go in with gets suppressed – exhausting
• Opposite end of spectrum, surgeons who think they’re gods, lots of power and autonomy
• HJC we don’t polarize against individuals, want to partner with people and create means to hold them accountable, the hotline is one way of doing that
• Hotline will connect callers with resources, other people in solidarity to be witnessed and heard, advocacy
• Survivors of medical abuse can experience deep shame and silence, medical system seen as benign – complex survivorship as continuing to be depended on system and caregivers, difficult spiritual terrain to navigate, huge amount of gaslighting and condescension
• Dr. Ruha Benjamin: “the hotline is a way of transforming our pain into power”
• Creating capacity and deeper partnerships
• Communities, healthcare workers and legal workers
• Generative movement building
• Healing justice hotline network – referral network, and co-create interventions and strategies to transform MIC, huge incubator
• Looking to abolition movement – primary lens
• People’s science lens
• Holding the vastness and complicity of it, comparisons to prison industrial complex
• Roles i’ve played in forced hospitalization
• How make our minds big enough to hold all of this
• Doctors who didn’t prescribe enough medications and so didn’t get partnership
• It is easy to otherize folks with disabilities – disability lens that all bodies are perfect, keep that as a baseline in my thought processes
• German word for healing means “whole”, how we get to personal state of being whole
• Bayer history of industrialization, eugenics, Nazism
• Industrialization of everything all taking power out of our connection with the land, what is surrounding us
• Go from being subject of treatment to being an actor in process of being whole
• Gender being a pathology, they made the mousetrap, we are not mentally ill, access to technologies
• Move from GID to gender dysphoria seems more expansive has resulted in more surveillance
• A test of drawing a doll and putting clothes on it
• Gender binary such a huge part of MIC
• Have to submit to pathologization to access treatment for trans and GNC folks
• Need to start asking ourselves how we can have more autonomy and dignity – what are the resources, steps, infrastructure to maintain and sustain power and self-determination – when this is taken from you it is counter to health
• How stressful it is to feel disrespected, humiliated or undermined – profound paradoxes and contradictions to spell out for our communities and the general public
• We can undermine success of far right manipulating wedge issues (only rich white people have invisible disabilities), to destroy solidarity
• Lots of shit falling apart, it is frightening, it is opportunity
• My internalized ableism has been lowered during the wildfires, normalization of understanding toxic air
• My body’s response to disabling toxic environment is adaptive – there is a lesson for all of us as a species, see the truth of our wholeness, the lie of any body that is inherently flawed or normal 
• We use science to debunk a lot of science and “truth”
• Partnering with climate justice sector
• Parallels of needs for alternatives
• How i can help people who i support see how they are situated in this architecture
• So many things that have to be reclaimed of different types of care
• Healthy skepticism of integration of alternative healing modalities into MIC
• Inspired by this work
• Connecting with other systems, complexes and oppressions
• Taking a lot home that i want to dig deeper into
• Inspired by community organized co-ops, how powerful that could be
• Never thought about institutional oppression in relation to healthcare
• Have never received care from someone Brown, don’t feel safe – need to be self-advocate for own safety
• Vulnerability and fear when we don’t know what’s wrong, when we are sick we don’t have a lot of time to doctor shop
• People who come to me with therapy treating them with a lot of sensitivity
• Feeling my care and my draw to this work
• Taking away relatively recent history victories – what can we put in motion now, what did not seem possible not that long ago
• Feeling all my friends from the 80s who are not here
• It is on us.