Street medics roam protests, provide care
Network of activist health care workers say racism a health issue
Far from the antiseptic halls of UC San Francisco Medical Center, medical experts are taking their skills to the loud and crowded streets of the Bay Area’s anti-racism protests and rallies, aiding the weary and injured so that voices stay strong.
And if the unrest turns violent, these volunteer members of a growing national network of activist health care workers are ready to rush in to stanch bleeding, wrap wounds and rinse tear gas from eyes.
“Our role is to support those in the street as they advocate for their right to health and justice,” said Dr. Rupa Marya, an associate professor of medicine at UCSF and faculty director of the doctors’ Do No Harm Coalition.
On Friday, they aided a protester who had fainted at the Port of Oakland shutdown and rally, then distributed energy bars, water bottles and squirts of organic hand sanitizer at a celebratory Black Youth Protest and Rally at Lil Bobby Hutton Park in West Oakland.
As part of a car caravan Saturday, they drove from Oakland’s Alta Bates Summit Medical Center to a rally at San Francisco’s Bernal Hill where, in 2014, Alex Nieto was fatally shot by police.
“We show up wherever we’re asked,” despite the pandemic, said UCSF’s Dr. Juliana Morris, a Harvard-educated physician who co-founded the coalition in 2016 and provides care to the homeless at “shelter in place” hotels. “I can’t pretend that I am do
ing anything to help my patients unless I am also doing my part to address the systemic issue of state violence in their lives.”
During some protests, police have been indiscriminate, dousing the crowd — and the doctors — with tear gas. Police barricades, gunfire and flash-bang stun grenade canisters have triggered stampedes, causing people to fall and get hurt, they said.
“Our job was to help rinse tear gas out of their eyes, find a quiet place for them away from everyone running and calm them down,” said Dr. Olivia Park, a physician at UCSF’s Lifelong Medical Care in Richmond.
The medics can reach protesters long before a city’s official emergency responders, who may be reluctant to rush into a melee. The team scans the streets for injured stragglers left behind as the crowd retreats, seeking anyone who may be hidden behind a car and struggling to breathe.
Sometimes, the medics feel helpless. When one protester was tackled by San Francisco police and beaten, “I tried to get through to intervene and help the person, but they wouldn’t let me,” Park said.
“They took him away.”
Dressed in scrubs and masks, with backpacks stuffed with supplies and marked by crosses made of red duct tape, the medics feel a moral obligation to join the protests, saying it’s time for medicine to live up to its deepest promise. They took an oath to heal, they assert — and racism, like COVID-19, disproportionately affects people of color.
Their numbers have swelled as protests continue cross the country since George Floyd’s May 25 killing by police in Minneapolis. More than 5,600 medical professionals registered for the coalition’s recent “street medicine” online training, where they learned about police weaponry, tactics and treatments.
Other first aid trainings — sponsored by Oakland Street Medics, Sacramento Street Medics and other groups from Baltimore to Portland — also have been held or are planned.
Mainstream medicine traditionally has avoided advocacy, but now there is increasing push toward activism on issues such as gun control, carbon emissions and, now, racial injustice.
As the ranks of young doctors grow more diverse, they recount influential personal experiences. Dr. Kamaal Jones, a Stanford pediatrics resident who is African American, described being pulled over in his car by police and questioned, threatened with jail and searched for drugs.
Marya, the daughter of Indian immigrants who moved to the Southwest, recalls that her father urged her to ask Native Americans about their experiences. Park, whose Korean parents owned and operated a small produce market in San Francisco, witnessed the harassment of African American childhood friends.
The activism has stirred some controversy.
“The prospect of this ‘new,’ politicized medical education should worry all
Americans,” wrote Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine. “Why have medical schools become a target for inculcating social policy?”
But Dr. Michelle A. Albert, UCSF professor of medicine and president of the Association of Black Cardiologists, said, “It is imperative that medical professionals become involved with fighting racism and associated anti-blackness in order to truly improve and ensure the health and well-being of all of their patients.”
Earlier this month, more than 800 members of the Stanford Medicine community — joined by hospital CEOs and Dr. Lloyd Minor, dean of the School of Medicine — gathered at a Rally for Racial Justice.
The university’s Pediatrics Advisory Council is working on ways to integrate anti-racism into trainee education, faculty development and community relationships, Jones said.
“We’ve decided that we have a moral duty to do more than just observe racial disparities and injustice; we must act,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, chairman of UCSF’s Department of Medicine. “Whether it’s trying to measure and address health care disparities, or encouraging brave conversations to help fight racism in our workplace, we’re doing what we can to make things better.”
For Park and her coalition colleagues, that means stepping out of the hospital.
“This is the reason I went to medical school. Real medicine happens on the street and out in the community,” she said. “This is what fulfills me.”