“And I cried,” she says. “I was so happy because nobody ever said ‘we.’ It was always ‘you.'”
He understood her as a Black woman, she said – from her need to be treated respectfully to “the real understanding about how I as an African American woman eat. I’m not eating a salad every day, all day. That’s not going to happen. So how do I deal with the food I do eat?”
Lartigue retired this year as executive chief of administrative services for the Mercer County Board of Social Services and is a Know Diabetes by Heart ambassador for the AHA and American Diabetes Association. She gets support from a nutritionist, who is Black, and a nurse, who is white.
“It doesn’t matter what color they are,” she says, as long as they understand you with more than just textbook knowledge of your problem.
Joseph agreed that trust is a critical part of diabetes care because patients have to manage so much on their own. He makes a point of being encouraging and talking about family issues “to drive that collaborative, trusting relationship, which I feel is the key to diabetes management.”
That concept works on a broad level too, he says. Academia, industry and others need to start by listening to and connecting with communities before trying to fix things.
The challenge is daunting, but Joseph isn’t downbeat. “As Barack Obama said, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. This is for our generation to address. And I think that we have to rise to that challenge and that as Americans, we can do it together.”
Find the Right Doctor
Try these tips for finding a doctor that is going to be sensitive to the trials and tribulations that you have to face as a Black person:
- Seek medical professionals that have made an effort to educate themselves on the dehumanization of people of color in the medical system.
- Seek medical professionals who are in the community with physicians of color.
- Watch out for red flags such as implicit bias.
- Speak up when something is wrong or you feel uncomfortable.
- Seeking a black doctor that understands you might be the best solution if you struggle to find one of another race.