Black Man in A White Coat addressed a lot of different issues, health disparities, bias, prejudice, impact of health insurance and social...

This question is very subjective. I would strongly recommend reviewing the book and thinking about which story or statistic was most surprising to you, then explain why. That is what the prompt is asking you to do. Your explanation can be based on your prior assumptions or even your own experiences with healthcare.

One of the main critiques made against Dr. Damon Tweedy in light of his memoir is that he was not more vigilant in response to discriminatory behavior from colleagues or superiors. However, considering that only five percent of practicing physicians in the United States are black, his reluctance was not surprising.

There are two very interesting anecdotes from the book which demonstrate this problem. The first took place in the mid-nineties. Tweedy was treating a nineteen-year-old young black woman named Leslie. The young woman had a miscarriage very late into her pregnancy. When Tweedy asked her questions about her medical history, she was very cagey, and she denied the obvious—being pregnant. His supervisor, who was white, demanded to know when the last time she had smoked crack was. Tweedy was stunned, but the supervisor turned out to be correct: the teenage girl was, unfortunately, an addict who had smoked crack two nights before. During a later conversation about the incident, a nurse added that the girl should have her tubes tied to avoid getting pregnant again, due to her addiction.

The entire incident made Tweedy uncomfortable. The doctor had been right about the girl's condition. The nurse was also, in a way, right about how the problem could be avoided in the future. However, would they have said the same about a middle-class white woman addicted to cocaine? Would the nurse have been as eager to see a white woman of a higher class sterilized? Also, how could they have been certain that the young woman's cocaine addiction caused the death of the fetus? There were other conditions, such as poor nutrition and lack of exercise, that also contributed to the death of the fetus the night before. Cocaine use was a major factor, but only one factor.

Tweedy, personally, both identified with the patient and felt superior to her. Clearly, his education and profession placed him in a better position. However, as a black man, he also felt vulnerable to the same snap judgments that plagued the teenage girl; he occasionally felt the same disregard for his value and abilities.

In another instance, Tweedy writes of a black male patient who was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder after disregarding a physician's instructions to take medicine, in favor of changing his diet and exercising. It was ironic to Tweedy that the man, who had a condition that is often prevented or ameliorated by such a regimen, was condemned as having a mental disorder for refusing to do exactly what a white physician wanted him to do.

According to Tweedy, a lot of the discrimination that results in hospitals comes from the white expectation that blacks should heed their presumably superior authority without question and should trust them without question. In other instances, there is a tendency to treat some patients with less respect due to certain conditions, such as drug addiction, but also due to their race or class.