Gloria Dickerson said she suffered what appeared to be a stroke in 2000, but doctors told her she was experiencing nothing more than an anxiety attack.
Dickerson, a specialist at the Institute on Homelessness Recovery, was paralyzed on her left side and unable to talk, which are signs typical of a stroke, but doctors misdiagnosed her, she said.
After spending 40 years in and out of the health care system, Dickerson said this sort of blunder is fairly common. She placed much of the blame on doctors who she said fail to give proper care.
“There is something about the way the system works that beats the goodness out of them sometimes,” Dickerson said. “We need to start with the way we train doctors. They are so fatigued and so burdened. If we don’t take care of doctors, we can’t expect them to take care of patients.”
Dickerson was one of four women to share their health care horror stories with 100 attendees Thursday, advocating for change during the William J. Bicknell Lectureship in Public Health, “Election 2008 – Agenda for Health Care Reform” at Boston University’s School of Public Health.
The event gave people with personal narratives a voice, organizer Jim Burgess said.
“These people are not professional,” Burgess, a BU health policy and management associate professor, said. “They are just people with a story to tell to motivate change.”
The women spoke about everything from providing more access to health care and better insurance coverage to improving the conduct of doctors and preventing medical errors.
Speaker Donna Smith said the problem is not with public awareness but with lawmakers’ reluctance to act. Filmmaker Michael Moore featured Smith in his 2007 documentary, “Sicko” after she lost her home and was forced to file bankruptcy to pay for medical expenses.
“The mood in the country is changing,” Smith said. “People get it. Now it is our task to get the congressional people to get it.”
SPH graduate student Abby Ross spoke about the limits of medical insurance she encountered after her mother suffered a stroke four years ago.
“We were told my dad had the best insurance plan,” Ross, also a School of Social Work graduate student, said. “I was pretty shocked to learn it was not unlimited.”
Ross spoke about the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, a bill which was introduced to Congress in July. The act would create a national insurance coverage program that would provide cash benefits to working individuals that they could spend on “rent, food, whatever,” Ross said.
Ross said Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is a co-sponsor of the bill, but Republican candidate John McCain is not.
Consumer Health Quality Council member Linda Klein lost her mother due to preventable medical errors, she said. In the United States, Medical mistakes are the fifth leading cause of death, according to the Institute of Medicine.
Klein said she recorded a video about her experience, which was uploaded to YouTube and has received about 15,000 views.
“I think one of the best things people can do is educate themselves as much as they can about the condition they have,” Klein said.