About Health Is Political

I spent over a decade practicing medicine on the South and West Sides of Chicago — inside the communities American healthcare most reliably fails. What I witnessed there changed how I understand health entirely.

The patients I cared for weren’t sick because of bad luck or bad choices. They were sick because of bad policy, inadequate funding, and a system designed to serve a narrow set of people, conditions, and circumstances. The medicine was downstream of everything else.

That's what this newsletter is about. The forces that determine what gets diagnosed, treated, and overlooked aren't biological. They're political. Every visit length, every treatment pathway, every category of illness that receives research attention — these are design choices.

And design choices have consequences.

I’m Dr. Brittani James — Board-Certified Family Medicine physician in Chicago. I write about what I witnessed on the frontlines, so patients, practitioners and policy-makers can see the system clearly—-and make it right.

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