This story aired on the October 23, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents.
For some BIPOC people, dealing with the healthcare system can be tough. Discrimination, lack of cultural understanding, and mistreatment can lead to skepticism of the medical system.
In Oakland, health organizations like Freedom Community Clinic are responding to this long-standing issue.
"Community receives and is very open to our services because it's directly coming From their neighbor or their comadre or someone that they know and they trust." - Esperanza Jimenez
Kendall Dominique is leading a peaceful breathing exercise. She’s an herbalist in residence at Freedom Community Clinic and she’s running a workshop called: To Be Held. “To be held by herbs requires us to dive into an understanding of what healing looks like outside of this Western ideology, right? We’re having to step into a different vision of what medicine looks like.”
There are about 15 participants, mostly people of color. As people arrive, Kendal greets them at the door and tells them to grab a seat. This workshop was designed to help immunocompromised folks learn about different herbs that can help them support their immune system.
To understand why Freedom Community Clinic exists, let me take you back a few years. During the height of the covid-19 pandemic people of color were dying at much higher rates than their white counterparts. In May of 2020, The city of Oakland passed a resolution declaring a local health emergency for African American residents, due to the spread of COVID-19. Two years later, the city declared racism a public health crisis. The pandemic accentuated the health disparities between communities of color and white populations. It also brought broader attention to the persistent issue of medical mistrust.
According to a 2021 study published in the Annals of Family Medicine, people of color were way more likely to distrust healthcare professionals than the white people surveyed. Latinos were nearly 50% more distrustful, and African Americans were more than 70% more distrustful. Now, medical mistrust can stem from historical events. The U.S Public Health Service’s syphilis study of men at Tuskegee Institute was infamous. Mistrust can also come from people’s personal experiences with medical institutions, but in this study, the researchers suggested that the mistrust was due to implicit and institutional racial and ethnic bias in health professionals.
In Oakland, the staff at Freedom Community Clinic knows those problems well. Dr. Bernadette says she comes from a family that has experienced a lot of medical trauma. Dr. Bernadette Lim is the founding executive director of Freedom Community Clinic, her mom and family had a a lot of encounters in the medical system in which they felt traumatized. Dr. Bernadette says” They felt like they did not have a voice and that they had to undergo procedures that they didn't have full consent towards and even resulted in death for some of my family members.”Dr. Bernadette remembers her family hardly going to the doctor growing up instead, her mother turned to home remedies from the Philippines.
However, when Dr. Bernadette’s mom had a lot of her reproductive health issues, she had to go to the doctor and that was very traumatizing for her. She didn't realize the full consequences of the hysterectomy procedure. Dr. Bernadette says, “Acupuncture, spiritual counseling, and the Filipino massage and these modalities were able to be there and help her reclaim her body in ways that the medical system didn't.” With those memories in mind, Dr. Bernadette started the Freedom Community Clinic in 2019 and established an organizing team through 2020. This was both during the height of the COVID pandemic and during Bernadette’s time in medical school. She says she and her colleagues at Freedom Community Clinic see themselves as the healing frontline for community members who have been cut off from traditional healing.
Dr. Bernadette believes that people’s ancestral medicines have been commodified. She says “such that we see herbal medicine, acupuncture and yoga and meditation in these rich wellness spas and these places that are divorced from the actual communities and cultures of which they came from. “ According to her, many people who visit Freedom Community Clinic explain that they have not felt seen or heard in the medical system. Dr. Bernadette doesn’t reject Western Medicine. She knows it’s saved
a lot of people. But, she says it's a both-and situation – there’s no single source of healing that can be the answer for everyone.
At the herbal workshop, a woman named Ellen is sitting across from me, she says she was diagnosed with Lymphoma about 20 years ago and had to undergo chemotherapy alongside 8 medicinal drugs every two weeks. Ellen tells me that throughout her battle with cancer, she felt that Western medicine only addressed what was wrong in the present moment and she continues to deal with the after-effects of the treatments 20 years later. Ellen is attending the herbal workshop as a way to have a more healing approach to her health.
Across town in the Fruitvale neighborhood, I meet up with Esperanza Jimenez and Maria de Los Angeles at FCC’s Sanctuary space. As soon as I step into the building, I am greeted by a big colorful mural near the entrance. The building smells almost spa-like Infused with incense. Esperanza is the Director of Cultural Arts and Healing Sanctuaries at FCC. She takes me through their growing apothecary in the corner of the room. She preps a small brown bag with herbal blends. These infusions were selected by promotoras de sanación – local community members who become health educators. For this batch, it was a blend of rose, chamomile, and other herbs for feelings of anxiety.
Promotoras de Sanación is a program at Freedom Community Clinic. It began last year, in the summer of 2023. Promatoras de Sanacion is based on a long-running program, Promotoras de Salud. That is a framework used in many health organizations and clinics. Esperanza says FCC’s main goal is to train their promotoras in FCC’s practices like herbal medicine, acupuncture, and massage. The promotoras are Spanish speakers that come from El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Honduras. Esperanza says, “Community receives and is very open to our services because it's directly coming From their neighbor or their comadre or someone that they know and they trust.”
Surrounded by books and a kitchen, I sit with Maria de Los Angeles, who goes by Angeles. She is a promotora de sanación at FCC. Angeles says she’s learned that people’s main fear of the healthcare system is related to their undocumented status, and fear of deportation. On top of that people in the community are sometimes unemployed, unhoused, and are held back by language barriers, because of that they don’t know where to get medical services. According to Angeles, The promotoras try to minimize fear in their community members by offering medical resources and a communal space they can trust. FCC founder Dr. Bernadette Lim says, that is the ultimate goal of Freedom Community Clinic.
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