COVID-19 deaths are beginning to decrease nationwide as the CDC debates easing COVID restrictions.

A thousand 430 New York City employees, less than 1% of the city's workforce, were fired after

failing to meet the vaccine mandate for public employees. A third person has been cured of HIV,

the record blood transplant, opening up a major advancement in treatment for the disease.

This is America Dissected. I'm your host, Dr. Abdul-Elsaid.

I want to get a little personal with you today, because in order to understand why this episode,

and the conversation we're having today is so important to me, I want you to understand why I

decided not to continue in my medical training after I graduated from medical school. It goes back

to a patient I helped care for when I was a medical student. I was doing a sub internship,

basically in a apprenticeship for medical students at a tiny hospital on the northern edge of Manhattan.

I just finished my residency application, and I was planning to train in internal medicine.

One morning, I was paid to come down to the emergency room to see a patient who'd fallen

in hit her head on the subway steps. It was January, a particularly cold one at that,

and the steps to the subway in New York City can be really icy. I mean, I've fallen a couple times.

The patient I met that day was unhoused. She was black and living with alcoholism.

Living without so much of the privilege I walk around with each day. I found my way to the emergency

doctor, a resident in his 30-year-of-training. I asked him an obvious first question.

What did the CT show? If you fall, hit your head, and find yourself in an emergency room,

the first thing you get at that emergency room is a head CT, to rule out a brain bleed that can kill

you. We didn't do one, he said. Why not, I asked. Well, she barely hit her head. I could see a

well forming on her head, and I hadn't even spoken to her yet. I pushed him on the scan,

and he told me the real reason. Well, she'd be a social admin, he said. For the non-doctor's,

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