The AAFP has a Health Equity Fellowship. I am interested in it and am thinking about topics. I would like to address discrimination and I think I would want to do a project re drug addiction. There is still tons of discrimination against folks who are hooked on "hard" drugs, in my area meth and heroin or opioids. We just had a young man in his 20s die of a heroin overdose. People congratulate you if you say, "I don't drink, I quit, I am an alcoholic." They don't do that if you say, "I quit meth." or "I quit heroin." They are more likely to run away or avoid you and stigmatize you.
I do have to be employed in order to get the fellowship. So I am thinking of approaches. My rural hospital still has me labeled difficult, possibly crazy and competition which is just stupid on their part. Hello, I have served patients in this county for 21 years and I am one of the very senior doctors still working here. I think there is one who started two weeks before me. Everyone else has gotten sick or quit or fled or retired. So it's funny that they can't get past the labeling. I was the second earliest adopter of treating opioid overuse with buprenorphine and the only one in the county for two years. The hospital lagged in getting their doctors and midlevels to train and finally did, about 8 years after me. Yet they still eye me nervously and don't want to listen to my ideas. I am pegging them as unfortunately stupid, including the doctors. Sorry, but docs can be stupid, they tend to be conservative in that they do not want to change and they don't adopt new ideas easily. In that area I am an anomaly, because I am VERY interested in new ideas and I watch the Functional Medicine Docs and the Naturopaths and Chiropractors and whatever like a hawk. Sometimes there are pearls in among the quack quack quackery.
I may be hired very quickly by an independent who is a midlevel and needs a supervising doc. He talked to me before but had found someone else. I was still pretty sick then. I am not now. Brain back on line without the damn dopamine antibodies in July and the food stuff improved very fast then too. I could eat bread and fruit and my normal diet and my alcohol tolerance promptly dropped off. I guess when the dopamine antibodies have my metabolism wired I can burn alcohol very efficiently. Not any longer. My lungs have lagged. I don't know why. Maybe the tubulin antibodies stick to the receptors or maybe they break the lung cilia and the body has to make new cilia or who knows. Why don't I have a bench lab yet? Where are my angel investors? Please message me, damn you. Oooops. I suppose I shouldn't swear at potential investors.
I am contemplating approaches to the hospital, but they are stupid. So, I am thinking about other avenues. I will check with the addiction facility in town and I think that I will contact a different hospital. It does not have to be in my county. Also, an organization in Seattle is looking for someone and I might fit the bill nicely, though I am not exactly what they are advertising for. They might be surprised.
It would be quite fun to do the fellowship without support from my dumb county hospital, but working with somewhere else. Wouldn't it? They would hear about it eventually. I am tired of banging my head against that wall and I quit. There are lots of other people and places that will appreciate my slightly weird talents.
I have two new kittens. They are a delight.