My son called from the emergency room before dawn and said, “Dad, the doctor is refusing to treat me. He says I’m faking it for drugs.” When I got there, the doctor’s s…

“Every patient deserves to be assessed based on symptoms, findings, and evidence,” I said, standing under white conference lights in a room so quiet I could hear my own breathing. “Not appearance. Not class markers. Not accent. Not race. Not whether the physician feels comfortable with them in the first thirty seconds. When doctors allow assumptions to substitute for examination, we stop practicing medicine and start distributing care according to prejudice. And when institutions protect those physicians because they are profitable, convenient, or difficult to replace, the institution becomes part of the harm.”