race and medicine

new book. new chapter.

In September 2025, my second book, NEGLIGENT BY DESIGN: Anti-Blackness in American Medicine and How to Address It, was released.

On January 30, 2026, I closed another chapter.

I stepped down as Director of Adult Medicine at Baywell Health to focus fully on Black Doc Village, the nonprofit I founded nearly four years ago.

Leaving was not easy. I meant every word I wrote in The Gift I Didn’t Realize I Needed. Baywell Health was that gift.

This is the first time I have ever left a place where I felt I could be my full self. Where I had real agency. Where my ideas — even the disruptive ones — were taken seriously, supported, even embraced. I will always be a cheerleader for Baywell Health.

But years ago, a mentor told me: aspire to your highest and best use.

At Baywell, there were deadlines, metrics, meetings — urgencies created by the organization. Important work. Necessary work.

Now? I set the urgency.

The discipline must come from within, alongside the very real pressure of fundraising to keep myself and my team salaried.

And here is what made this moment clear:

Black Doc Village has raised significant philanthropic support from the California Health Care Foundation, The California Wellness Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and The Commonwealth Fund.

We have completed our first national study, which resulted in two manuscripts that are currently under peer review. We have two more studies underway and plans for future work.

The work is not hypothetical. It is happening.

That traction told me it was time.

The truth is this: someone else with my same commitment and intellect can see patients and direct Adult Medicine. I spent the last several months ensuring a smooth passing of the baton to Dr. Monique Hedmann. Recruiting her to Baywell was a highlight of my tenure.

But nobody else can lead Black Doc Village right now.

(If someone thinks they can, let me know as I’m going to need a successor someday (unless of course I solve all the problems in my lifetime — jokes).

A colleague recently reassured me that I had “no doubt contributed” to California’s last remaining predominantly Black-serving federally qualified health center. I know this.

I also know that the receptivity to my leadership has varied across institutions, often in ways that say more about them than about me.

It is a privilege to take this leap. Not everyone can leave a leadership role and a steady paycheck. I do so with the steady support of my husband, Robert Phillips, and deep awareness that autonomy is not evenly distributed.

So here we are.

All my intellectual energy. All my plans for disruption. Focused on Black Doc Village.

If you believe medicine can do better — structurally, not symbolically — I invite you to:

• Book me to speak
• Fund Black Doc Village
• Follow our work

The book was not the culmination.

It was the preface.

 

 

what I'm doing about Black doctors being pushed out of medicine

I’ve written about my reasons for leaving UCSF. And while it was painful to feel unsupported, isolated, undervalued, and gaslighted—including by Black leadership within the institution—I was already a published author, recipient of multiple coveted grants and fellowships, and double board-certified in nephrology and internal medicine. I’ve since learned that my story pales in comparison to so many other young Black physicians who are being disproportionately pushed out of medicine at a time in their career when they have no license to practice independently but do have $240,000 of debt on average after completing medical school. Only 5% of physicians in training in the US are Black, but account for 20% of program dismissals. And this doesn’t even count those who are convinced to resign to avoid the damaging mark of dismissal on their record.

,

how to get on the kidney transplant wait list

,

Mr. Garcia was one of the lucky ones.

Not in the born-in-poverty or kidney-failure-by-30 sense. But lucky in the sense that by the time his kidneys failed completely, he was in California where Medicaid pays for undocumented folks get the same dialysis as the US-born and not in one of the 38 states that wait until undocumented people show up to their ERs damn near dead before they will give them a dialysis treatment or three before they send them back out to start the process again five or six days later—even though it is far more expensive than standard care. Because racism.

,

17 years and counting!

,

It’s our 17th kidney transplant anniversary y’all! (Check out my latest video for “Real Kidney Talk with The People’s Nephrologist” where I talk about being a kidney donor.)

If it’s not obvious from our picture, my husband and I are both Black. And don’t let the fair skin fool you: We are unapologetically and proudly Blackity-Black.