
Racism in Medicine
More than a quarter of Germany's population has a migrant background, and this DW film asks whether the country's healthcare system treats them fairly. It hears from patients turned away in emergencies, midwives describing racism in delivery rooms, medical students criticizing curricula built around white norms, and doctors reflecting on their own blind spots. Remziye T. from Lower Saxony spent years with an infected heart valve that doctors dismissed as exaggerated pain; by the time it was diagnosed correctly, surgery left her unable to walk or work. Dr. Bismarck Ofori, a Black physician in Hanover, opens his surgery to the camera, where migrant patients describe being brushed off elsewhere before finding him. The film cites the term 'Morbus Mediterraneus,' still used to describe supposed exaggerated suffering among southern patients, and notes that standard equipment can misread dark skin and that textbooks still assume a white European patient as the diagnostic default. Its findings draw on Germany's first representative study on the subject, published in November 2023.