I wasn’t taught the basics of LGBTQ+ health in medical school.
Neither were the vast majority of my brilliant, compassionate, and dedicated faculty peers at one of the top medical schools in the world.
I’ve been in practice for 20 years and most of my education about queer health issues occurred outside the boundaries of a ‘traditional’ medical school curriculum, largely before I started residency training.
I was fortunate to learn while volunteering at two ‘gay and lesbian health centers,’ first at Whitman Walker Clinic in Washington, DC as a college student in the early 1990s, and later during medical school at Howard Brown Health Center in Chicago. These two experiences were quite different.
My time at Whitman Walker was transformative for me. I volunteered in their communications office, which directed outreach at a time when community activism was the weapon to fight HIV. I’ll never forget this purple T-shirt they gave to the volunteers that read, “Celebrate Diversity” in bright colors. I only wore that shirt in certain DC neighborhoods and I was convinced everyone I passed had an opinion about it. I was a young gay man, from a rather small town, trying to define my identity in a city and study for the MCAT at the same time. The passionate man who agreed to let me volunteer at Whitman Walker died of AIDS just before I started medical school.
Vintage 1990’s Celebrate Diversity T-shirt, credit: “handsomeharold”
Things became different for me in Chicago… less activism, and more medicine. I volunteered at Howard Brown on Thursday evenings in the STD clinic (still called STDs, back then) and I strongly considered a career in HIV medicine because of the inspirational teaching of an infectious disease fellow who precepted me.
Today, LGBTQ+ health is taught sporadically in US medical schools, a remnant of the 1980’s and 90’s in which physician educators came to know the gay community only through the lens of the AIDS crisis. The pathologizing of queer patients was reinforced in medical school for us, as we were quizzed solely on AIDS-defining illnesses and the side effects of various protease inhibitors.
Thankfully, science advances, and LGBTQ+ health now encompasses so much more than HIV/AIDS. Our health professions students want to learn this material, yet my faculty peers are still uncertain about their knowledge of LGBTQ+ health and feel underprepared to teach it. Faculty development never caught up.
Stanford’s Teaching LGBTQ+ Health is a free, online, introductory, CME course for educators across the health professions, designed to address the gap between student demand for better teaching and a lack of previous faculty training. This interactive faculty development course provides a comprehensive review of LGBTQ+ health vocabulary, social and behavioral determinants of queer health, disease prevalence and prevention, and strategies for teaching this content. It is open access to educators, providers, staff, students, patients, and anyone interested in the material.
My medical student co-authors of the course deserve much of the credit. Timothy Keyes (Stanford) and Shana Zucker (Tulane) have content expertise in LGBTQ+ health that far exceeds the majority of faculty members. As importantly, the instructional design team at Stanford Educational Technology – especially our project lead, Deila Bumgardner – brought this material to life. Stanford EdTech created beautiful animation and interactive learning modules. Finally, members of the Medical Student Pride Alliance lent their voices to the characters in our case studies and reviewed the course material for authenticity.
Please consider completing our online course. If you learn something, pass it on to the colleagues in your clinical department and a few individuals outside your institution.
View the course trailer here and access the course site here.
We are grateful to the Stanford Teaching and Mentoring Academy, the Stanford Department of Emergency Medicine, and The PEARL at Stanford for their support of this project. Our course was amplified and disseminated by organizers of the 2021 National LGBT Health Awareness Week. Check out their sponsors, the National Coalition for LGBT Health and HealthHIV.
March 21, 2021
Co-Authors of ‘Teaching LGBTQ+ Health’: Michael A. Gisondi, MD – Stanford University, Timothy Keyes, MD/PhD (cand.) - Stanford University, Deila Bumgardner, MA - Stanford University, Shana Zucker, MD/MPH/MS (cand.) - Tulane University