Celebrating Pride

June is the month of rainbows, Pride Month, a month celebrating the enormous progress and courage of the LGBTQ+ community. Knowing this, I’d like to draw you guys to an important topic that hits close to home, health disparities and issues that the LGBT+ community face.

According to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the LGBTQ community faces a wide variety of issues that need to be taken into account by healthcare providers and members of the medical community. Such issues include: 2 or 3 time higher rates of suicide for LGBT youth, higher rates of homelessness amongst LGBT youth, higher risk for STDs and so on…

Members of the LGBT community face problems that impact both physical and mental health as shown above. But besides facing these physical and mental problems at a much higher rate, members of the community also have problems gaining access to health care. According to Cigna Health, those in the LGBT community are less likely to have healthcare, more likely to delay getting healthcare, and more likely to report poor quality of care or unfair treatment by health providers.

To properly address these disparities, the medical community should educate themselves on why these disparities even exist in the first place. Institutional biases, such as legal discrimination for adults, social discrimination at school, as well as the lack of clinical research on LGBTQ+ related issues drive this deep disparity. Furthermore, many healthcare providers are unable to provide culturally competent care due to lack of experience or knowledge on the LGBT community.

Therefore as we celebrate Pride, we must think of ways, especially as it relates to the health of the LGBTQ+ community, to reduce these glaring disparities. Even though it takes a long time to completely override institutional and social discrimination, we can always start somewhere, and that somewhere is to educate ourselves on these important issues that they are facing.

By: Alan Lu