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Haydee C Brown

@drhaydeebrown

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💚 1908 💗💙 1938 | Ortho Surgeon 🛠️| Afro-🇵🇦| Harlem |
Founder @bwos2020 | Co-Host @elladisruptors |
Medicine, power & what gets protected. Views=Mine

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Anthony Fauci pleaded the 5th more than 100 times last week in congressional hearings. A senator had an aide walk over and hand Fauci a pocket Constitution. Fauci’s attorney was escorted out of the room.

I am an orthopaedic surgeon. If my judgment is faulty in the operating room, there’s a chart with my name on it, a morbidity and mortality conference, and possible larger ramifications, period.

Being wrong has serious consequences in medicine. But not in congressional hearings.

A person with no medical training can say something untrue about a disease that killed more than a million people. That senator can then walk out of the hearings with a clip that will outperform anything I could ever publish.

I want you to sit with that asymmetry.

These hearings falsely accuse the man who shepherded our country through an unprecedented pandemic.

At the height of that pandemic, vaccine hesitancy was high in Black and Brown communities. Medicine as a field has earned every bit of that distrust from communities that look like me.

And the COVID-19 vaccine is what helped us emerge from the shutdowns.

Both of those are true at the same time.

George Orwell gave us a word for being asked to hold two contradictory things and accept both. Doublethink. James Baldwin, in 1961, warned us about what happens when we try to make a complex thing simple.

My latest Substack is about all of it.

Link in bio. Subscribe.

#HealthEquity #COVID19 #Orthopaedics #PublicHealth #MeidasTouch by @drhaydeebrown

As an orthopaedic surgeon in New York City, I’ve watched private practice groups get consolidated or consumed.

When private equity buys a practice, physicians leave. In ophthalmology practices, departures went up 265%. When private equity buys a hospital, ER deaths rose 13% while those hospitals cut 11.6% of their staff.

The staff goes first, and then the patient care follows.

When a spreadsheet decides who gets care, for how long, and how many nurses are on the floor, patients lose.

Week two of my October series: When Physicians Disappear. Free essay, link in bio.

Do you know who owns your doctor’s practice?

Hashtags for the first comment:
#HealthEquity #PrivateEquity #Orthopaedics #PatientSafety #WomenInMedicine by @drhaydeebrown

This whiteboard says everything. @drzoobs

Between 1975 and 2010, physicians grew 150%. Administrators grew 3,200%.

Documentation was designed to communicate clinical information. It became a billing instrument. Coded and optimized by people who were never in the room.

Orthopaedic surgeons account for 28.2% of all surgeon suicides. The highest proportion among all surgical subspecialties. Burnout runs 40 to 60 percent in our specialty.

We do not have a resilience problem. We have a structural problem dressed up as a personal one.

The answer is patient-centered care, led by physicians, accountable to outcomes.

Until we name the problem directly, we cannot fix it.

Full post on LinkedIn.

Link to my Substack in bio - I write about this every week.

Credit: Eric Arzubi, MD @drzoobs

#HealthEquity #PhysicianBurnout #PE #wellness by @drhaydeebrown

🎃Halloween🎃 is one of our favorite holidays!

In Sugar Hill, we take pride in our stoop decorations and in making sure there’s enough candy for everyone. This year we had FORTY pounds of 🍬🍭🍫

This is a long way growing up where dodging eggs and staying in was the go to for Halloween.

Now Eb and Chase join us on the stoop passing out candy, with 🥂🍾 and plenty of giggles.

Bonus: Tomorrow is Marathon Sunday! 🏃🏾‍♀️

#PeakNYC #Halloween #MarathonSunday #Halloween2026 #Harlem by @drhaydeebrown

I’ve been quiet…now, I’m back.

A high school sophomore, three intensives, private practice, and service commitments can do that sometimes.

New substack dropping this week.

All my writing, and the work of so many, is for naught if we don’t vote.

Private equity in medicine, reproductive rights, education, health care access, vaccination schedules, domestic violence legislation, and immigrant rights are all on the ballot.

Election Day is November 3.

Many states are voting right now.

I'm voting EARLY

Do you have a plan?

Do you know your polling site?

Check @whenweallvote

Send this to someone who needs it.

Our Vote = Our Voice

Drop a comment below:

Have you voted already?

If not, do you have a voting plan? 📸: @margaritacorporan

#Empower08 #YourVoteYourVoice #Disrupt #Vote by @drhaydeebrown

Twenty five years ago today.

Photo credits: Barry M. Goldstein, “Being There” (2005). Manuel Mojica photo courtesy of FDNY / National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.

#NeverForget #911 #NY #ILoveNY by @drhaydeebrown

My grandparents decided MV was my happy place after they watched an 8-year-old me ride my bike, unrestrained and joyful, into town from Shearer Cottages. Decades of August apple fritters at 2am, chosen sisters made at Linda Jean’s, and joy that felt uninterrupted.

This summer, everyone’s “happy place” got turned into ‘content.’ I chose something quieter instead. Tricia Hersey (@thenapministry ) calls rest a reparation. I call it medicine, long overdue.

Full story on rest, joy, and what the research says about the cost of never getting either: New Substack drops Thursday at 7:15 am EST. #linkinbio

@mieshasuber
@missjulee
@erincolemantv
@chynna.steele.johnson
@acomard
@missebone

#MyHappyPlace #40Augusts #Rest #MarthasVineyard by @drhaydeebrown

On one of the most magical nights on MV, Illumination Night, we honored Nolan Wells on his golden birthday.

N-O-L-A-N. Laid out by hand in front of the Oak Bluffs Gazebo, on what should have been his 19th birthday.

It was a sacred honor to help @untilfreedom and @greentherev of Faith For Black Lives, alongside @tamikadmallory🩷💚, organize the Vigil on the Vineyard for Nolan Wells. The call was simple: a space to honor him, and to demand answers for his family.

As we spelled his name out in candlelight, I kept seeing Nolan Wells’ face on that boat with his “friends.” I reminded my son to “never be the only one” in his groups and environments. That shouldn’t be necessary. But it is.

We are all Nolan Wells’ family now.
When we sang Happy Birthday to Nolan, the heaviness of singing something so joyful sat right next to us, in this multilayered sunset, next to the Oak Bluffs Ocean Park Gazebo. And somehow, God showed off. The sunset. The weather. The DJ who cut the music at 7pm before I even had to ask.

@mysonnenygeneral , for organizing and shaping how Nolan’s name is carried

We always recognize who we are, and whose we are.

Say his name.
We demand answers. by @drhaydeebrown

Two years ago I choked at the Women’s Skillet Toss. Or so I told myself for two years.

The first time I saw this event I could not look away. Women launching a cast iron skillet across a field, the ones over 65 throwing farthest.

What Harlemite is even skillet tossing?!

Training where, Central Park😂😳?

In 2024 I “trained” with Gaél as my coach. There’s not much online about it. We improvised. The whole village showed up to watch. My church father saw my face change with stage fright. He was right.

No ribbon 🥇that year. So I filed it away as the year I choked.

This weekend a Soror pushed me to enter again. I almost said no. I hadn’t trained at all, and I remembered 2024 too well.

I signed up anyway. The Pulling Ring was packed, people lined the fences.

First throw: barely 14 feet. Second throw, I centered myself: 20 feet, 1 inch.

Then I went back and looked at the tape from 2024.

28 feet, 6 inches.

I threw further the year I called it a failure😨 . No ribbon, so I wrote the whole day off. Carried that version for two years. It almost kept me out of the ring this weekend.

Check the story you’re telling yourself. Mine was wrong.

I took notes this time.

Now that I’ve faced the Pulling Ring again, anyone out there with real skillet toss technique?

Any pointers?

Shoes or barefoot?

How are you holding the skillet?

My comments are open.

I want to learn more.

#MyHappyPlace #MVAgFair #SkilletToss #DoTheHardThing by @drhaydeebrown

Yesterday the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons sounded an alarm. A proposed Medicare rule, they warned, would push my specialty past a tipping point and accelerate consolidation. They called orthopaedics one of the last frontiers of independent practice.

I have been making this case for two years. Yesterday my field’s own association made it for me.

The AMA has already counted where the ownership went. In 2012 most physicians worked for themselves. By 2024 most did not.

We do not have a physician shortage. We have an ownership problem.

Full essay published this morning. Free. Link in bio.
@aaos_1

#HealthEquity #PhysicianWorkforce #Orthopaedics #PrivateEquity #Medicine by @drhaydeebrown

I am not going to argue with anyone about what they felt in an exam room. If your physician was typing instead of looking at you, they were. If you waited three months for something that should have taken a week, you did.

The person who decided your imaging needed approval before I could order it was not in there with us. The person who set how many patients were on my schedule that day was not in there either.

At major nonprofit medical centers, mean CEO compensation rose 93 percent between 2005 and 2015. Physician pay rose 10 percent. Inpatient stays went down over the same decade.

They were not paid more because more care was delivered.

Physicians are leaving. We keep calling it burnout.

Thursday, 7:15 AM. The essay is free. Link in bio.

#HealthEquity #PhysicianWorkforce #Medicine #Orthopaedics #PatientCare by @drhaydeebrown

This was me in my chief year. Exhausted, still working out who I was.

This is Gaél Ernesto, who cared about none of that. He just wanted to be held.

A new class started residency today. Watching them begin, I keep thinking about this version of me. The training will try to tell you the work is everything. A child in your arms is the correction.

To everyone who started this week: protect the part of you that stays soft. It will make you a better doctor than any exam ever will. #BlackWomenInMedicine #Intern2026 #WomenInMedicine #Residency #orthopedics by @drhaydeebrown