Cultural fainting

Not much to debate tbh but a landmark trial is now underway, in Sweden, in which one of our regional healthcare trusts is being sued because a nurse-paramedic in their employ most likely contributed to the death of a young doctor by judging his symptoms to be a case of "cultural fainting" back in 2017. The man had experienced trauma to the head during a football game, and, the following day, he had a severe and progressively more intense headache, followed by vomiting and then altered consciousness, before ultimately becoming unresponsive. The nurse-paramedic described it as the patient "pretending to be unconscious" in a display of "cultural fainting", which, shockingly, resulted in the patient being left unattended in a room in the emergency dept. for over an hour. Turns out he had some sort of massive hemorrhage (not specified), and the delay caused by the initial assessment of "cultural fainting" likely made his already poor chances much worse. He was in a vegetative state for a long while before he ultimately passed away. The nurse-paramedic has continued to work in that capacity the whole time.

This "cultural fainting" nonsense is something that some few Swedish physicians and nurses still teach students, along with a host of other ludicrously racist and medically fucked-up ideas about caring for non-white patients. The idea is that non-white patients—esp. very dark-skinned people from Africa, and people from the Middle East—frequently express emotional issues such as anxiety and stress in extremely dramatic and even outright bizarre ways, either for inscrutable "cultural" reasons, or as a way to "communicate", or as a means of persuasion. There is an implicit understanding that non-white patients are primitive, with primitive cultures, that cause them to express discomfort in primitive ways—like an animal might. Some of this racist reasoning has simply been transplanted from prejudices about people with psychiatric illnesses—esp. women—and applied to entire populations.

I don't know whether this trial will make any difference, but I hope the memory of this collective shame doesn't fade for at least a generation.

Bizarre. I'd never heard of this term before, sounds horrible what happened.