Rupa Marya, MD Profile picture
Deep Medicine Circle 🤘🏾Rupa & the April Fishes 🎶🐠. Co-author of INFLAMED: Deep Medicine & the Anatomy of Injustice--Views are my own
Hamdou Raby Wane Profile picture 3 subscribed
Mar 22 6 tweets 2 min read
Our colleagues who were too afraid to speak up against genocide, as physicians, nurses, medics, pharmacists, students and patients are murdered—how did you amputate your care? Did you silo a part of your heart to say Black Lives Matter but Palestinian lives don’t? Image The ones who were raised indoctrinated who position themselves as supporters of health justice but privately emailed me to say how dare I assume Israel was bombing hospitals and didn’t I know it antisemitic to say such a thing—how are you feeling now, some 30,000+ deaths later?
Dec 10, 2023 11 tweets 3 min read
While universities start sacrificing their own professors as their donors and MAGA GOP run them through gauntlets around statements that calls for genocide are not ok, the March for Israel was a call for genocide while a genocide was underway and is ongoing. With signs like "Finish the Job Israel" and "Many Gaza Civilians are Hamas-In-Training" and chants of "No Ceasefire" as hospitals were being bombed and NICU babies were dying, this sea of white people was akin to a modern day lynch mob.

Nov 26, 2023 14 tweets 3 min read
Say it louder for those who can't seem to get it: A Two State Solution is just ongoing apartheid, "separate and not equal." It will only breed more violence.

A One State Solution requires the dissolution of Israel as a political entity and the creation of a new single state with equal rights for all. Historically, the peoples of Palestine--Muslims, Christians Jews; Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Circassians, Europeans and many more have always been ethnically and religiously diverse.

In the fall of colonial empires post WW2, Zionism claimed
Nov 12, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
I've never been in a point in my career where my phone is blowing up nonstop with SOS signals from residents and medical students going out of their minds at the UTTER MORAL FAILURE of leadership. This just happened at the
@AmerMedicalAssn Image From @DoNoHarmUCSF Today 135 medical student members with resident and fellow members and the Minorities Affairs group at the @amermedicalassn attempted to introduced a resolution for ceasefire in Gaza. The young Middle Eastern trainee who moved to introduce the resolution
Oct 27, 2023 10 tweets 2 min read
As someone who studies colonialism and health I want to share why I and others use the phrase "settler colonialism" to describe the state of Israel. The term describes historical dynamics of power that are on display today. Many people are Indigenous to the region, including 1/ Image Jews, Arabs and others. Claims to Indigeneity do not absolve a group of colonization. Palestine has been a historic homeland to many different kinds of people.

I name--as others name--the state of Israel as a settler colonial project because this is how it was described by 2/
Dec 26, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
I dreamed last night that I was standing on the Camino del Diablo. The treacherous path so many migrants perish on walking to this side of the border. These trails have been walked by humans for millennia, but now with the border they have become deadly. I stood and watched a man walk by. He wasn’t holding bottles of water in his hands to survive the desert heat. He had bare feet. His shoes had given out a whole back. He was holding a child’s hands, helping her stay upbeat as she walked. She was little, maybe 2 years old.
Nov 4, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
I've been told since the first day I started working at the Division of Hospital Medicine at @UCSF that my work doesn't bring in $ to cover my salary. It's a narrative of manufactured scarcity, a common tactic in capitalism. The CEO is making $1.85 million plus bonuses. I have a feeling all the patients I care for, the chemo I oversee for oncology, the ortho patients I make sure don't die, the families I accompany, they see the value I bring.
Sep 11, 2022 12 tweets 2 min read
I went to an outdoor performance with my family last night--Mary Poppins--and in the midst of Act One heard the whisper traveling up my way from a few rows ahead--"Is there a doctor here?"

No rest for the weary, I jumped up and headed down to find the person who needed help. 🧵 I found frantic family around an ashen looking grandmother. “I’m a physician in Internal Medicine.” She was sitting upright but not responding to verbal cues. What’s your name? No answer.

She had a leftward gaze deviation. I said, call 911. The son was already on the phone. 2/
May 23, 2022 11 tweets 3 min read
The reason the Bay Area is now a hotspot for Covid is because the things that made us ride through well at first (an abundance of caution/masking) now have been thrown to the wind by people who think vaccines and paxlovid will get us through this. These tools will help but not 1/ on their own. Masking is a simple intervention that works to prevent the indoor spread of Covid. Shutting down indoor dining also helps. But the Bay Area has been taken over by libertarians in medicine/public health. The worst possible political orientation for getting through 2/
Feb 25, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
Yesterday I met the guy who developed EPIC. He told me that this was never meant to be a clinician note-taking tool. It was created by accountants to do billing and to capture billable moments. No wonder we hate it so much. Can we please stop now? If you want to capture billable moments, HIRE SOMEONE to follow me around and capture them. But let me write notes that don't take hours of my work day and then hours at home completing then hours more responding to billing people telling me to rewrite my notes to capture more $$
Feb 11, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read
I had shivering chills under 6 blankets, sore throat, myalgias, fatigue, racing heart rate, diarrhea for 16 days in March 2020 after the first Covid patient was transferred to our floor. Occ health refused to test me b/c I didn’t go to China or have “fever & cough.” 1/ They insisted there *no* in-hospital transmission and it wasn’t airborne. Front-facing (lower wage) staff were told not to wear any masks and several got sick. Our response at @UCSF has been a challenge for me from the start. ☹️
Feb 11, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
One of the things that drove me to learn more about soil health and farming practices was meeting the farmworkers and their children who show up at UCSF with bizarre anaplastic cancers and who refuse to be counted because of our racist border policies and 1/ how that creates a labor pool of people willing to do *anything* including working in toxic fields where synthetic pesticides/fertilizers are sprayed. We don't know the true human cost of Big Ag because they choose to stay invisible for their family's safety. 2/
Feb 10, 2022 4 tweets 3 min read
With the Frisco5 Hunger strike I had doctors at @SF_DPH emailing me at work asking me to divulge health information about the hunger strikers. I had to remind them that they were violating federal privacy laws by asking me without consent. @OUSDNews is now 1/ Image @SF_DPH @OUSDNews saying their concern for the Oakland Schools hunger strikers is motivating them to send EMS. But there’s not an emergency—except the racist policies around depriving Black/brown schools of resources to ensure student success. If OUSD was so concerned for their health, 2/
Feb 9, 2022 9 tweets 2 min read
When I share my thoughts on how to create equity in medicine or in society at large, people who I would characterize as liberal often say "Well, I'm not a 'burn it all down' kind of person" to put clear blue sky between ideas of transformative action and their ideas 1/ Image to offer small adjustments to a highly toxic system.

And with this I ask myself--am I "burn it all down" kind of person? I do recognize the transformative and cleansing aspects of fire, as do most traditional people in human history. It is why fire plays such an important 2/
Jan 18, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
To spare myself the barrage of emails and concerns from our community, I’m putting out this statement—

UCSF doctors Jeanne Noble, Monica Gandhi and Vinay Prasad have been giving the most reckless and at times, blatantly false analyses on the pandemic. 1/ Monica celebrated the pandemic being over in July 2021. In case you haven’t noticed—It’s not over.

Vinay compared masking mandates to the Holocaust.

Jeanne Noble is putting out FALSE interpretations of our hospital data to support her agenda, which is to be over 2/
Jan 16, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Starting in February the Deep Medicine Circle will be hosting frontline healthcare workers from @UCSF at the farm on Ramaytush Ohlone territory to Heal the Healers. One thing we will do together is learn how to make tea that soothes us from plant medicines. 1/ So many of our colleagues are running on empty right now, carrying the trauma of the past two years and counting. Please support our Heal the Healers program. We are a 501c3 nonprofit women of color-led collective of farmers, healers, artists and activists. 2/
Jan 5, 2022 10 tweets 5 min read
Our Healthcare $$ Are Golfing in Hawaii 🧵

My mom lives in Hawaii. She loves to golf. She's in her late 60s and I'm happy for her. She was on the course the other day and saw a young man in his early 30s who goes to Hawaii several times a year to golf.

She was curious. 1/n "How do you manage to get the time to go golfing at this stage in your career? What do you do? It took me forever to get this time off."

He responded, "I work in billing for health insurance companies. They can't handle all the administration so they contract it out to us." 2/n
Jan 3, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
Today I wake up grateful for Chief Caleen Sisk of @winnememwintu and her prayers for the salmon and her ceremonies to balance the water and fire in this beautiful region where we live. We share her stories of salmon in our book Inflamed. 1/n Image One of the elders sent me this photo when I said I was going into the hospital to work these challenging days. It helps to know there are people out there holding it down for all of us, calling home the water, calling home the salmon, bringing the elements back into balance. 2/n
Jul 21, 2021 7 tweets 4 min read
This #Delta surge shows me the cost of our siloed education system. The ID doctors and immunologists pushed the narrative that it was fine to discard the masks if you were vaccinated and encouraged full opening. They didn't see this through the lens of the sociologists, 1/n who were looking closely at what 80% vaccination rate meant and who was counted and who was *not counted.* The way our society and economy are structured in the US is dependent on an invisible, undocumented workforce who bore the brunt of the pandemic in places like CA, 2/n