Racism in Medicine
If anything has become clear from the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, it is that a reckoning has come for racism in medicine. Below, I’ve compiled some of the things I’ve been reading:
‘The direct result of racism’: COVID-19 lays bare how discrimination drives health disparities among Black people
“The disparities have long been documented. Black people are more likely than white people to die from cancer. They are more likely to suffer from chronic pain, diabetes, and depression. Black children report higher levels of stress. Black mothers are more likely to die in childbirth.
Those findings are part of a mountain of research cataloging the complex and widespread effects that racism has on the health — and the medical care — of Black people in the U.S. Those effects stretch back centuries and take different forms, from discriminatory diagnostics to institutional barriers to care, all of which affect a person’s health.”
The history of African Americans and organized medicine
“Segregation and racism within the medical profession have, and continue to, profoundly impact the African American community. Yet, the complex history of race in the medical profession is rarely acknowledged and often misunderstood. The AMA Institute for Ethics invited a panel of experts to review and analyze the historical roots of the black-white divide in American medicine. The following is a summary of the panel's findings, along with other resources.”
Troubling History In Medical Research Still Fresh For Black Americans
“But another is that medical research has a long, troubled racial history. One example is the Tusgekee study, which involved doctors letting black men die from syphilis. Another example is the case of Henrietta Lacks. She was a poor African-American woman whose cancer cells scientists and drug companies used for decades without her permission. But the list of abuses is long. So the National Institutes of Health and others have been trying to overcome all that, in part by working with groups like the Abyssinian Baptist Church.”
“In 1932, the Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphilis in hopes of justifying treatment programs for blacks. It was called the ‘Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.’
The study initially involved 600 black men – 399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease. The study was conducted without the benefit of patients’ informed consent. Researchers told the men they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. In truth, they did not receive the proper treatment needed to cure their illness. In exchange for taking part in the study, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance. Although originally projected to last 6 months, the study actually went on for 40 years.”
#BlackLivesMatter: Physicians Must Stand for Racial Justice
“Racism is one of the major causes of health problems in the United States. Between 1970 and 2004, the Black-white mortality gap resulted in more than 2.7 million excess Black deaths [1], making racism a more potent killer than prostate, breast, or colon cancer [2]. Physicians are intimately involved with institutions that contribute to the victimization of Black people and other people of color. As is widely documented, Black and Latino patients are less likely to receive the care they need, including adequate analgesia, cancer screening, and organ transplants [3-6]. This is due both to physician bias and to the health care payment structure’s financial disincentives for the care of people of color [7]—clinicians are paid less to care for patients who are uninsured, underinsured, or publicly insured, and these patients are disproportionately people of color. As a consequence, people of color are often denied access to the health care they need [8, 9].”
Medicine and medical science: Black lives must matter more
“Emblematic of the profound sense of outrage at the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black men and women at the hands of law enforcement, hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets in the USA and across the globe. They set aside the risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2, judging that what they were marching for was more immediately urgent.”
How Racial Health Disparities Will Play Out in the Pandemic
“The federal government has failed its populace in many ways since the COVID-19 pandemic reached American soil. It began early on with an inadequate supply of test kits being provided to clinicians, compounded when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention enacted strict criteria for which patients could even receive one.
Dr. Uché Blackstock notes that discriminatory effects were embedded into those criteria.”
Racism, Hazing And Other Abuse Taints Medical Training, Students Say
“As doctors and nurses across the United States continue to gather outside hospitals and clinics to protest police brutality and racism as part of the White Coats for Black Lives movement, LaShyra Nolen, a first-year student at Harvard Medical School, says it's time to take medical schools to task over racism, too.”