Elizabeth Cohen, CNN, July 23, 2009
{snip}
While it’s extremely difficult to tell in any given situation how much race—consciously or subconsciously—plays a role in a doctor’s decision making, multiple studies over several decades have found doctors make different decisions for black patients and white patients even when they have the same medical problems and the same insurance.
“It’s absolutely proven through studies that a black man and a white man going to the hospital with the same complaint will be treated differently,” Dr. Neil Calman, a family physician and president of the Institute for Family Health in New York, said. Calman is also Reid’s regular physician.
For example, a 2005 study found African-American cardiac patients were less likely than whites to receive a lifesaving procedure called revascularization, where doctors restore the flow of oxygen to the heart. The study authors at RTI International, a research institute, noted that all of the patients had Medicare, which covers the cost of revascularization.
In a study conducted in 2007, Harvard researchers showed doctors a vignette about a 50-year-old man with chest pain who arrived at the emergency room, where an EKG showed he’d had a heart attack. Sometimes the researchers paired the medical history with a photo of black man and other times with a photo of a white man.
The doctors were significantly more likely to recommend lifesaving drugs when they thought the patient was white than when they thought the patient was black.
Is it racism or something else?
“Racism in health care is a common experience of people of color,” Calman recently wrote on his blog.
But he said disparities in medical care are about much more than race. “[Race] is one very important factor in why people get bad medical care,” he wrote. “So is poor education, poverty and lack of insurance.”
Dr. Cornelius Flowers, a cardiologist at the Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, Georgia, agrees there are several reasons for racial disparities in medicine.
“It’s about respect. If a patient is of a low socioeconomic status, a doctor might think, why do I need to go out of my way for this guy? I’ll just do the minimum I have to do and send him on his way,” Flowers says.
He adds that sometimes African-American patients don’t insist on quality care.
“Back in the 1950s and 60s, hospitals in places like Atlanta had a black side and a white side, and the care for blacks was second rate,” he says. “People who remember those days still consider themselves second-class citizens, and a lot of times they allow people to treat them that way.”
{snip}
“The lesson learned is, I tell people all the time to seek a doctor who will care about you,” Flowers says. “If you feel like you have a doctor who isn’t genuinely concerned about you, just get another doctor next time.”
Original article
(Posted on July 27, 2009)
Comments
People that I have known that were in the medical field have often told me and others that people that were getting charity medical care (including medicaid) were very ungrateful for what they were given and often asked for over and above what they were entitled to.
Black are a poor investment. The likelihood of a positive return on any resources devoted to Blacks is much lower than the same resources given to Whites. Even if doctors paid no attention to race, but instead used credit reports, arrest or driving records, and an 8th grade placement test, they’d come up with the same sort of discrimination.
Doctors like patients who have a modicum of good sense and the ability to take somewhat reasonable care of themselves. Doctors will take better care of someone if they think the investment will pay off for that patient.
CNN will not cease critisizing the medical profession as “racist” and “uncaring” until it has succeeded in convincing the government to pass national health care. In addition there is no more rabid proponents of national medical care than the editors of such esteemed medical journals as The New England Journal of Medicine. Any medical investigator who finds that Blacks are getting the same of better health care than whites will not get their studies published and their academic careers would be over.
I want to see the study that compares how BLACK physicians treat their white patients as opposed to their black patients. What’s that? No such study. No surprise.
When doctors are confronted with low IQ patients it can get very frustrating telling them what they should and should not do. Very often advice falls on deaf ears. When some 400 lb. welfare mama saunters in to a doctor’s office with diabetes, high blood pressure and some other self-inflicted maladies, I imagine it would be a waste of time to offer sensible advice. If advice is given, the Black welfare “mama” might misconstrue it as “racism”. So the poor doctor just leaves well enough alone and says or does the minimum.
Obviously the writer of this article, and her editor, began with the assumption that Whites are treated better than blacks by doctors, then began looking for ways to “prove” it. But the whole theory falls apart upon closer examination. For one thing, how many doctors has Ms. Cohen seen face-to-face in American hospitals lately? Does she realize what a high percentage of doctors practicing here are now, say, Filipino, or Indian, or some other Asian ethnic group? If “White racism” is to blame for this alleged inferior treatment of blacks, why would an East Asian even be familiar with the concept, let alone practice it?
Claiming “numerous studies have shown” this or that as she does is a common technique of writers trying to prove something and knowing they are on shaky ground. And she quotes only two doctors by name: Mr. Reid’s physician, who appears to have a vested interest in this notion about care based on race; and a black doctor from the South, reminiscing about the “bad old days.” Hardly a clear-cut case for national racial bias in the ER.
There is a simple remedy for this unequal standard of care. Blacks should enroll in medical school in huge numbers, pass all the necessary tests, internship, etc, and become physicians. Then they should open their own state-of-the-art hospitals in their own neighborhoods and administer their own preferred level of care to their own people. Then they can tell those racist doctors, “Take a hike, Whitey! We gots our own doctors now!” The solution is so obvious, it’s right under their noses! Why can’t they see that?
CNN is so ideological driven. I sometimes think they are headquartered inside the NAACP.
Too bad because when CNN first started it was a nice alternative to the liber CBS and NBC, but then the liberals took it over and now it is the worst of all news stations.
Stay tuned to CNN for another 300 part special “Black in America”
I think everyone has had doctors they weren’t satisfied with. I see no reason to make this a racial issue. Unless, of course, this has something to do with their opinion on Obama’s health care bill.
Is “Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center” in Los angelos still operating, now there was a shining example of what they want all USA medical centers to be.
My doctor judges you on the strength of your insurance policy. IN the past two years he’s hire all spanish speaking receptionists, and magically the compostion of the patients in the waiting room has changed to 50% from 0% Hispanic. The neighborhood is still maybe 10% Spanish. So he sees these Hispanics, many of whom are illegals because I don’t hear any English spoken by them as revenue generators-some get Medicaid, some are insured by employers. Soon they’ll all be covered by Obamacare.
Oh yes, I’m going to a new doctor next month. Several miles to the west. No illegal or jabbering Spanish Hispanics.
It’s a fascinating expose’ of bias in the medical field.
How about the subject of bias in the newsmedia?
I don’t think any of us need a course in that subject.
I think a simple solution to this would be for the good Dr. Neil Calman to devote the rest of HIS career working in the ‘inner-city’ clinics so as to put a dent in the ‘racism that ‘people of color’ experience in the health care system’. How about it Neil, ya game! Lead by example. Can we also compare their health care here with what their ‘brothas’ get in Africa? Maybe we can arrange to fly them THERE for their health care so as to eliminate any racism in their treatment. Any takers???
>2 — Schoolteacher wrote at 6:00 PM on July 27:
Unfortunately, to save money, and because little hispanic kids are more worthy of medical care than old people, which are just going to die anyways, the cases will be reversed. You, white man, contributer to society, will be forsaken for a poor, disadvantaged, person of color. After all, if he/she were to get AA’d to judge, he/she would surely make a better judgement than your crackah butt. Believe it.
While being treated once by a Doctor we had a discussion about how patients vary in following advice and instructions. He informed me blacks simply would not follow instructions and therefore ended up with significantly poorer results than whites. Guess to the uninformed that looks like disparate treatment.
Since they continue coming up with every reason in the world why the races were created and split apart in the first place this just continues to prove that whites and blacks or reds/yellows DO NOT need to be living in the sme proximity and maybe we can all now understand why they were sent to Europe Asia and Africa 4500 yrs ago after the original single race was wiped off the earth.
The distance of the continents to the earths population 4500 yrs ago would have similar to the distant galaxies today and considered an impossibility notwithstanding the fears of the earth being flat until 500 yrs ago.
“There is a simple remedy for this unequal standard of care. Blacks should enroll in medical school in huge numbers, pass all the necessary tests, internship, etc, and become physicians. Then they should open their own state-of-the-art hospitals in their own neighborhoods and administer their own preferred level of care to their own people.”
This is a good suggestion and one that has already been tried in Atlanta, Georgia. In the mid-1970s blacks could not be admitted to white medical schools because they could not pass the rigid admission requirements and the Medical College Admissions Test, so the simple solution was for these black doctor-wanna-be’s to open their own Medical School: Morehouse Medical School (better known as Mo’house). It has now been in existance for over 30 years, and the combination of Morehouse graduates plus the affirmative action students graduated from the other three medical schools in GA has produced a large population of black doctors, yet blacks still whine about the lack of black doctors, and the racial bias in medical care.
Blacks won’t follow medical advice. They run their bodies into the ground and don’t regulate their food and alcohol intake, and often use street drugs. As result, you often see broken down, grossly overweight blacks. I think that blacks have an accellerated lifespan, not unlike a mayfly. They have sexually active earlier, and they age faster and die at a younger age. It’s not right or wrong, it’s just their genetics.
I certainly HOPE my doctor judges me by what he sees. A clean, well-kept, well-dressed, well-mannered, polite, well-spoken, physically fit white female. By observing those things, he will also see that he can trust what I say, my basic lifestyle is good, and that I will follow his advice.
My father, a physician, has an acronym for a certain type of patient, a HONDA. That is, Hypertensive Obese Noncompliant Diabetic Alcoholic. If doctors have a “Racist” attitude towards certain patients it is because they never follow directions and live unbelievably unhealthy lifestyles then blame/sue their doctors when they face a health crisis. Obama will make sure his ambulance chasing race hustler buddies that comprise the trial lawyer lobby will be happy with any “reform” to our health care system.
