Internet Resources
- 1 in 5 Have Been Discriminated Against in the Healthcare SettingRace is most common form of discrimination reported in survey.
- AMA: Racism is a threat to public healthBuilding on its June pledge to confront systemic racism and police brutality, the AMA has taken action to explicitly recognize racism as a public health threat and detailed a plan to mitigate its effects.
- Racism, Inequality, and Health Care for African AmericansThe American health care system in beset with inequalities that have a disproportionate impact on people of color and other marginalized groups. These inequalities contribute to gaps in health insurance coverage, uneven access to services, and poorer health outcomes among certain populations. African Americans bear the brunt of these health care challenges.
- Racism and discrimination in health care: Providers and patientsA patient of mine recently shared a story with me about her visit to an area emergency room a few years ago.* She had a painful medical condition. The emergency room staff not only did not treat her pain, but she recounted: “They treated me like I was trying to play them, like I was just trying to get pain meds out of them. They didn’t try to make any diagnosis or help me at all. They couldn’t get rid of me fast enough.”
- Racism and Health: CDCAt CDC, we are committed to ensuring every person has the opportunity to live a healthy life. To that end, CDC—as the nation’s leading public health agency—has established this web portal, “Racism and Health” to serve as a hub for our activities, promote a public discourse on how racism negatively affects health and communicate potential solutions. Working with the broader public health community, we will serve as a catalyst to further investigate the impact of racism on health and efforts to achieve health equity for all.
- Racism is a Public Health CrisisAcross the country, local and state leaders are declaring racism a public health crisis or emergency. These declarations are an important first step in the movement to advance racial equity and justice and must be followed by allocation of resources and strategic action.
Streaming Media
- Cultural Diversity In Health CareLearn how to respectfully care for a diverse clientele by understanding their cultural differences. This program provides practical and effective methods of recognizing and dealing with the special needs of different cultures by adapting care techniques to the preferences of a diverse clientele including: ethical and religious beliefs, values and practices.
- Structural Racism in Medical CareLisa A. Cooper, MD, MPH, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Clyde W. Yancy, MD, MSc, of @Northwestern Medicine, and David R. Williams, PhD, MPH, of@Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health join JAMA Editor in Chief Howard Bauchner, MD, to discuss racism and structural racism in health care and medicine. Recorded March 16, 2021.
- Combating Racism and Place-ism in MedicineRace shouldn’t determine your health. Zip code shouldn’t change your life expectancy. Dr. Nwando Olayiwola explains how the medical profession does harm to patients by perpetuating racism & committing place-ism, ignoring place & health connections. She offers solutions for how technology & educational reform can help.
Books & Films: Check Out at McKee Library
Black Man in a White Coat
One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans When Damon Tweedy begins medical school,he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse,in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than in whites." Black Man in a White Coatexamines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of many health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosedwith a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.
Medical Apartheid
Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge-a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government's notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions.
The Health Gap
In this groundbreaking book, Michael Marmot, president of the World Medical Association, reveals social injustice to be the greatest threat to global health In Baltimore's inner-city neighborhood of Upton/Druid Heights, a man's life expectancy is sixty-three; not far away, in the Greater Roland Park/Poplar neighborhood, life expectancy is eighty-three. The same twenty-year avoidable disparity exists in the Calton and Lenzie neighborhoods of Glasgow, and in other cities around the world. In Sierra Leone, one in 21 fifteen-year-old women will die in her fertile years of a maternal-related cause; in Italy, the figure is one in 17,100; but in the United States, which spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world, it is one in 1,800 (and now, with the new administration chipping away at Obamacare, the statistics stand to grow even more devastating). Why? Dramatic differences in health are not a simple matter of rich and poor; poverty alone doesn't drive ill health, but inequality does. Indeed, suicide, heart disease, lung disease, obesity, and diabetes, for example, are all linked to social disadvantage.