Health Disparities: A Civil Rights Issue You Should Not Bury in the Sand!
America can boast of being the number one country with the best technology—China is number two! But certain axioms make our country look bad, and I will not sugarcoat my adjectives! I mean, real bad! For one, we have the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized country: over 2 million! Secondly, we have some egregious health disparities, as cited by the Institute of Medicine, the American College of Physicians, and the Commonwealth Fund, which will focus on this essay.
Some facts on racial health disparities we cannot hide. Nearly everyone knows black men have the lowest life expectancy--69 years compared to white men, who live to 78 years. Black women die four times more than white women from childbirth. Evidence also shows that many doctors have preconceived notions about minorities which contribute to poor treatment. Several studies reveal that some doctors still think blacks can stand more pain than whites and that their skin is thicker than whites. Hence there is a need for cultural diversity and sensitivity. Moreover, uninsurance for blacks is about 34 percent compared to 13 percent for whites.
Other disparities also show that race and racism are factors in these differences. The Commonwealth Fund reminds us that “mortality rates from heart disease, breast cancer, and stroke got worse between 1995 and 2003 for blacks. Because of the shortest of black mental health providers, black and brown teenagers’ mental health needs are not met, as evidenced in “The Dose,” a podcast from March 25, 2022, in which psychiatrist Kevin Simon, an M.D. at Boston’s Children’s Hospital and Commonwealth Fund Fellow in Minority Health Policy at Harvard University addresses this issue. (When one reads
former JAAH editor V.P. Franklin’s essay on the contributions of children and young adults to the Civil Rights Movement, one cannot help but think about the egregious lack of mental health our black teenagers are subjected to even today.) One should note that 86 percent of psychiatrists in the U.S. are white compared to 4 percent who are black! And one must not forget our long history of using blacks in medical experiments, notably delineated in black Harvard University’s Public Policy researcher Harriet Washington’s canonical book Medical Apartheid, published in 2007.
She traces those illegal experiments from colonial times to the present. After reading her well-researched text, Dr. Marion Simms, considered the father of gynecology, should be condemned as a racist sadist. Feeling that enslaved women could feel no pain, he experimented on them vaginally using no anesthesia. (We clapped when in 2018, his statue was taken down in Manhattan!) Then she proceeds to analyze the racism seen in Chapter 11, in which young black teens are subjected to unethical experiments with fen-fen, radiation, measles vaccinations, lead contaminants, and victimization by doctors looking for the “criminal gene” in them. Not all medical doctors guilty were white because some were from primary black medical schools. From reading her book, I coined the phrase failing to consider, “RECS will certainly wreck the patient.” Failure to consider race, ethics, class, and science will certainly wreck the treatment outcome.
In conclusion, we know that the COVID-19 pandemic brought out these medical health disparities even further. Blacks died from COVID three times more than whites.
Dr. Margaret Bernice Smith Bristow, Historian
Unless education, housing, job security, and environmental components are addressed, race and racism will continue to plague our society—embarrassing the United States, a healthy democracy. And as Martin Luther King concluded after his march to Selma on March 25, 1965, the problem with racial health issues is our latest civil rights issue. And from those mentioned above, indeed it is!
