Racism In The Medical Field Essay

Historically discrimination against minority groups has been a reoccurring problem in the U.S. In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court denied citizenship and basic rights to African Americans (Civil rights, 2015). Over time, through many legal and legislative acts African Americans were slowly granted full rights. Today, the issue of unconscious racial bias among doctors is prevalent in America. These physicians tend to demonstrate dominate conversations with African Americans during visits, pay less attention to the patients emotional and social needs and make the patient feel less involved in decision making (medical news today, 2012).

In this article, researchers noticed that racial disparities in health care are still prevalent in the United States and the outcome and treatments that blacks and Latinos, when compared to those of white patients, receive are as big as they were 50 years ago. The article looks at several different ways that institutions, such as the University of California, San Francisco, are introducing new methods to training programs that allow doctors in training to realize their own prejudices when working with patients. The article also discusses a 2007 Harvard study that shows that the traditional diversity training used in the 80’s and 90’s was not working and reinforces and confirms racial bias.

According to Henrietta, physicians at the Hopkins during the 1950s and early 1960s claimed to offer to treat African American patients but in contrary, they did so in a manner that showed segregation especially from the fellow white families. Another strategy to ensure that African Americans did not receive treatment in medical institutions is that there were education and language barrier. According to Skloot, these factors kept the backs away from these institutions unless they thought they had no choice, pg. 16.

With the ongoing changes on policies in healthcare, it is imperative to consider the legal and ethical issues in health disparities and access to care based on the socioeconomic status. Research have shown over the past 25 years that disparities in the quality of care are highly influenced by individual characteristics such as race, gender, ethnicity, education, income, and age. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) recognized that providing care is not simply a “one size fits all” approach especially with the diverse population in today’s society. As healthcare professionals, we need to be alert and know how to properly intervene with such disparities so that the care provided is tailored to the individual.

The concept of racial bias –more specifically implicit or subconscious racial bias– has received increased attention over the years as racial and ethnic gaps in achievement (largely educational and economic), treatment, and survival outcomes persevere despite the expansion of concerted efforts to focus on the social determinants of health (SDOH) and combating longstanding, overt discriminatory barriers and practices. The increased interest in as well as investments made within the study of implicit or “hidden” biases is largely attributed to the field of social psychology and the research of practitioners like Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt and Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, whose work have emphasized the importance of focusing on the role that contextual environmental factors and social conditioning play, rather than just explicit racial attitudes, in explaining the persistence of racial inequality.

The continued survival of racist beliefs in the medical profession was could

Before answering the question of “Should physicians pay attention to “race”?” lets first discuss why it is necessary for a physician to know the “race” of the patients. The first reason is in regard to pathogenic reasons leading to the field of pharmacogenetics. The second is more social reason and leads to racial division among a population. In considering of the latter reason, one should note that it may not the physician’s intention to cause any racial division. In fact the physician may have nothing but the best intentions in mind but the division it self comes from the interpretation of the physician’s questions. In order justify racial profiling or injustice in a society an uneducated and ignorant society that is searching for a genetic link to race may wrongfully assume genetics are the sole reason of racial differences. These assumptions are made stronger if someone of such a high social position like a physician takes “race” in consideration. However race it self cannot be linked to genetics in anyway. In fact according to the human genome project humans share 99.9% of the same gene pool. Furthermore a study by the Genetic Society of America, weakens the myth that race is caused by genetic differences by stating that there is a “larger Genetic Differences Within Africans Than Between Africans and Eurasians” meaning “blacks” are more genetically similar to “whites”

Racial differences play a huge role in the access of health care services for Americans. It is perceived that whites are more likely to access quality services than ethnic minority groups in the country. The racial groups that are perceived to have limited access to healthcare services include the black community and Hispanics across the United States (White & Chanoff, 2011). Geographical factors also determine the level of access to health services since some regions have fewer medical resources than

While many argue that minorities and ethnicities face health care disparities due to racial backgrounds, other argue that these disparities instead occur because of a large range of dimensions. Individuals that face the greatest health care disparities are often referred to as being part of the “vulnerable population,” ultimately living as a group that is not well integrated into the health care system regarding key characteristics such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, geographic location, language, gender, disability status, citizenship status, and sexual identity and orientation. Disparities even occur within subgroups of populations, as some Hispanics receive poorer health care quality based on their primary language, immigration

This can lead to the individual gaining a lot of aggression and tend to leads to violence. So discrimination should be widely avoided to prevent the some of many effects that can occur. National initiatives promote anti discrimination in many ways. Firstly in all health and social care institutions there must be a code of conduct which every employee must comply with. These consist

Henrietta Lack was an African American woman born in 1920 who helped science define some of the world’s medical discoveries. Many woman were dying every year from cervical cancer. Little did she know what the future held for her and millions of other people. This situation saddens me as a medical professional because a human was treated as a specimen rather than a person. Even though this was many decades ago, I feel as though there still should have been standard practices in place that prevented this kind of behavior from those who are supposed to be trusted most, health care professionals.

As of this time, we have addressed the issues of disparities in healthcare that have been lingering amongst us for a few centuries. We have also touched on the topic of competencies in the healthcare system as well. In life the will always be something with an issue, now, let’s discuss the solutions. First, let’s just do a quick recap of the ‘issues’ we are addressing that are the reasons we are discussing a few solutions. The first, issue was the healthcare disparities, as you should remember disparities in healthcare mean that there are many distinct correlations between the lack of healthcare and certain ethnic and racial minorities.

These factors increase the minority groups of being uninsured, lack of health care accessibility, receive poorer quality care and experiencing worse health outcomes, including low income individuals and black people (Ubri & Artiga, 2016). In United States, the healthcare disparities are very obvious and it can be clearly seen between urban and rural

The lack of cultural competency by physicians in health care settings is producing many barriers to health care that is negatively affecting Hispanic families, such as miscommunications, poor adherence to medications and health promotion strategies, and misunderstandings that lead to misdiagnosis or inadequate treatment for Hispanics. This issue is alarming because the Hispanic population makes up roughly 17% of the entire U.S. population, which is a staggering figure that can’t be ignored. Some solutions that have been tried in the past but failed include, establishing more community-based programs to assist this segment of the population, hospitals pushing for prevention programs, and greater efforts by health institutions on training physicians to improve all aspects of communication. Although

For example, a major injustice is evident given that researchers exclusively carried out this study on African-American males and did not fairly distribute the studies among all races. Additionally, medical researchers purposely targeted highly impoverished area to find participants for the study. While prevalence may have been higher among this group, the lack of any other test subject demographics indicates possible discrimination in proceedings towards this particular