Discrimination in Health Care

Throughout my college career I have become aware of the racism and discrimination present in our health care system. Attending a lecture my freshman year I discovered that African Americans were more likely to die from heart-related issues and that part of the issue was misinterpretation or ignoring the symptoms of these critical conditions by physicians. They also received fewer heart-related operations and treatments.

In my Health Equities Internship course we had readings concerning how African Americans have been treated particularly horrifically throughout history—dragging an African American slave-woman around Europe for medical “display purposes” to be exhibited for researchers and show the differences in Black women’s bodies from the normal European body type—the “accumulation of fat in the buttocks—and also elongated labia minora.” “Spectators paid to crowd around her near-naked form, staring close up at her so-called deformities.” And after her death, she was dissected and her brain and vagina displayed at the Paris Museum of Man until 1974. This story perfectly illustrates how African American bodies were seen as belonging to themselves, but as the toys of white medical researchers—Tuskegee anyone?

My internship also touched on the disparities faced specifically by African American men in the health care setting—being seen as overly aggressive and non-compliant. And particularly surprising to me, African American men were routinely under prescribed pain medication due to the perception that they are drug seekers. This brings me to an article I examined for my last document analysis. “New Report Says U.S. Health Care Violates U.N. Convention on Racism” summarizes a report, “Reproductive Injustice: Racial and Gender Discrimination in U.S. Health Care,” and offers a glimpse into the discrimination of the U.S. health care system based on race, class, and gender. The article cites two black women’s experiences with racism from their physicians due to negative stereotypes who lived in Jackson, Mississippi affected the way they were treated, information provided to them, and likelihood of being questioned about drug use during pregnancy. One woman had a particularly jarring instance where her physican did not believe that she knew how to use birth control: “After I had the baby, and I went back fro my checkup…[the doctor] told me, ‘I’ll see you in six weeks.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said I’d be pregnant again.”

It is instances like these and many others that point to how grossly racist our society still is. In a field like health care, where trust in your health care provider is essential to our well being, it is particularly frustrating to see how little progress has been made.

Sources:

Pérez, Miriam Zoila, “New Report Says U.S. Health Care Violates U.N Convention on Racism,” Colorlines, Aug. 28, 2014, accessed April 18, 2016, http://www.colorlines.com/articles/new-report-says-us-health-care-violates-un-convention-racism.

White, Augustus A., and David Chanoff. Seeing patients: Unconscious bias in health care. Harvard University Press, 2011.