Race & Medicine: You Have To Be Carefully Taught
Late last week, the Boston Globe highlighted a disturbing study indicating that medical students may provide African American patients with substandard care because of hidden or unconscious biases. According to the Globe:
“In the new study, trainee doctors in Boston and Atlanta took a 20-minute computer survey designed to detect overt and implicit prejudice. They were also presented with the hypothetical case of a 50-year-old man stricken with sharp chest pain; in some scenarios the man was white, while in others he was black.
We found that as doctors’ [white and non-white, including a small percentage of African American physicians] unconscious biases against blacks increased, their likelihood of giving [clot-busting] treatment decreased,” said the lead author of the study, Dr. Alexander R. Green of Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s not a matter of you being a racist. It’s really a matter of the way your brain processes information is influenced by things you’ve seen, things you’ve experienced, the way media has presented things.”
What this study also demonstrates is that negative ideas, images and words have a significant impact on us all – no matter what our race or ethnicity. We need to work doubly hard – especially those in health communications – to overcome the barriers to outstanding care faced by African American patients.
