Learning From the Past and Working in the Present to Create an Antiracist Future for Academic Medicine (original) (raw)
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Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology
Eastern Virginia Medical School "Though I am gone, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war.
Against the Turn to Critical Race Theory and "Anti-racism" in Academic Medicine
HEC Forum, 2022
Medical academics are increasingly bringing critical race theory (CRT) or its corollaries to their discourse, to their curricula, and to their analyses of health and medical treatment disparities. The author argues that this is an error. The author considers the history of CRT, its claims, and its current presence in the medical literature. He contends that CRT is inimical to usual academic modes of inquiry and has obscured rather than aided the analysis of social and medical treatment disparities. Remedies for racism suggested by CRT advocates will not work and some of them will make things worse. Academic medicine should avoid the embrace of CRT and should maintain an allegiance to rigorous empirical inquiry and to treating patients not as essentialized ethnic group members but as individual human beings in need of care.
2007
IntroductIon The former surgeon general’s supplementary report on race and mental health identifies mistrust as a major barrier to people of color receiving mental health treatment. Indeed, an impressive body of evidence suggests that the reason people of color mistrust medicine in general, and the mental health system in particular, is linked to a unique and troubling history—a history of racism entrenched in medical research, diagnosis and clinical management. The importance of historical context is not unfamiliar to healthcare practitioners who regularly elicit a present, past and familial history of illness from their patients. Mental health providers must often explore the meaning and interpretation patients assign to their histories, an approach we refer to as “history sensitive.” Beyond providing useful information that can be gleaned to determine an accurate diagnosis and course of treatment, a history-sensitive approach to treatment of people of color offers motivated clini...
Race, Racism, and the Policy of 21st Century Medicine
The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 2021
This perspective describes three new policies passed at the November 2020 Special Meeting of the American Medical Association House of Delegates. These policies (1) denounce racism as a public health threat; (2) call for the elimination of race as a proxy for ancestry, genetics, and biology in medical education, research, and clinical practice; and (3) decry racial essentialism in medicine. We also explore the social and institutional context leading to the passage of these policies, which speak directly to the harmful legacy of racism in America, and its insidious impact on the healthcare system.
Racism and Medicine in the United States
Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Health Humanities, 2021
This encyclopedia entry examines the historical and political contexts of race, racism, medicine, and medical racism in the United States from the colonial era to present. This entry consists of an area of health humanities study that applies critical race theory and social justice theory to examine race as a social construct with consequences for both theoretical medicine and the lived experience of medical care and medical practice based on racialized identity.
Embo Reports, 2006
concept of race is not the best strategy to identify underlying genetic differences. Relying on a few obvious characteristics, such as skin colour or eye shape, tells something, but not everything, about a person's ancestry. "It doesn't mean that if we look at these various groups as we define them now, that some of these genetic variants are not going to be more frequent in some groups, but there is overlap," said Charles Rotimi, a biochemist and genetic epidemiologist at the National Human Genome Center at Howard University (Washington, DC, USA). "What is important to recognize however, is that genetic variants cut across social demographic groups in ways that make it difficult for us to consistently say who is black or Hispanic, for example." Although it may be reasonable to use the occurrence of genetic variants in medical or scientific settings, using race as a category in an uncritical way, and interpreting it as reflecting distinct groups, may lead to incorrect conclusions. "I've been trying to track how 'Asian' becomes a category in some of the conclusions in scientific articles. When you go back and try to find out what exactly has been used, you may find for example that 90% of the samples come from one specific Chinese population and then is extrapolated to the broader category of Asian," commented Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, an anthropologist at …physicians increasingly use their patients' skin colour or other physiological features as a first step towards 'individual' treatment…
Racism in a Medically Segregated World
The article posits a preliminary critical examination of issues tied to racism within the field of medicine and medical school education. The discussion notes that manner in which the economy commingles historically to produce long term and persistent practices of racialization, which result in a pernicious system of medical apartheid. The discussion concludes with a call toward an ethics of liberation, which calls for expanding the ethics of medicine, in ways that integrate values that support doctors in honoring all life, reinserts the notion of community care, and speaks truth to power.