Bias, black lives, and academic medicine (original) (raw)

Genocide in Grams: A Social Research of Medical Bias and African American Health

2018

This paper will examine multiple accounts of systematic discrimination pertaining to the medical industry that builds on the reality of oppression in America. The intended argument is that medical industries have victimized black patients, particularly imprisoned men and youth of color, in favor of the elitist research majority. Many unethical procedures that have been conducted are the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, with additional chemical and vaccination testing, and other unconsented experimentations on black bodies. This has led to drastic health effects such as death, mortality rates, and drainage of mental health that hinders trust from the African-American community. The primary connection intended to be made is that the medical industry has served as a mediator in disrupting the physical and mental health of black communities, primarily distrust between the institution and communities, with any emerging strategies having a necessity to implement patient-based change in health disparities. Since medical and social science publications alone haven't caused drastic change for these disparities, some relatively contemporary community-based projects have shown favorable results.

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.

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.

How Does Racial Segregation Taint Medical Pedagogy?

AMA Journal of Ethics

Persistence of racial segregation makes equitable health care impossible for African Americans, as does the supra-geographic segregation perpetuated by enduring racial medical mythologies that remain unchallenged in health professions education. This article canvasses how these mythologies exacerbate myopia in health professions practice and education, maintain barriers, and perpetuate racial health inequity. Codifying Racial Segregation In 1870, the American Medical Association (AMA) twice excluded 1 the racially integrated delegation from Washington, DC, to the AMA's national meetings while admitting a White one. 2 Between 1846 and 1910, the AMA developed a state-based organizational structure that excluded most African American physicians even as the association shaped medical education. 2 Schools commonly rejected Black medical aspirants like James McCune Smith, who moved to Glasgow, Scotland, where he earned his medical degree in 1837, 3 and Daniel Laing, Isaac Snowden, and Martin Delaney, who were admitted to Harvard Medical School in 1850 but were expelled when White students protested. 4 African American physicians responded by founding their own societies 2,4,5 and medical schools because the relatively few Black patients admitted to White hospitals were typically pressed into service as "teaching material" and research subjects. 6 When the AMA decided to elevate medical education by creating the Council on Medical Education in 1904, it did not essay to treat the 9 million underserved African Americans in the South. 2 Instead, the AMA Council commissioned the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to evaluate American medical education and produce the 1910 Flexner Report, which recommended closing all but 2 of 7 African American medical schools-Howard and Meharry. 7 Moreover, the report castigated African American physicians-already denigrated as purveyors of drugs, alcohol, and abortion 8,9-as "limited," declaring: "A well-taught negro sanitarian will be immensely useful; an essentially untrained negro wearing an M.D. degree is dangerous." 7 Five of the 7 schools closed, and the number of African American physicians plummeted, ensuring that Black patients' needs remained unmet. A lingering consequence today is that only 5% of US physicians are Black. 10 And though African American men, who have

Draft 8 / 1 / 2005 Page 1 of 46 Tragedy and Remedy : Black Reparations for Racial Disparities In Health

2005

Biomedical research into racial disparities in health is distracted by an etiological reductionism which overlooks the underlying history of slavery, racism and segregated health care. The epidemiological model of research is ill-equipped to adequately diagnose the health effects of race, controlling for variables such as income and education which themselves bear the legacies of racism in America. Biomedical research can also fall prey to the dangers of racialized research, reinforcing stigma through medical profiling based on race. Biomedical research has a race problem.

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.