Why Latinx Americans Don’t Want to Go to the Doctor
It’s a common belief in the Latinx community that when we are sick, we don’t need to go to the doctor.
We have countless home remedies to take care ourselves. From burning the candle below our ear, to chewing garlic cloves, to our lifetime supply of foreign antibiotics, the Latinx community has found ways to work around the necessity of visiting primary care physicians, urgent care doctors, and sometimes even the life saving doctors of emergency care. Although this may be written off as just another inherited cultural norm, I don’t really think that’s the reason that the American Latinx community doesn’t believe in our health care system. I think it’s because our health care system does not believe us.
Many studies suggest that Latinx are the racial and ethnic group least likely to visit a doctor’s office. Ethnically driven financial disparity and a lack of legal documentation play a huge role in our access to medical care. A 2013 Colorado study found that forty-five percent of those surveyed relied solely on home remedies, simply because of the cost or the risk of deportation. Medicine that puts our lives and our livelihoods at risk is not good medicine. However, one study by the Pew Hispanic Center found that half of the Latinx members they studied who did not seek medical care had a high school education, a third were American-born, and 45 percent had insurance. So clearly, something else is going on too.
The care provided to a low-income citizen of color is not the same as the care provided to a middle-class white citizen. The care provided to any person of color via Medicaid, Obamacare, or even a traditional workplace insurance is sub-par at best. The Latinx community is not going to stray from a culture of home remedies just to be brushed off by medical practitioners who do not take them seriously. Our home remedies are great and all, but they can’t treat more serious long-term conditions that Western medicine can.
Cancer is a leading cause of death in Hispanics, accounting for about twenty percent of our deaths in 2016 alone. Heart disease is responsible for another twenty percent. Both of which are managed best through early diagnosis and preventative care. But the biggest killer of Latinx people? Medical bias.
A study by JAMA Psychiatry found that Latinx people were disproportionately diagnosed with several medical issues, including major depression, despite the fact that significantly higher levels of symptoms were self-reported by Latinx than any of the other tested ethnic groups. That means that even when we’re speaking up, doctors aren’t listening.
In my own personal experience, I’ve had to fight tooth and nail to convince medical practitioners that my pain and symptoms weren’t “just in my head.” It took a year for my PCP to diagnose me with a routine infection, all because I was not given basic tests. I endured a year of unnecessary and constant pain for a condition that could be treated with a single pill.
To get diagnosed with post-operative dental complications, I had to visit two oral surgeons, a dentist, and an urgent care, which increased my pain and suffering tenfold. A single x-ray could’ve spared me weeks of expensive appointments, missed work shifts, and even an emergency sinus surgery. But hey, “if I was really in that much pain, I’d go to the ER.”
Without financial access to quality preventative care, members of the Latinx community go underdiagnosed. Without access to treatment that won’t jeopardize our status in this country, we go underdiagnosed. Without health care that doesn’t treat patients with less money, different than those with more, we go under-diagnosed. With racist systems designed to evaluate the pain of a person of color differently than the pain of a white person, we go underdiagnosed, and we are dying disproportionately because of it.
Even when we speak up, doctors, dentists, and any practitioner can be guilty of not listening to us. So, what can we do?
We must fight to make systemic changes that benefit all people of color, because until racism and intrinsic bias are eradicated from our judicial, cultural, and medical systems, we will continue to experience this country differently than our white or white-passing counterparts. We must always advocate for ourselves. We know our bodies better than anyone else, and we must continually search for doctors who validate and believe our pain because that can literally save our lives.
Sources
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/207503
https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2016/hispanic/index.htm
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/why-many-latinos-dread-going-to-the-doctor/361547/
