“Can healthcare be cured of racial bias?”
“Even as the health of Americans has improved, the disparities in treatment and outcomes between white patients and black and Latino patients are almost as big as they were 50 years ago.
A growing body of research suggests that doctors’ unconscious behavior plays a role in these statistics, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences has called for more studies looking at discrimination and prejudice in health care.
For example, several studies show that African-American patients are often prescribed less pain medication than white patients with the same complaints. Black patients with chest pain are referred for advanced cardiac care less often than white patients with identical symptoms.
Doctors, nurses and other health workers don’t mean to treat people differently, says Howard Ross, founder of management consulting firm Cook Ross, who has worked with many groups on diversity issues. But all these professionals harbor stereotypes that they’re not aware they have, he says. Everybody does…
Amanda explains to the class that her parents made their way to the U.S. from Iran, and settled in Marin County, north of San Francisco. She took the version of the test that measures bias against Muslims, and another on light and dark skin tone.
“I kind of went in thinking that these are two areas that I would probably not have a bias, and that’s kind of why I chose them,” she said.
But the results were not what she expected.
“It was like, actually, ‘You’re biased and you don’t like brown people and you don’t like Muslims,’” she said. “Which is interesting for me — because that’s, kind of, the two things that I am.”…
A 2007 study described in the Harvard Business Review examined diversity training programs at more than 800 companies over 30 years, and the results underscore Ross’s point. Overall, such programs seemed to do nothing to change people’s prejudices or improve diversity. Instead, in some cases, they reinforced bias.
“What happens is, ultimately, we feel bad about ourselves, or bad about the person that made us feel that way,” Ross said.
So rather than making people feel bad or awkward, Ross and Salazar say that, more than anything, they want people to accept that having biases is part of being human.”
Everyone should take implicit attitude tests. implicit.harvard.edu do ittttt
There are a lot of reasons why I am super privileged to have so many medically-trained friends, but one is the occasional interactions with them when they’ve just learned about something that black people get way underdiagnosed in (like heart attacks, when you come into the ER presenting with the symptoms for a heart attack), and they let me know that if I ever have that problem I’m going to have to advocate for myself in order to get the proper care.
Related: “The Case for Black Doctors”; “Study Links Disparities in Pain Management to Racial Bias”; “A New Way to Fight Health Disparities?”; “A Superhumanization Bias in Whites’ Perceptions of Blacks”
