Black History Month and Black health
27th February 2017 · 0 Comments
By Glenn Ellis
Contributing Writer
(TriceEdneyWire.com) — Race is everywhere in medicine. Most health statistics are broken down by race. Despite a pervasive belief that race represents clear-cut and genetically distinct groups of people, there is no evidence that it is associated with any personality traits, skills, or abilities.
Yet, if we just look at health outcomes, an argument could be made that being an African American is a disease unto itself! Across the board, if you look at the 15 leading causes of death in the U.S., blacks have higher death rates than whites in about 12 of them, including heart disease, cancer and stroke.
Black History Month, is an annual celebration of achievements by African Americans, and a time for recognizing the central role of African Americans in U.S. history. The celebrations can be experienced nationally and worldwide as many organizations, cities, states and countries host events that educate on the rich culture, and memorable figures of African American history. How often is health a topic of focus during Black History Month?
This entire month of February has been set aside, each year, so that all Americans can honor the past of a people who were brought to this country in political bondage.
But there is one area where the bondage of African Americans continues… Health!
African Americans have a unique history in the United States which has led to some unique factors that have created significant health disparities in the Black community. Whether these factors are cultural, environmental, or structural, it is important to reflect on where African Americans are in terms of health status. One of the main reasons, experts say, is because people of color often live in areas where there isn’t a lot of access to quality health care or to better lifestyle choices.
Areas of high racial segregation are areas of high concentrations of poverty and the absence of access to good schools, the absence of access to high-quality medical care, exposure to high levels of messages about tobacco and alcohol and low access to green spaces and areas to exercise
Historically, within medical research, African Americans were often relegated to unscientific experiments aimed at bolstering eugenics—such as the disfiguring procedures performed in the antebellum South by white physicians on non-consenting Black slaves. In addition, they’ve historically been excluded from clinical and therapeutic trials that seek to uncover risk factors for disease and offer life-saving new treatments. Consider the infamous federally funded Tuskegee syphilis experiment (shut down, only after it was exposed in 1972) which denied treatment to hundreds of African-American men suffering from the disease.
Between 1933 and 1974, the state of North Carolina ran one of the most aggressive eugenics programs, sterilizing more than 7,600 mostly poor and African-American men, women and children.
The concept of race has been widely propagated since Carl Linnaeus published Systema Naturae in 1735. The father of modern taxonomy proposed four distinct racial groups for human beings — American, European, Asian, and African — that encompassed not only physical characteristics and geographic origin, but also personality traits, skills, and abilities. This classification has become institutionalized with little awareness that the variable “race” is not actually a biological phenomenon: there is more genetic variation within these racial groups than across them. Rather, the notion of race is a social construct.
Sick or injured African-American patients wait about an hour longer than patients of other races before being transferred to an inpatient hospital bed following emergency room visits, according to a national study published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine.
Granted, doctors and other healthcare providers face huge demands for time efficiency and output; often being called upon to process as many as six patients per hour.
It is important to note that in contrast to shameful periods in history that focused on race with unethical agendas, the vast majority of research today is completely well-intentioned, with a goal of equitably tailoring medical care to a diverse patient population.
There are also significant structural factors that are attributing to some of the health care disparities seen in the African-American community. Some of these structural factors include lack of or poor transportation options, inability to schedule appointments at a convenient time or to get in to see a healthcare provider fast enough due to rigid work schedules, and excessive time spent in waiting rooms; all of which will negatively impact an individual’s ability and willingness to get care that may be necessary for them to receive.
Health care disparities among African Americans have many root causes, and will require ongoing continuous efforts to help solve these issues. It requires the attention of the entire nation 12 months of the year.
Glenn Ellis, is a Health Advocacy Communications Specialist. He is the author of Which Doctor?, and Information is the Best Medicine. For more good health information, visit www.glennellis.com.
This article originally published in the February 27, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
