African American Inequalities

Although statistical data and research shows there are healthcare disparities as it relates to minorities, much isn’t done to change negative patterns. However, researchers’ have chosen to examine the healthcare racial inequalities of African Americans. Cultural differences, and racial conscious and unconscious are factors that contribute to the gap in African American health. Therefore, collecting only medical data and physician behaviors towards certain diagnosis, is not enough to determine or conclude that there aren’t any deep rooted unforeseen components that play into racialist thinking by physicians. Despite the alarming writings of African Americans dying of heart disease, strokes, cancers, liver disease, diabetes, childbirth, tuberculosis, and premature birth at much greater rates than non-Hispanics. Health care organizations and/or professionals are not alerting this a healthcare emergency crisis. Although there is over 20 years of historical data and facts written about medical racism, little is done or left unexplored to provide goals for future improvements. Racial implications are adversely ignored by white physicians when determining if they favor white patients over black patients due to familiarity and lack of cultural awareness. Yet, Hoberman focuses half of the blame on researcher’s failure to develop a resolution based on statistical facts that present proof of racial disparities and delivering it to the forefront of the American medical communities. The flood of research papers documenting the medical suffering of the black population has become a kind of dirge, and endless tale of woe and victimization that can create an impression of overwhelming hopelessness and thus paralyze the will to enact policies that might begin to reverse the dire conditions that are described. The recitation of endless statistics documenting the racial health gap can also have the effect of depersonalizing and obscuring the human reality of what is happening to real people. There are numerous of findings related to African American health care failures and the magnitudes of unconscious and insensitivity caused by the physician vs. patient relationship. The variety of biases of white doctors’ racially unconsciousness-of not being aware that they are bringing racial eccentricities to their patients. Historically, black’s experiences have been influenced by the southern Jim Crow laws and the relationship of racial segregation and inequalities. Thus, these feelings and experiences, even today, are an influence to the doctor-black patient relationship. Today’s predecessor’s traumatized generations of African Americans, for whom a distrust of white doctors became nothing less than a cultural legacy that persists to this day on a scale few whites can imagine. One bias maintained that authors have knowingly written about the concerns of minority health disparities, however, will refuse to directly expound upon the issues, due to being afraid that exposing doctors or the medical communities will somehow backlash and create a negative self-image upon that writer. At the same time, medical authors have developed a rhetoric and a vocabulary that allow them to deplore racial health and treatment disparities without ever taking any real responsibility for them.” In addition, there is also denial of racism against minority patients. Healthcare professionals refuse to agree that there is a racially motived thinking when it comes to the limitations of understanding cultural competency. In thus, healthcare organizations try to formulate sensitivity training to deviate any allegations that cultural awareness has ever been addressed. …show more content…
This research could also contribute to build physician-patient trust relationship that has hindered so many African American patients from receiving care due to past traumatizing historical events that have alarmed the black community.
There was cost or incentive for this study, and the information was not be shared with any other patients or outside companies and/or institutions. The study involved human subjects in the research as the candidates from the specialty clinic were interviewed. There were no healthcare risks involved with this study. A participant may choose either to take part or not to take part in this research study. If they had chosen to not participate there was no penalty involved. Much has been said about the barriers to entry into a clinical research study. Some of the primary barriers include mistrust, economic factors, lack of awareness about clinical research, and effective study staff