The Medical Field Of Medicine

The relationship between black patients and doctors has always been strained by the injustice done by doctors in history. One such example stated in the book is the Tuskegee syphilis studies: They recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them. …

In doing so, he pays particularly close attention to black patients and their relations with health care policies and practices. Smedly maintains that blacks are not only the victims of, inpatient and outpatient treatment, racial policies, and other services but also the victims of its consequences. He argues that many health care administrators are agents to a system of inequality that support provider and administrator biases, geographical inequalities, and racial stereotypes (Smedly 2012).

Black or Negro doctors were not common in America during the first half of the century: 500, or about 2.6%, of New York City’s 19,000 physicians were Negro in 1963 (Curtis 64). New York City and Chicago are major cities in the United States, they also are similar when it came to population. It is to say that since New York City only had a few Black Physicians during the time then Chicago reflected the same range of numbers when it came to their black physicians. In fact, African-Americans had only made up “3% of all professional workers in [New York City] in 1950”(Curtis 64). African American women were allowed to work in the medical professions but they were mostly limited to the nursing

In the early 1960’s privately owned hospitals in North Carolina were allowed to discriminate against race as to whether to admit a patient to the hospital and/or grant privileges to African American doctors or dentists, as long as separate-but-equal facilities were provided. Dr. Simkins, an African American dentist, attempted to admit and treat a patient experiencing an abscessed tooth, ultimately being subjected to denial of privileges.

Neil Calman’s “Out of the Shadows”. In Calman’s essay, he confesses how his implicit bias towards minority groups, in this case black men, prevented him and other medical professionals from properly doing their jobs. Additionally, in Dr. Calman’s essay he blatantly admits that his African American patient, Mr. North, is treated differently than a White middle class patient. Calman supported his claim by citing examples of Mr. North being denied a refill for an insulin prescription, being sent home from an appointment because he was 10 minutes late and even not being offered consultations by doctors to see heart specialists because they assumed he could not afford the visit (Calman, 2000). Dr. Calman recognized his own prejudice and the prejudice of other medical professions toward Mr. North and worked vigorously to try to convince others to confront their own. Even going as far as calling ahead and giving a positive characterization of Mr. North so he would not be categorized as “Poor Black Man” and given subpar medical

The patient has no family history of heart disease or diabetes, however both her parents are on medication for high blood pressure. Her paternal grandmother died of breast cancer at age 47. Her maternal grandmother

In Kevin Boyle’s Arc of Justice: A saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, the author creates a way to describe the discrimination and horrible racial treatment inflicted on the African American community following the civil war and continuing into the 1900’s by following a black doctor’s life and his controversy in equality. The author sets the scene in the booming city of Detroit, a place many blacks ventured to when trying to escape the cruelty Jim Crow Laws forced upon many African Americans. The great migration of blacks fleeing to Detroit in search of a new life brought an increase of over seventy thousand people in just the short span of fifteen years. This sudden unwanted abundance of people, still disliked even in the North, lead to a city full of racial prejudices and unjust discrimination.

Like previously stated, there has been a vast history of racial issues particularly in the medical field. These issues have led to minorities, especially African Americans, to not trust medical professionals and procedures. A study found in the Archives of Internal Medicine gives shocking results by stating that “African Americans were far less trusting than whites of the medical establishment and medical researchers in particular. African Americans were 79.2 percent more likely to believe that someone like them would be used as a guinea pig without his or her consent” (Clark 118). There are many cases in the past which would make a minority feel neglected and like a “guinea pig”. For instance, Henrietta Lacks, the main character of Rebecca Skloot’s book, was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951. Her doctors were shocked at the terrifying rate her tumor was growing (Skloot 117). Her cells were taken from her cervix and they were distributed world wide without her or her family’s consent. The distribution went on for years even after her death

First of all, nurses have a very critical role of advocating for their patients regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender. Today the nurse would treat the African Americans and white patients equally. Nurses are a lot more educated now then they were back in the ‘50s and there is so much more research available to them to practice evidence based care. Today’s nurse would not proceed with a procedure unless a voluntary informed consent was signed prior to any invasive procedures with potential risks. If today’s nurse was given the opportunity to treat Henrietta Lacks, this patient would have been treated with holistic therapeutic care, great pain management, care that has evidence to back it up, and the nurse would have advocated for the consent form to be signed by the patient and care clearly and thoroughly explained to the patient prior to implementing the

About ten years before the civil rights movement which fought that “Separate but Equal” wasn't all that equal. Johns Hopkins hospital was placed in the middle of urban Baltimore, Maryland. For the purpose to create an environment that could help African Americans receive medical attention even if they couldn't afford it. Many people believe that the hospital was put there to “…benefit scientist- to give them potential research subjects” (Skloot 166). The hospital had a separate but equal policy like many establishments at that time.

Between early June 1951 and Henrietta’s death on October 4, 1951, doctors involved in her treatment would continue to violate ethics code. Henrietta complained of discomfort in early June that morphed into pain. During the 1950s, segregation was still occurring in the country (Skloot, 2010, p. 63). Therefore, it was common for black patients to not question white professionals (Skloot, 2010, p. 63). It was also common practice for doctors to withhold information from patients so they would not be upset or confused by medical terms such as cancer (Skloot, 2010, p. 63). Within two months, the pain was so severe she could be heard screaming a block away from her home (Skloot, 2010, p. 65). By the time doctors examined her properly, she was inoperable and a “stony hard mass” (Skloot, 2010, p. 64) could be felt on her abdomen. The doctors during previous follow up visits wrote notes about her complaints but still stated no evidence of reoccurrence. Therefore, these unnamed doctors did not demonstrate appropriate professionalism because they neglected to perform a thorough exam required to give Henrietta a proper diagnosis breaching codes: 1.04 integrity, 1.07a exploitative relationship, 2.09 treatment/intervention

After the emancipation of Black slaves, the practice of exploiting Black people for medical experimentation continued. One such instance of this is the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments of 1932; which is often cited as a pivotal point that entrenched Black people’s distrust of medical institution (Gamble, 1997). During the Tuskegee study, Black American male patients were subjected to experiments to ascertain the proper treatment for syphilis, by U.S. government-funded medical professionals (Rusert, 2009). From this study, penicillin emerged as an effective treatment for syphilis, but this treatment was withheld from many Black American patients, and many were falsely informed that they suffered from “bad blood” rather than syphilis (Rusert, 2009). This resulted in many unwitting patients dying from complications related to the disease, and infecting others.

Medical research in the United States has a disgraceful history of exploitative studies in which African Americans were targets of abuse in the name of medical and scientific progress. African Americans have been used as the testing ground for drugs, treatments, and procedures since the time of slavery. The tolerance of the human frame and the endurance of the soul have been pushed to the limit in many of these experiments. From the physical demands on plantation work and the torturous treatment of slavery to the mental anguish inflicted on a slave’s soul by their masters, blacks have received deplorable treatment sanctioned by a white society. The end of slavery and the ushering in of the twenty first century did not end the torturous

In chapter one of the “Minority Populations and Health: An Introduction to Health Disparities in the United States”, the authors goes into detail about the history of the relationship between the United States government. In the chapter, contains a historical background on how minorities played a significant part in understanding why health disparities exist and how they can be eliminated. Some examples of the historical background of racial/ethnic minorities are the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments in the U.S. Constitution, the Trail of Tears, The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and The Civil Rights and Voting

While today’s “patients [have] one thing going for them that Henrietta didn't: They [are] alive. And the dead have no right to privacy-even if part of them is still alive,” (Skloot 211) history’s ethical debate regarding medical racism remains a social issue. When patients experience racism, they may be unable to defend themselves if they are incapacitated by medical professionals. Due to patient negligence and bias, the health care provider’s poor treatment breaks the trust of minorities. As shown in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and treatment of Henrietta Lacks, doctors and researchers have failed to inform the participants correctly. Both occurrences highlight medical racism because of the historical maltreatment of minority groups. Now, many