SOC 280 Medical Racism in the United States
SOC 280 Medical Racism in the United States
Education and Health Care
Read the following blogs and consider the author’s opinions:
Challenging Medical Racism and Physicians’ Preference for White Patients
Four Ways Racism Continues to Influence Modern Medicine
http://racerelations.about.com/od/diversitymatters/a/Four-Ways-Racism-Continues-To-Influence-Modern-Medicine.htm
The Hidden World of Medical Racism in the United States
http://theconversation.com/the-hidden-world-of-medical-racism-in-the-united-states-9113
Bias, Black Lives, and Academic Medicine
https://westcoastuniversity.on.worldcat.org/oclc/5802903425
SOC 280 Medical Racism in the United States
After you read the author’s opinion blogs, write a 1– to 2–page paper in APA format that includes a brief explanation of the overall problem discussed throughout these blogs. Find your own academic sources using the WCU library that helps you explain why this problem might exist. Come up with a five-point action plan to reduce racism in the field of medicine. Justify your plan. Make sure to explain how you would teach each of the five points to those currently working in the health care field. (When you do this, think about what you have learned throughout the course about education, racism, and other areas that may affect your program.)
Medical racism in the United States encompasses discriminatory and targeted medical practices and misrepresentations in medical teachings driven by biases based on characteristics of patients’ race and ethnicity. In American history, it has impacted various racial and ethnic groups and affected their health outcomes. Vulnerable subgroups within these racial and ethnic groups such as women, children and the poor have been especially endangered over the years. An ongoing phenomenon since at least the 18th century in the United States, medical racism has been evident on a widespread basis through various unethical studies, forced procedures, and differential treatments administered by health care providers, researchers, and even sometimes government entities. Whether medical racism is always caused by explicitly prejudiced beliefs about patients based on race or by unconscious bias is not widely agreed upon.
Cultural competence
Physicians not possessing the appropriate level of cultural competence as it pertains to their patient demographic can lead to adverse impacts to those patients due to poor relationship dynamics and contribute to medical racism.[5] Cultural incompetence exists for a number of reasons such as lack of diversity in medical education and lack of diverse members of medical school student and faculty populations. This leads to marginalization of both minority healthcare providers and minority patients.[6][7][3][8]
Medical education
Studies done on the curriculums of medical schools in the US have found that within the assigned textbook readings, there exists a disparity between the representation of race and skin color in textbook case studies relative to the US population. This is true for both visual and textual lecture materials.[6][8]
A group of studies done on the representation of race and gender in course slides for the University of Washington School of Medicine, preclinical lecture slides at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and case studies used at the University of Minnesota Medical School simultaneously showed associations of race as a “risk factor” and a lack of racial diversity.
