The effects of the US healthcare system on POC women
Originally Written: February 17, 2021
Racial disparities in healthcare: it's not a new issue in society. However, the coronavirus has further displayed how your race can negatively impact the treatment you can get at hospitals. In the past, we saw examples of black and Latina women who were given less anesthesia while giving birth because they were considered "more tolerant" of pain. In other words, these white male doctors felt that they did not need to spend their resources on these non-white women, ultimately leading to higher rates of infant mortality and putting black women at higher risk for dying while giving birth. Unfortunately, not even recognizing these inequalities and having an elite background can stop these social stigmas and stereotypes from impacting POC women in maternal health.
Source: CNN News
Recently, a video went viral after Dr. Susan Moore, a family physician in Indianapolis, was hospitalized for Covid-19. However, the shock came more from the descriptions she gave of how she was treated in the University of Indiana hospital. In the video, she noted that the nurses barely came to check on her during her stay. Additionally, the doctors there tried to send her home after only two treatments. What makes the situation worse is the bias that the doctors there had against her. They assumed that she was a drug addict simply due to the fact that she was black, and refused to give her narcotics. After weeks of struggling, Dr. Moore unfortunately passed away, but her story highlights the continuous biases that the medical field holds against Black and LatinX communities.
This mindset carries over when dealing with mothers about to deliver their children. According to NPR news in 2017, it doesn’t matter how well-off you are or how educated you are. In the long run, it's your racial identity that decides the treatment you get in the medical field. Even if a black woman was a college graduate and the white woman was a high school graduate, the black woman was three to four times more at risk for death during childbirth. An unfortunate example of discrimination occurred in 2017 with the sudden death of Shalon Irving, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She had died during childbirth because of the lack of treatment and care she received from her hospital. It didn't matter that she had a PhD and was knowledgeable about medicine and healthcare. She worked to understand the healthcare inequities and how that could impact the future generations. Almost ironically, her last days were a result of these inequities and hateful biases.
Much of this is attributed to harmful stereotypes regarding black women, especially the ones that medical professionals hold. In a survey conducted amongst a group of medial students, over half of them believed that blacks had thicker skin than whites. Another handful thought that blacks had stronger immune systems that whites. At first glance, these subconscious biases may not seem offensive. Nonetheless, they contribute to how medical professionals deal with blacks as they put in less effort to truly care for them. Consequently, black people fail to trust their hospitals since they never know if he doctors are really trying to help them, or if they are relying on the stereotypes to make decisions for them.
Especially in times where public health is a serious issue to ponder over, we cannot leave anyone behind. All citizens of a country should have equal access to healthcare, no matter their race, gender, or their sexual orientation. I hope that we as a society can start to reflect on any subconscious biases we may have had, and make sure we don't repeat the same mistakes. For the sake of these women and mothers we have failed, let's all try to aim for equity.
Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/04/04/do-blacks-feel-less-pain-than-whites-their-doctors-may-think-so https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/america-is-failing-its-black-mothers/ https://theundefeated.com/features/new-poll-shows-black-americans-put-far-less-trust-in-doctors-and-hospitals-than-white-people/
https://www.propublica.org/series/lost-mothers
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMpv2100228
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/us/susan-moore-black-doctor-indiana.html