SYSTEMIC

An urgent study of how ethnic minority patients are medically disadvantaged because they are economically and socially disadvantaged—and they are dying because of it.

Liverpool, a British journalist for Nature with an expertise in immunology and virology, takes a broad view of a thorny problem: Racism plays a critical factor in health care and, as the Lancet notes, is “a public health emergency of global concern.” Systematic racism presents in many ways in the health sphere, including the persistent belief that Black people have differences enough in their pain receptors that they require less anesthesia in surgery. Biological differences do exist, notes the author, but these are at the genetic level and affect such things as the ability to metabolize certain therapeutic drugs, in the same way that people with certain genetic markers have difficulty metabolizing dairy products. Racism is often marked by simple carelessness. Algorithms for one dermatology app, for instance, were trained on light-skinned people, making their diagnostics suspect for those of darker complexion. Liverpool herself suffers from a skin condition that white doctors said was incurable until one dermatologist pronounced it common eczema that expresses itself somewhat differently on darker skin. Racially grounded disparities in health care are everywhere: Black patients wait far longer for organ transplants than whites, and standardized tests eliminate many from the candidate rolls; Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by Covid-19, and hospitals treating Black patients received fewer funds; childbirth mortality rates are higher for Black women than for white women; and so on. Liverpool notes that while these disparities are measurable, “instead of simply stating that Black people are dying disproportionately because they are poor, we should be asking why Black people…are disproportionately poor in the first place.”

A powerful argument for a more equitable approach to health care.