Persistence of racial segregation makes equitable health care impossible for African Americans, as does the supra-geographic segregation perpetuated by enduring racial medical mythologies that remain unchallenged in health professions education. This article canvasses how these mythologies exacerbate myopia in health professions practice and education, maintain barriers, and perpetuate racial health inequity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is the researcher's responsibility to provide accurate, complete, and unbiased verbal and written information yet, as this essay discusses, challenges to meaningful research consent abound in the communication between researcher and subject. This discussion of these challenges is far from exhaustive, but it will flag some of the potholes that researchers must anticipate on the sometimes rocky road to eliciting meaningful consent. These include, but are not limited to, inadequate scientific literacy, poorly written consent forms, and even the deployment of scientific terms and seductive acronyms like CURE and MIRACL.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBetween 1910 and 1968, the National Medical Association (NMA) repeatedly clashed with the American Medical Association (AMA) over the latter organization's racial bars to membership and other health policy issues. The NMA, founded in 1895 as a nonexclusionary medical society to provide a voice for disenfranchised black physicians and patients, struggled in its early years, during which AMA leadership took scant notice of it. But skirmishes ensued over such actions as stigmatizing racial labels in the AMA's American Medical Directory, which, beginning in 1906, listed all U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn independent panel of experts, convened by the American Medical Association (AMA) Institute for Ethics, analyzed the roots of the racial divide within American medical organizations. In this, the first of a 2-part report, we describe 2 watershed moments that helped institutionalize the racial divide. The first occurred in the 1870s, when 2 medical societies from Washington, DC, sent rival delegations to the AMA's national meetings: an all-white delegation from a medical society that the US courts and Congress had formally censured for discriminating against black physicians; and an integrated delegation from a medical society led by physicians from Howard University.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLike the nation as a whole, organized medicine in the United States carries a legacy of racial bias and segregation that should be understood and acknowledged. For more than 100 years, many state and local medical societies openly discriminated against black physicians, barring them from membership and from professional support and advancement. The American Medical Association was early and persistent in countenancing this racial segregation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSecret tobacco industry documents lay bare the industry's targeting, seduction, and recruitment of minority groups and children. They also unmask Big Tobacco's disdain for its targets.
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