The Importance of Black Representation in Healthcare

Edited by Catherine Verdeflor

Being represented is knowing someone will have your back when you’re not around. It’s feeling accounted for when you thought no one that looked like you would ever make it. Bottom line is representation is important, but, sadly, the medical field is severely lacking in black representation. This has many negative effects and speaks about a bigger issue of racism that needs to be addressed. If this issue is fixed, many others, such as the white to black difference in life expectancy and infant mortality death rates, could potentially be resolved.

Over half of active physicians are white and less than 5% are black (Association of American Medical Colleges, 2019, para. 1). Many black patients tend to trust doctors or caretakers more when they are of the same race, and when the majority of the doctors they run into don’t understand their backgrounds or culture, it's difficult to trust them with your health. To start to understand this topic, we have to look at history and what made black people not trust doctors in the first place. During slavery, young females were experimented on without anesthesia to discover more information about the reproductive system. It was believed that black people didn’t feel pain, which is a misconception still thought today by many white doctors. Then, in 1932, the Tuskegee Experiments further proved that physicians saw black lives as expendable. They purposely injected them with a disease with no intentions of curing it but to rather study its negative effects on the body. Many believe that these misconceptions and horrible treatments are in the past, but that is the farthest from the truth. A study in 2018 showed that black male patients get a higher level of care when they are under black physicians as compared to white physicians (Torres, 2018). When looking at possible reasons on why this is, it's possible that you must understand the patient and their pain to effectively treat them, which sadly many white physicians simply can not or were not trained to. Not only does it lead to devastating outcomes, such as black infants being three times as likely to die in white physicians care and black women being twice as likely to die from cervical cancer (Cohen et al., 2002).

All in all, representation of black physicians in healthcare would optimize patient care, patient satisfaction, and patient trust. There is a history of black pain and health being seen as expendable which needs to be addressed in order to broaden representation. Black patients matter and black care needs to be optimized.

References:

Cohen, J. J., Gabriel, B. A, & Terrel, C. (1 September 2002). “The Case For Diversity In The Healthcare Workforce.” Health Affairs, 21(5). doi:10.1377

Diversity in Medicine: Facts and Figures 2019. (2019). Association of American Medical Colleges. Retrieved from https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data/figure-18-percentage-all-active-physicians-race/ethnicity-2018

Torres, N. (2018). Research: Having a Black Doctor Led Black Men to Receive More-Effective Care. Harvard Business Reviews. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2018/08/research-having-a-black-doctor-led-black-men-to-receive-more-effective-care

[Untitled image of a doctor]. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/we-need-more-black-doctors-orgs-that-help