{"id":41146,"date":"2015-05-18T02:19:35","date_gmt":"2015-05-18T02:19:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41146"},"modified":"2015-05-20T20:31:37","modified_gmt":"2015-05-20T20:31:37","slug":"the-case-for-black-doctors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41146","title":{"rendered":"The Case for Black Doctors"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Case for Black Doctors<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2015-05-15<\/p>\n

Damon Tweedy<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
\nDuke University, Durham, North Carolina<\/em><\/p>\n

DURHAM, N.C.<\/a> \u2014 IN virtually every field of medicine, black patients as a group fare the worst. This was one of my first and most painful lessons as a medical student nearly 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

The statistics that made my stomach cramp back then are largely the same today: The infant mortality<\/a> rate in the black population is twice that of whites. Black men are seven times more likely than white men to receive a diagnosis of H.I.V.<\/a> and more than twice as likely to die of prostate cancer<\/a>. Black women have nearly double the obesity<\/a> rate of white women and are 40 percent more likely to die from breast cancer<\/a>. Black people experience much higher rates of hypertension<\/a>, diabetes<\/a> and stroke. The list goes on and on.<\/p>\n

The usual explanations for these health disparities \u2014 poverty, poor access to medical care and unhealthy lifestyle choices, to name a few \u2014 are certainly valid, but the longer I\u2019ve practiced medicine, the more I\u2019ve come to appreciate a factor that is less obvious: the dearth of black doctors. Only around 5 percent of practicing physicians are black, compared with more than 13 percent of Americans overall.<\/p>\n

As a general rule, black patients are more likely to feel comfortable with black doctors. Studies have shown that they are more likely to seek them out for treatment, and to report higher satisfaction with their care. In addition, more black doctors practice in high-poverty communities of color, where physicians are relatively scarce…<\/p>\n

…Another time, I worked with a young woman who struggled with her biracial identity. Her black father had been abusive to her white mother when she was a child, and she found herself both afraid of and hostile toward black men. Because she physically resembled her father in many ways, she had also turned these negative feelings inward. Not surprisingly, her initial impression of me was unfavorable, but a friend encouraged her to come back to see me…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Case for Black Doctors The New York Times 2015-05-15 Damon Tweedy, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Duke University, Durham, North Carolina DURHAM, N.C. \u2014 IN virtually every field of medicine, black patients as a group fare the worst. This was one of my first and most painful lessons as a medical student […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,125,8,20],"tags":[20093,20092,20094,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-41146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-damon-s-tweedy","tag-damon-scott-tweedy","tag-damon-tweedy","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}