Hot Topics: Racism in Healthcare

This socially conscious, culturally relevant book explores the little-known history and present climate of Black people in the medical field. It reveals the deficiencies in the American healthcare structure that have contributed to the mismanagement of healthcare in the Black population, and examines cross-currents that intersect with the major events in minority medical history.

Why do African Americans have exceptionally high rates of hypertension, diabetes, and obesity? Is it their genes? Their disease-prone culture? Their poor diets? Such racist explanations for racial inequalities in metabolic health have circulated in medical journals for decades. Blood Sugar analyzes and challenges the ways in which "metabolic syndrome" has become a major biomedical category that medical researchers have created to better understand the risks high blood pressure, blood sugar, body fat, and cholesterol pose to people. An estimated sixty million Americans are well on the way to being diagnosed with it, many of them belonging to people of color.

In this book, Dr. Richard Allen Williams has assembled the very best scholars on healthcare disparities to raise the public consciousness of this issue. Arranged into discrete categories, this volume contains comprehensive coverage, both historical and current, of the healthcare disparity crisis currently plaguing our country in hopes of leading us all to a brighter future.

More than 84,000 black and brown lives are needlessly lost each year due to health disparities, the unfair differences between the quality and quantity of health care provided to Americans who are members of racial and ethnic minorities and care provided to whites. Here, Dayna Bowen Matthew finds that they principally arise from unconscious racial and ethnic biases held by physicians, institutional providers and their patients. She argues that we need strong, evidence-based legal remedies.

Geddess interviews Indigenous elders across Canada who were willing to share their experiences of segregated health care, including their treatment in the "Indian hospitals" that existed from coast to coast for over half a century. The memories recounted by these survivors—from gratuitous drug and surgical experiments to electroshock treatments intended to destroy the memory of sexual abuse—are truly harrowing, and will surely shatter any lingering illusions about the virtues or good intentions of our colonial past. Yet, this is more than just the painful history of a once-so-called vanishing people (a people who have resisted vanishing despite the best efforts of those in charge); it is a testament to survival, perseverance, and the power of memory to keep history alive and promote the idea of a more open and just future.

Racial and ethnic minority youth have less access to health care and experience health disparities that are linked to social determinants that impact their health and well-being. This book is a practical reference for clinicians caring for racially and ethnically diverse adolescents seeking to effectively identify and address the social structures and factors that influence their health and well-being to promote health equity. It provides an overview of key health equity, population health and cultural competency principles and highlights clinical, teaching, and research skills critical to promoting health equity. Clinically oriented chapters provide guidance on strength-based approaches and strategies that clinicians can integrate in their encounters with diverse youth and feature clinical vignettes, clinical pearls and reflection questions to promote the application of concepts to practice.

Based on a survey of more than 500 Ontario Nursing Association members, this study demonstrates how racism impacts working relations in the nursing profession. Gender and class concepts are explored as well as how fear, lack of support, management collaboration, and ineffective institutional responses make it difficult for victims to fight back. Dealing with the concept of racism within the frameworks of human rights legislation and the political economy of health care, this reference illustrates its causes in detail, providing a foundation from which nurses and other workers can combat racial harassment.