Experiences affect African-Americans' choice of doctor
One in five black patients prefers to see a black physician, a new study said.
By Damon Adams, amednews staff. Sept. 8, 2003.
Black patients who have experienced unfair treatment from a physician or nurse, or whose family has, are more likely to prefer black health care professionals, according to a new study.
A University of Cincinnati researcher found that race preference for a doctor or nurse was not related to patients' knowledge of current racial disparities in care or historical mistreatments such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, in which researchers withheld treatment from about 400 black men to study how the disease progressed.
Instead, personal experiences of discrimination in health care were associated with a preference for a same-race doctor or nurse.
"The research shows that unfair treatment of African-Americans isn't just in the past. It happens to people today and it affects how African-Americans think about health care," said Jennifer Malat, PhD, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Cincinnati who presented her research in August to the American Sociological Assn. "A study like this one reminds people that African-Americans still feel that they're being treated unfairly."
Minority health care has come under closer scrutiny since a March 2002 Institute of Medicine report found that racial and ethnic minorities received lower quality health care than whites. For example, minorities were less likely to undergo bypass surgery and to receive kidney dialysis than were whites.
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