Colour of skin influences patient care in US, finds study

Racism a factor in treatment doctors choose for patients.

24 July, 2007:

Race could decide the kind of treatment one gets from a doctor in the United States. A new study by researchers has found evidence of racial bias in medical care. Unintentional racism, which physicians are unaware of, can affect how doctors diagnose and treat patients.

The study, conducted by the Disparities Solutions Center, affiliated with Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the United States, is the first to deal with unconscious racial bias and how it can lead to inferior care for African-American patients.

The study has been published in the online edition of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

The doctors in the study were told that two men, one white and one African-American, were each 50 years old and complained of chest pain. Each showed other symptoms of a heart attack.

The result was shocking: most of the doctors were more likely to prescribe a potentially life-saving, clot-busting treatment for the white patients than for the African-American patient.

Alexander Green, chief researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, said “physicians, like others in the United States, demonstrated unconscious biases based on race.”

According to the study, those biases affected the treatment the doctors would have given the two patients. The patients were not real people, but computer-generated images seen by the doctors only on a monitor. In fact, this is not the first study to find that caucasians get better medical care than then their Afro-American counterparts in the United States.

The latest study differs from previous ones in that it is the first to demonstrate that the reason for the difference is racial bias.

After the doctors in the study evaluated the two simulated patients, they were then given a so-called implicit association test. The test is designed to reveal a person’s unconscious views of African-Americans and whites.

“If you scored high on the bias against Afro-Americans portion of the test,” said Alexander Green, “then you were actually less likely to provide clot-busting treatment for a heart attack for black patients.”

The stronger a doctor’s hidden anti-Afro-American feelings, the less likely he or she would be to give the black patient the clot-busting agent.

The drugs were considered one of the most effective treatments for the symptoms these doctors were presented with. According to Alexander Green, administering the clot-busters can mean the difference between life and death.

The researchers said they hope that the doctors who hear about this report will learn to stop, think and consciously suspend their racial prejudices the next time they have to make a critical decision about a patient.

Interestingly, African-American doctors also showed bias against African-American patients, though less than white doctors.