Posted on 06/02/2021 8:08:39 AM PDT by Enlightened1
Harvard Medical School instructors Bram Wispelwey and Michelle Morse argue in a Boston Review article that race should be used as a determining factor in how heart failure patients are treated.
They write that the necessary "proactively antiracist agenda for medicine" should be direct, and the solution they propose could reach patients exactly at the point of care: "a preferential admission option for Black and Latinx heart failure patients to our specialty cardiology service."
The physicians say that “medical restitution” should be part of an overall push to make society more equitable. “Anti Racist [sic] institutional change is essential to supplement federal reparations," they write.
Both Wispelwey and and Morse work with Brigham and Women's Hospital, a Harvard-affiliated teaching hospital.
Noting that a disproportionate number of COVID-19 patients admitted to the hospital were people of color, the physicians wrote that “our effort to understand and correct this disparity has led us to rethink the nature of the fight for racial justice in medicine.”
The pair then analyzed ten years’ worth of hospital data, which revealed that white patients were indeed “more likely to be admitted to the cardiology service” at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and that Black and Latino patients with the same cardiac issues were disproportionately likely to end up in the general medicine department rather than the cardiology one.
The professors' plan seeks to influence healthcare professionals' decision-making. Their system, they write, "will include a flag in our electronic medical record and admissions system suggesting that providers admit Black and Latinx heart failure patients to cardiology, rather than rely on provider discretion or patient self-advocacy to determine whether they should go to cardiology or general medicine."
The professors pass over more common elements of anti-racist efforts, including "implicit bias training, diversity and inclusion efforts, and the adoption of supposedly objective checklist-style clinical criteria for decision making," claiming those tools do not go far enough to fix the problem.
“Our path to this realization, as with nearly all advancements in social medicine, took us outside our discipline — through the field of critical race theory (CRT), in particular,” they continued, arguing that “colorblind law” effectively “reduces the effectiveness of traditional civil rights laws, while rendering discriminatory actions more oppressive than ever.”
The hospital's media relations manager Mark Murphy referred Campus Reform to a statement clarifying that the professors’ position does not represent the hospital’s official policies. The statement denies that the hospital will offer race-based preferential treatment.
Though the statement acknowledged that “health inequity today continues to be a patient safety and public health issue,” it clarified that Brigham and Women’s Hospital will not offer preferential care based on race.
Campus Reform reached out to Wispelwey and Morse for comment; this article will be updated accordingly.
Follow this author on Twitter: @BenZeisloft
This won’t change the health outcome of blacks and hispanics because they have a 50% obesity rate.
Racism by any other name is still racism. ‘Critical race theory is. Nothing but a euphemism for racism and a license to be racist.
It’s a new “Tuskegee Experiment”.
Those Rascally Racist Democrats don’t never change.
in my best vernacular . . .
How did whites manage to get to such a pathetic third class status when we used to rule the world? Why did we surrender that power so easily?
We will soon be like the south African whites.
My extended family in my generation is about half medical professionals, from RN to med tech. Most have talked about just walking down the hall to a friendly doctors office when they need something.
That also can cause future problems. Ailments and treatments may not appear on medical records. When my brother retired and went to the VA hospital, he had the problem that there was no record of his back injury or diabetes. He had had everything treated by friends in the hospital for decades.
This is WRONG!!!! And these MD’s need to be sued for big bucks!!!!
By the way a few years ago, after a whole battery of tests, my very nice cardiologist told me—for good medical reasons— that I did not need a cardiologist!! But that does not happen to everyone.
Patients who need a cardiologist’s care should get it—regardless of their race!!!!
Payback
Remember Big Mike had a job in Chicago to send low income patients out the door at 300,000 a year.
So why are these doctors trying to interject health equality into the culture based on race and not recognize the cognitive dissonance in their behavior by being racist in their application of healthcare?
A person is either a racist or they are not. An action is racist or it is not. A thought is either racist or it is not. You can't have to both ways while at the same time claim you are no being racist.
"These people of color are not receiving equal medical care because of their race, so we're going to dispense own medical care based on race."
It is not racist because we're the ones being racist, not those "other" people.
These people are too clever by half. What a crock of crap.
Ping!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.