These Five Numbers Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Racial Disparities In Health Care
Despite all the progress we have achieved in medicine and all the knowledge accumulated, a single virus has upended our world. COVID-19 has humbled so many in biomedicine, and I must count myself among them. And yet I remain confident that this pandemic will pass to history. Although it is far from over, this is a story with an ending. As I write, researchers around the world are investigating more than 120 vaccine candidates. Long-standing business competitors have pledged to share resources and clinical trial data to accelerate new therapies. And cross-sector partnerships are flourishing. Together, these efforts will defeat the virus; human ingenuity will win out.
I am less assured, however, about how a different public health crisis ends. It is a crisis that has persisted for generations at a tragic cost. To understand this challenge, you only need five numbers: a zip code. Far more than our family histories or genetic code, our zip code—the place we call home—remains the single greatest predictor of long-term health and life expectancy.
Consider Washington, D.C. The difference in life expectancy between our national capital’s longest-lived zip code, 20088, and its shortest, 20020, is a staggering 32.9 years. Yet the physical distance from tony Friendship Heights to hard-pressed Barry Farm is less than 10 miles. This disparity shows how health is profoundly shaped by our environment: the air we breathe, the food we eat, the services we have access to, the opportunities afforded to us.
We refer to these factors as the social determinants of health. But beneath the surface of this term lies an ugly truth. It is not a coincidence that Friendship Heights is a majority-White neighborhood, while Barry Farm is predominantly Black. Nor is it a fluke that similar racial disparities show up in neighborhoods across Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities. Up close, when we study social determinants of health, what we are really studying are the enduring health consequences of racist policies and prejudice encoded in our society.
This is an excerpt from an article that was published on July 8 in Fortune. To read the full article, visit Fortune.
AIB Bank Stanford University Scholar Writer
4 年Lloyd, we have found the same evidence in our Stanford Business Rebuild work. Intersectionality presents double, treble and quadruple "whammys" for the Black Neurodiverse communities: e.g. someone who has Autism, who is from a poor / disadvantaged community, from a Black community: the inequity and discrimination is almost overwhelming. In our Report next week we seek to point out these Intersectionality and many other issues. None of us can be bystanders in this: I owe it to my ancestors, my family, my community, Stanford and Everyone in society Not to Be a Bystander. This is for the public record. Ronan
Global Health Expert
4 年Dear Dean Minor, The "racial" disparities in the health care system were already apparent and well known when I was an intern at GW in the seventies. The questions are: (1) Why has so little been achieved in closing the gap in so many years? and (2) What needs to be done to reach equity in the short and medium term and how? Peeling off the onion leads to a main founding block of this nation i.e. racism as the root cause. No more beating around the bush, denying, minimizing, obfuscating, blaming or playing the victim, invoking real or faked ignorance, lying, dividing to conquer, making unkept promises, inventing false narratives, spinning, intimidating, using force, etc. etc. I suggest that the most efficient approach to deal with racism is from a communicable disease angle. Please see below the link to my article published in August 2019: https://jneurosciences.com/index.php/CNCNR/article/view/23/14 Also, please see the call to the scientific community I posted on LinkedIn 2 weeks ago: CHANGE STARTS WITH ME AND YOU: A CALL TO ACTION. Please do not hesitate to contact me for further discussion, particularly on international medicine.