Thinking about this further I have a question for the author - could it be argued that the white doctors have more babies with extremely low birth weight because of…. racism? (That is, specific neglectful medical practices that fail to avoid the low birth weight?). In other words, what really drives the extreme low birth weight, what is it attributed to? I assume it has to do with the health of the mother. But I guess that to nail this down it is necessary to explain the true causal factors for this.
Interesting question! To paraphrase: when black women receive OB/GYN care from a white doctor, perhaps it is statistically likely to be inferior to the care she would receive from a black doctor, resulting in a low birth weight baby. This inferior care could be attributed to racism. I don't have access to enough information to say anything but generalizations. Assuming a pregnant woman is getting medical attention at all (and in America, she might not be), it would be hard to put the ill health of the mother, which translates to low birth weight for the baby, down to a single doctor. There are usually a variety of medical personnel that a pregnant woman would see and interact with, a number of "check points" where her health problems could be caught. Her health (and that of her fetus) would not be likely to be in the hands of a single racist physician. Of course, one could argue that the healthcare system is "structurally racist," and all the personnel and checkpoints are poisoned by it, and this results in bad health for black women and their babies. But what's the solution to "structural racism"? Is it any different than merely trying to ensure that all pregnant black women (or better yet, all pregnant women, period) get good healthcare? If so, how? It's hard, in other words, to know how to fix "structural racism," but extending healthcare to all is surely manageable. Other countries have done it better than we have and we could learn from them. But at this point, we're dealing with a political not a medical question.
This is an excellent article. It is really chilling to think about the insistence on racial concordance in medicine instead of finding and addressing the root causes of differential health outcomes. When I read the studies documenting the deferential outcomes, it disturbs me that there is seemingly never any effort to explore the true root causes. Articles cite ‘racism’, which is unfalsifiable.
Sadly, science is increasingly corrupted by activists in this way. Ironically, there is an anti-black disproportionate impact on black babies coming out of the American medical establishment that clearly has its historic basis in systemic racism. Planned Parenthood, founded by the anti-black eugenicist Margaret Sanger leads in the disproportionate abortion of unborn black children. Unfortunately for these children, the woke are far more concerned with defending abortion than in the racial biased outcome of which babies get aborted.
This is such an important article. I sincerely hope that the 2024 PNAS article that corrects the 2020 article gets as wide a dissemination as the earlier one, but I am skeptical.
I agree with you. ‘Structural racism’ cannot be the root cause of any medical outcome because it is so unspecific.
Thinking about this further I have a question for the author - could it be argued that the white doctors have more babies with extremely low birth weight because of…. racism? (That is, specific neglectful medical practices that fail to avoid the low birth weight?). In other words, what really drives the extreme low birth weight, what is it attributed to? I assume it has to do with the health of the mother. But I guess that to nail this down it is necessary to explain the true causal factors for this.
Interesting question! To paraphrase: when black women receive OB/GYN care from a white doctor, perhaps it is statistically likely to be inferior to the care she would receive from a black doctor, resulting in a low birth weight baby. This inferior care could be attributed to racism. I don't have access to enough information to say anything but generalizations. Assuming a pregnant woman is getting medical attention at all (and in America, she might not be), it would be hard to put the ill health of the mother, which translates to low birth weight for the baby, down to a single doctor. There are usually a variety of medical personnel that a pregnant woman would see and interact with, a number of "check points" where her health problems could be caught. Her health (and that of her fetus) would not be likely to be in the hands of a single racist physician. Of course, one could argue that the healthcare system is "structurally racist," and all the personnel and checkpoints are poisoned by it, and this results in bad health for black women and their babies. But what's the solution to "structural racism"? Is it any different than merely trying to ensure that all pregnant black women (or better yet, all pregnant women, period) get good healthcare? If so, how? It's hard, in other words, to know how to fix "structural racism," but extending healthcare to all is surely manageable. Other countries have done it better than we have and we could learn from them. But at this point, we're dealing with a political not a medical question.
This is an excellent article. It is really chilling to think about the insistence on racial concordance in medicine instead of finding and addressing the root causes of differential health outcomes. When I read the studies documenting the deferential outcomes, it disturbs me that there is seemingly never any effort to explore the true root causes. Articles cite ‘racism’, which is unfalsifiable.
Sadly, science is increasingly corrupted by activists in this way. Ironically, there is an anti-black disproportionate impact on black babies coming out of the American medical establishment that clearly has its historic basis in systemic racism. Planned Parenthood, founded by the anti-black eugenicist Margaret Sanger leads in the disproportionate abortion of unborn black children. Unfortunately for these children, the woke are far more concerned with defending abortion than in the racial biased outcome of which babies get aborted.
This is such an important article. I sincerely hope that the 2024 PNAS article that corrects the 2020 article gets as wide a dissemination as the earlier one, but I am skeptical.