Thank you for shedding light on this. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. Many of the ”evidence” out there supporting a racist etiology for discrepancies in health outcomes are single studies with poor methodology, not yet or unreplicated elsewhere. If physicians and scientists actually stick to their goal of the scientific method, they would not make any assertion based on a single study, let alone one with poor or improper methods.
I recall a time when the scientific community does not agree to at something is “likely true” until dozens or hundreds of studies, done at different settings and institutions all point to the same conclusion. And even then, it is still not held as complete truth.
Now, studies that shouldn’t even pass editorial reviews nor accepted to be printed (because they were so poorly designed), are being passed across the land in a matter of days, as though they are the spoken word of God. What a shame!
Regarding the problem with low birth weights infants, a study from Colorado, published around 1980, described a prospective series of 100 such infants. To determine the incidence of germinal matrix hemorrhage (GMH), all 100 got CT scans within a few days of birth. Forty-four (44!)% had GMH. Almost half. This is hemorrhage into the brain, and it never does the patient a favor. It is not clear what the long-term effects of low-grade bleeds are, but I can comfortably say that it never improves neurological development. These babies spend long times in neonatal ICUs.
I recall reviewing infant mortality rates several years ago and among White, Black, and Hispanic women, Hispanic women had the lowest infant mortality rate. Whites were in the middle. At that point, I realized there must be so many factors that are not being taken into account that to race grift was probably not the right approach.
Well yeah, by now everyone knows that White doctors are having a gay ol' time carving 'em up. And eating them, too! What do you expect? They're all Republican.
A very good read. High compliments on the review and analysis.
The political and social divide in the US exemplifies concordant beliefs — individuals cluster into groups that share similar ideologies, creating echo chambers.
In this sense, the impact of concordant beliefs in both political and professional spheres, like healthcare, highlights a broader societal issue where identity and belief alignment, rather than objective evidence, influence decisions and policy.
Great! Now let’s talk about the strange and ironic relationship between this and white doctors being asked by pregnant black women to end their pregnancies. It’s quite a staggering statistic, and dwarfs by almost a comical amount the numbers in the 2020 study this article refers to. Look it up. One could logically assume that behind the racial disparity in negative outcomes, is a deeper, visceral reaction because after all, we are talking about the deeply sorrowful loss of a new life that a mother wanted. That racism could and would be expressed in this way is repugnant and wallows in the depths of human depravity.
It’s been a few years since I read the “report” but I can’t recall any instances of any overt racism accusations of any of the patients regarding the doctors. Like so many of these incidents, the disparity itself, devoid of any nuanced or detailed or contextual analysis, is the proof of the deed. So there’s that, but I digress.
The original point was the visceral response and why. So we all get that. Evil white doctors killing black babies. Horrific and repulsive to the core.
Except when the mother WANTS that. Then we put in a fucking express lane, call it “reproductive rights”, and these same activists that are so up in arms don’t have a single issue with that.
This reminds me of a dissertation presented by a former student of mine. She was looking for those disparities of standardized language tests among black and white children. Instead, in a retrospective analysis of 100s tested at one hospital, the key analytic for disparity was education level of the mother.
But she and her committee twisted and ran and reran the data til they could find some reason that everyone was under identifying black babies.
Ten years ago we were over identifying…
In ten more years it will be back to that.
And I had to leave before floor was opened for questions from the audience but no one on that committee challenged this or asked a relevant question.
I recall they originally built Martin Luther King Hospital in South Central Los Angeles after the 1965 Watts riots, where it was needed only for Blacks but for anyone who had a traffic accident in that part of town. Then, they decided that it should run and staffed according to Affirmative Action protocols. Soon, the reputation for maiming and killing patients became well know, but the far left political hacks (whom we would call wokers today) scream racism whenever anyone mentioned the disaster. Even after it become known as Killer King, there could not be anything wrong in staffing a hospital with affirmative action devotees. Finally it was closed by the Feds in about 2007. The reopened it in 2015, but I've not kept track of its quality. Who died as a result of the "wokeism"? Not the politicos behind the Woke policies.
It's honestly horrifying how ideology has seeped into science and morphed it into a tool to control others. Trust the science? How? This will only destroy society because if we can't trust any "trustworthy" institution, then who do we trust?
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.
Thank you for shedding light on this. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. Many of the ”evidence” out there supporting a racist etiology for discrepancies in health outcomes are single studies with poor methodology, not yet or unreplicated elsewhere. If physicians and scientists actually stick to their goal of the scientific method, they would not make any assertion based on a single study, let alone one with poor or improper methods.
I recall a time when the scientific community does not agree to at something is “likely true” until dozens or hundreds of studies, done at different settings and institutions all point to the same conclusion. And even then, it is still not held as complete truth.
Now, studies that shouldn’t even pass editorial reviews nor accepted to be printed (because they were so poorly designed), are being passed across the land in a matter of days, as though they are the spoken word of God. What a shame!
This reminds me of the misuse and manipulation of data regarding black maternal death rates.
Regarding the problem with low birth weights infants, a study from Colorado, published around 1980, described a prospective series of 100 such infants. To determine the incidence of germinal matrix hemorrhage (GMH), all 100 got CT scans within a few days of birth. Forty-four (44!)% had GMH. Almost half. This is hemorrhage into the brain, and it never does the patient a favor. It is not clear what the long-term effects of low-grade bleeds are, but I can comfortably say that it never improves neurological development. These babies spend long times in neonatal ICUs.
I recall reviewing infant mortality rates several years ago and among White, Black, and Hispanic women, Hispanic women had the lowest infant mortality rate. Whites were in the middle. At that point, I realized there must be so many factors that are not being taken into account that to race grift was probably not the right approach.
Well yeah, by now everyone knows that White doctors are having a gay ol' time carving 'em up. And eating them, too! What do you expect? They're all Republican.
A very good read. High compliments on the review and analysis.
The political and social divide in the US exemplifies concordant beliefs — individuals cluster into groups that share similar ideologies, creating echo chambers.
In this sense, the impact of concordant beliefs in both political and professional spheres, like healthcare, highlights a broader societal issue where identity and belief alignment, rather than objective evidence, influence decisions and policy.
That is not a survivable outcome.
Great! Now let’s talk about the strange and ironic relationship between this and white doctors being asked by pregnant black women to end their pregnancies. It’s quite a staggering statistic, and dwarfs by almost a comical amount the numbers in the 2020 study this article refers to. Look it up. One could logically assume that behind the racial disparity in negative outcomes, is a deeper, visceral reaction because after all, we are talking about the deeply sorrowful loss of a new life that a mother wanted. That racism could and would be expressed in this way is repugnant and wallows in the depths of human depravity.
It’s been a few years since I read the “report” but I can’t recall any instances of any overt racism accusations of any of the patients regarding the doctors. Like so many of these incidents, the disparity itself, devoid of any nuanced or detailed or contextual analysis, is the proof of the deed. So there’s that, but I digress.
The original point was the visceral response and why. So we all get that. Evil white doctors killing black babies. Horrific and repulsive to the core.
Except when the mother WANTS that. Then we put in a fucking express lane, call it “reproductive rights”, and these same activists that are so up in arms don’t have a single issue with that.
Makes perfect sense.
This reminds me of a dissertation presented by a former student of mine. She was looking for those disparities of standardized language tests among black and white children. Instead, in a retrospective analysis of 100s tested at one hospital, the key analytic for disparity was education level of the mother.
But she and her committee twisted and ran and reran the data til they could find some reason that everyone was under identifying black babies.
Ten years ago we were over identifying…
In ten more years it will be back to that.
And I had to leave before floor was opened for questions from the audience but no one on that committee challenged this or asked a relevant question.
Thank you for this detailed report!
Saving for later.
I recall they originally built Martin Luther King Hospital in South Central Los Angeles after the 1965 Watts riots, where it was needed only for Blacks but for anyone who had a traffic accident in that part of town. Then, they decided that it should run and staffed according to Affirmative Action protocols. Soon, the reputation for maiming and killing patients became well know, but the far left political hacks (whom we would call wokers today) scream racism whenever anyone mentioned the disaster. Even after it become known as Killer King, there could not be anything wrong in staffing a hospital with affirmative action devotees. Finally it was closed by the Feds in about 2007. The reopened it in 2015, but I've not kept track of its quality. Who died as a result of the "wokeism"? Not the politicos behind the Woke policies.
It's honestly horrifying how ideology has seeped into science and morphed it into a tool to control others. Trust the science? How? This will only destroy society because if we can't trust any "trustworthy" institution, then who do we trust?
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.
If you want to see racism, I’m sure there’s a way to explain it as racism.
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.
Anyone know why isn't it retracted. Isn't that like a fatal flaw...(?)
I haven’t read or heard either way. But it definitely SHOULD be retracted.
Sadly I think that’s a bell that can’t be unrung, like the later-debunked study linking vaccines to autism. People still believe that to this day.
You make a good point.