Medical Biases that Sabotage the Health of Blacks & Latinos
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My mother died of
complications from breast cancer at the age of fifty-one. The doctors did
all that they could for her. Well actually, they did all they could had
she been of Northern European ancestry. Medical researchers are only now realizing that black women are
less likely to get cancer than white women. However, when they do,
that group is three times more likely to develop the aggressive, triple-negative
form of breast cancer, which affects less than fifteen percent of white women.
Given the type of cancer, which may be exacerbated by traditional
treatment protocols, and many black women’s lack of access to adequate medical
care, it is no wonder that African-American women suffer a breast cancer
death rate (according to the Center for Disease Control), that is sixty percent
higher than that of white women. It may have been too late for Mama, but
present-day cancer specialists are finally beginning to recognize ethnic
differences in breast cancers and adapt treatment protocols accordingly.
If only ancestral factors were researched in other arenas of medicine and
public health as well.
Whatever treatments
and nutritional standards have been shown to work for people of Northern
European origin are imposed on all other segments of America’s multi-ethnic
population, no matter what the consequences. For instance,
well-intentioned doctors encourage their black patients to consume more dairy
products. However, elderly blacks seldom suffer from osteoporosis or low
bone density, even though they have never drunk milk on account of
lactose-intolerance (apart from in early childhood). It would make far
more sense for the medical community to study young, healthy blacks (80%
lactose-intolerant), Native Americans and Asians (99% lactose intolerant),
Latinos (65% lactose-intolerant) and other non-dairy-consuming populations in
order to learn how alternate physiological processes build strong bones.
Instead, medical practitioners, backed by United States Department of
Agriculture nutritional guidelines, scare conscientious parents into plying
lactose-intolerant children, with high-fat, high-cholesterol dairy products to
avoid calcium deficiency. It’s no wonder that obesity rates among
African-American, Latino and Asian adoptee children have skyrocketed.
Most premature
deaths among blacks, Latinos and Native Americans are caused by complications
from such lifestyle diseases as obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure.
But the medical community operates under the dictates of an unexamined
paradigm, which I have come to call “Nordic universality.”
The role played by race
in American society has diminished in recent years to the point where a black
man now sits in the White House. Given that history, it seems almost
un-American, some might argue, to begin pigeon-holing people on the basis of
physiological or nutritional differences. This is especially so, given
the uproar created by publication of the 1994 bestseller, The Bell Curve.
Its authors, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, purported to show
that racial differences exist in brain functioning, making whites cognitively
superior to blacks.
However, the Human Genome Project has given biogeneticists
irrefutable evidence that the concept of the three races (blacks, whites and
Asians) is a fiction. What the genetic data does show is that the world
is inhabited by fluid, overlapping, population groups, which number in the
thousands. This is because our human biology adapts over time both to
environmental conditions and the available nourishment. For people with
darker skin in tropical climes, melanin acts as a protective biological shield
against ultraviolet radiation. The Inuit of Northern Canada and Alaska
have subsisted for thousands of years on a diet of whale blubber and seals,
which is devoid of vegetables and grains. And yet they rarely suffer from
the cardiovascular diseases associated with high-fat diets, which are endemic
to western societies. People of Northern European ancestry, East
Africans, and other dairy-consuming societies have evolved the genetic ability
to produce lactase as adults, the enzyme needed to break down the lactose in
dairy products. These traits are unknown in many areas of the world,
including West Africa, where tsetse fly infestations made it all but impossible
for the ancestors of African-Americans to breed dairy-producing beasts of
burden.
The health care
community needs to shake off the shadow of The Bell Curve and
the racial exclusivity it has fostered. In doing so, it may finally begin
grappling with the bio-diverse richness of American society. And even more
important, it might stop writing prescriptions for minorities from other
peoples’ medical files.
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