Introduction
Medical anthropology is one of the essential fields of study that primarily focuses on exploring how illness and health are understood, shaped, and experienced in relation to contemporary external factors. More and less narrow concepts and processes, including new pharmaceutical interventions or the impact of environmental disasters, are studied by medical anthropologists, and most healthcare news articles may be analyzed through the lens of this field. For instance, in her writing, Dusenbery (2018) examines the issue of health disparities and discrimination, which is today’s acute social and medical concern. The purpose of this paper is to explore the healthcare news article published by BBC and evaluate how specific anthropological concepts refer to its ideas and content.
News Article Overview: Discrimination in Healthcare
To begin with, before referring the writing’s content to the concepts studied in the medical anthropology class, it is necessary to review and summarize the news article. The main concern expressed in Dusenbery’s (2018) paper is that some people, especially women, low-income individuals, and racial minorities, cannot get access to adequate and high-quality medical services. While this century is marked by increased inclusion, tolerance, and awareness, there are still many gaps in healthcare that do not allow people to be treated and diagnosed equally, regardless of their income, gender, or race. This observation is also supported by other researchers and medical professionals. For instance, according to Anstey, Christian, and Shimbo (2019, para. 8), in 2017, more than 45% of adults in the U.S. were diagnosed with hypertension, but many of them could not receive proper medical support. Such a concern is also expressed by Carratala and Maxwell (2020), who highlight the prevalence of discrimination based on ethnicity, culture, income, and gender. Consequently, these disparities make it challenging for minorities to get diagnosed and treated adequately.
Medical discrimination is expressed not only in poor attitudes of particular healthcare employees. Unfortunately, as noticed by Dusenbery (2018, para. 6, 7), the general opinion among medical providers is that women and persons of color tend to exaggerate their symptoms, lie about the degree of pain they are experiencing, or confuse physical illness with a mental condition like ‘hysteria.’ Statistics show that minorities like people of color, low-income individuals, and women are “more likely than men to see 10 or more months pass between their first visit to a doctor and diagnosis” (Dusenbery 2018, para. 4). What is more, it was established in 2012 “that black patients were 22% less likely than whites to get any pain medication and 29% less likely to be treated with opioids” (Dusenbery 2018, para. 25). Consequently, mortality rates rise due to medical bias and errors. Indeed, this is a severe concern raised by the news article’s author, and this issue can be viewed through the lens of medical anthropology.
First Course Concept: Race
The first concept to be connected with the examined news article is race. As stated in the class presentation, race “is a form of identity used to describe physical and cultural variations within humanity.” While the concept of race is not scientifically supported, it is still medically significant due to various reasons. First, prejudices and biases are extremely common among healthcare workers (Anstey, Christian and Shimbo 2019, para. 8). Thus, it poses a great challenge to eliminate them and make healthcare providers view their patients only as patients, not as representatives of different cultures and ethnicities (Dusenbery 2018, para. 6). Second, medical professionals and researchers believe that persons of various races show different symptoms of the same conditions, and the course of some diseases is much more difficult in representatives of specific ethnic groups.
In the class materials, it is mentioned that there are two primary embodiments of race: direct and indirect. These observations are examined by Gravlee (2009) in their article. The direct embodiment of race may be seen in how discrimination based on skin color increases the risk of the individual’s condition deterioration. In other words, if a person experiences discrimination based on their ethnicity, they are likely to have or develop higher blood pressure, depression, low birth weight, preterm birth, abdominal adiposity, coronary artery calcification, risk of breast cancer, and other complications (Gravlee 2009, p. 48). As for the indirect embodiment of race, it is discussed precisely in Dusenbery’s (2018) news article. This concept refers to healthcare disparities, unequal access to high-quality and adequate medical services, and poor attitudes of professionals towards individuals of different skin color (Gravlee 2009, p. 47). One may agree that no inequality should be present in healthcare. Medical providers should treat their patients properly, regardless of their ethnicity, and cultural characteristics need to be taken into consideration only to improve health outcomes, not otherwise.
It is noticeable that both direct and indirect embodiments of race are covered in the selected news article. Dusenbery (2018, para. 25) talks about racial minorities, especially African Americans, receiving inadequate diagnosis and treatment primarily because of their skin color. The author also notices that women and low-income individuals tend to face similar experiences (Dusenbery 2018, para. 4). As for the direct embodiment, some diseases may be indeed more complex in Asians, African Americans, Mexicans, and people of other races. The question is whether this is due to differences at the genetic level, or it is the long-lasting severe discrimination that has deteriorated the health of ethnic minorities so much that their immunity finds it difficult to cope with many diseases.
Second Course Concept: Pain
The second concept to be explored in relation to the selected news article and medical anthropology course materials is pain. It is noticeable that this concept also refers to the one discussed above. Overall, as stated in the lecture, physicians, clinical social workers, and psychiatrists have always been interested in examining the nature and characteristics of pain, as well as determining whether people of various races could experience pain differently. Furthermore, according to Scheper-Hugh and Lock (1978, p. 10), who managed to investigate the aforementioned concepts, pain “was either physical or mental, biological or psycho-social-never both nor something not-quite-either.” At the same time, researchers tried to understand whether ethnicity could, to any extent, impact the individuals’ experiences of pain, and it is possible to say that many professionals were wrong in their conclusions (Clarke et al. 2022, para. 6). When some medics found out that the representatives of some ethnic groups experienced lower pain levels than other races, this conclusion resulted in numerous biases and medical errors (Hoffman et al. 2016, p. 4296). Therefore, it is essential to dispel this myth, which still affects society and healthcare providers who do not want to treat their diverse patients equally.
This severe concern is also mentioned in the selected article. As stated above, Dusenbery (2018, para. 4, 8, 9, 25) provides statistics that highlight that African Americans and other racial minorities face obstacles when receiving pain management and opioids. Healthcare workers tend to doubt the sincerity of such patients’ complaints of pain, so they do not want to take it seriously to reduce and manage it (Dusenbery 2018, para. 5). In the article by Hoffman et al. (2016, p. 4267), it is explained that there is a common misbelief among healthcare staff that there are “biological differences between blacks and whites,” like black people’s skin being thicker. Precisely this misbelief results in healthcare disparities and the fact that African Americans and other ethnic minority groups are undertreated for pain and underdiagnosed in general. Unfortunately, these people, as well as women who are believed to exaggerate the level of their pain (Dusenbery 2018, para. 5), face numerous severe challenges when merely trying to feel better and feel adequate medical support. These negative experiences and wrongful statements have to be eliminated, and people’s access to high-quality healthcare services free of discrimination should be promoted and increased.
Conclusion
To draw a conclusion, one may say that it is indeed valuable and informative to view some healthcare concepts and articles through the lens of medical anthropology. This scientific field deals with an extended number of valuable and necessary topics and processes that make it possible to better understand healthcare, from the concept of pain to how medicine and diagnoses can travel. The news article selected for this paper, as well as other additional research, demonstrates how a patient’s race can have a significant impact on the attitudes of medical workers and the way they perceive and treat this individual. What is more, precisely race, according to some biased healthcare providers, can influence the degree and nature of the pain experienced by the patient, which further adds to the process of medical disparities.
References
Anstey, D. Edmund, Jessica Christian, and Daichi Shimbo. 2019. “Income Inequality and Hypertension Control.” Journal of the American Heart Association 8 (15).
Carratala, Sofia, and Connor Maxwell. 2020. “Health Disparities by Race and Ethnicity.” American Progress. Web.
Clarke, Gemma, Emma Chapman, Jodie Crooks, Jonathan Koffman, Shenaz Ahmed, and Michael I. Bennett. 2022. “Does Ethnicity Affect Pain Management for People with Advanced Disease? A Mixed Methods Cross-National Systematic Review of ‘Very High’ Human Development Index English-Speaking Countries.” BMC Palliative Care 21 (46).
Dusenbery, Maya. 2018. “’Everybody Was Telling Me There Was Nothing Wrong’.”Web.
Gravlee, Clarence C. 2009. “How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139 (1): 47-57.
Hoffman, Kelly M., Sophie Trawalter, Jordan R. Axt, and M. Norman Oliver. 2016. “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs About Biological Differences Between Blacks and Whites.” Psychological and Cognitive Sciences 113 (16): 4296-4301.
Scheper-Hugh, Nancy, and Margaret M. Lock. 1978. “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 6-41.