All my life, I’ve believed that death and sickness do not discriminate.
The logistics of these abstract entities coming forth as practitioners of discrimination have never seemed feasible to me. How can the stages of an individual’s life that are supposed to signal the end engage in acts of discrimination, I found myself wondering. In my eyes, death and sickness were like the weighing scales wielded by the Lady of Justice. Irrespective of the social divides that might’ve overwhelmed an individual’s life when they were alive, death and sickness come together to even everything out. I’ve often gone so far as to imagine the insides of a surgery room, where a team of medical professionals are operating on a terminally sick individual.
As they work through the intricacies of human anatomy guided by the flickering radiance of the light in the operation theatre, I wonder if the dollops of blood and fragments of skin on their wads of cotton describe their identity and speak of their origin. If they did, I contemplate whether this would influence the effectiveness of the doctors or make their hands pause at any stage of the process. The world would be an interesting place, I conclude, if human blood and skin develop a voice of their own.
Even though this relatively fantastical assumption isn’t true, I think the symbolic interpretation of blood and skin speaking has significant relevance in our present day medical scenario. It impacts the decisions that are made and subsequently tampers with the veins of justice that are essential to the anatomy of our everyday lives. As per a report document by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) quoted in an article entitled Implicit Bias and Racial Disparities in Health Care published by the American Bar Association, “racial and ethnic minorities receive lower-quality health care than white people— even when insurance, status, income, age and the severity of conditions are comparable.”
The report goes on to describe how race and ethnicity, attributes that are a source of pride, turn out to be the sole cause of death for most. Exemplifying this, the National Academy of Medicine report states that “one study of 400 hospitals in the United States showed that black patients with heart disease received older, cheaper, and more conservative treatments than their white counterparts. Black patients were less likely to receive coronary bypass operations and angiography.” The extent of this discrimination bleeds into post-treatment scenarios as well, and the NAM report affirms this by describing how “Black patients were less likely to receive coronary bypass operations and angiography.” After their surgery, the report says that “Black patients are discharged earlier from the hospital than white patients—at a stage where discharge is not appropriate,”
However, it doesn’t end here.
The American Bar Association Article goes on to indicate how “Black patients are more likely to receive less desirable treatments, and the rates at which black patients have their limbs amputated is higher than those for white patients.” The discrimination isn’t just limited to physical ailments, and is prominently observed in the comparatively abstract area of mental health concerns as well. Attesting to this, the article describes how “black patients suffering from bipolar disorder are more likely to be treated with antipsychotics despite evidence that these medications have long-term negative effects and are not effective.”
Is there an explanation for these acts of discrimination? The article says that there is. According to scholars, if people of color are sicker and dying at younger ages than white people, this may be because physicians have racial biases that make them provide inferior health care to people of color. The article alludes to Dayna Bowen Matthew’s book, Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Healthcare (2015) that emphasizes the difference between consciously and unconsciously held biases. In her book, Matthew says that if a decision made by a physician about which treatment to prescribe their patient is harming, and not helping their patient, it’s unlikely that this choice is being made intentionally. This is why, Matthew says, that such biases are often assumed to occur in a state of unawareness and in most scenarios, a physician is possibly oblivious to the discriminatory beliefs that they hold.
Setting obliviousness aside, it’s important for us to view such reports, along with the jolting statistics that they offer, as a societal call for us to stop and think. This is why it’s so important for institutions to practice mindfulness and reflection, ensuring that their employees are self-aware and deeply conscious of themselves as they go about their work commitments. Thus, if the human blood and skin on our bodies could talk to each other, I don’t think they would speak about their origin and identity. This would possibly be the least of their concerns. I think they’d turn to each other with sparkling eyes, and instead talk about their similarities.
