The data justifying “racial concordance,” the idea that patients will receive better care from doctors of their own race, have been “cherry-picked” to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in medicine, according to a new study.
The theory of “racial concordance” has become prominent among America’s leading medical schools and organizations, as well as within left-wing political leadership. The theory holds that doctors of certain races are “inherently biased toward members of other races,” the study stated.
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Organizations like the American Medical Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, which represents all accredited U.S. medical schools, and “Top Doctor” search engine Castle Connolly have all heavily pushed the ideology.
However, the supporting data for this idea exist in a relatively small number of studies, with “generally cherry-picked” evidence that is “decisively outweighed by the full body of scientific research,” causing the study’s authors to conclude that “medical research does not support racial concordance.”
“A narrative has arisen that blames healthcare disparities on physician bias,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the medical advocacy group Do No Harm, said on a press call Monday. “This has been presented as a fact by a number of commentators pushing for the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda in healthcare and medical education.”
Claiming the ideology “promotes racialization of yet another aspect of American life,” Goldfarb went on to say that most doctors “want to see elimination of healthcare disparities. We believe the way to accomplish this is to improve access to healthcare by minority communities and better outreach by healthcare systems to those communities.”
The new study does not claim that racial disparities in healthcare are nonexistent, instead calling them “a persistent and tragic phenomenon.” However, it does maintain that racializing healthcare is neither beneficial nor supported by the academic papers often cited in favor of it.
In the most recent review of the literature on racial concordance, 12 analyses showed beneficial outcomes, eight showed harm, and 86 found no difference. Researchers in that review concluded that “results reveal little evidence to suggest that patients of color who share racial or ethnic identity with their physicians experience a different quality of physician communication.”
The Do No Harm study, called “Racial Concordance in Medicine: The Return of Segregation,” notes that in the few instances where racial concordance was deemed beneficial, they were the “exception rather than the norm” and should be “contextualized against the backdrop of a much larger body of evidence.”
“It is irresponsible for medical organizations and political actors to push, in practice or policy, for racial concordance in medicine, with the attendant radical restructuring of healthcare along racial lines,” the study continued.
The American medical establishment, however, has continued pushing the racial concordance idea, going so far as to claim that a black baby is twice as likely to survive with a black doctor than a doctor of a different race and that black doctors are more equipped to treat pain in black patients, ideas espoused by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and ideas pushed by the AAMC in its amicus brief in support of racialized college admissions for that case.
The study used by the AAMC, which was cited as the basis for Jackson’s claim in the dissent, actually found that the survival rate of black newborns with black attending physicians is about 99.7%, while the survival rate of black newborns with white attending physicians is about 99.6%, according to study author Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Similarly, the allegation about pain assessment is not supported by the studies the AAMC cited, Greene said, which did not look at pain in black patients in reference to doctors of different races.
Despite that, the brief was signed by 14 organizations involved with training healthcare professionals, such as the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, and 26 organizations that represent healthcare professionals like the AMA.
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The authors of the Do No Harm study likened these organizations to the doctors who took part in the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which medical professionals infamously lied to black patients about their illnesses and kept them sick without available treatment.
“One of the lessons of the Tuskegee Experiment is that medical professionals are morally and professionally obligated to tell the truth,” the study stated. “When it comes to the state of evidence on racial concordance in medicine, it’s clear that many influential individuals and organizations are derelict in that responsibility.”
