Doctors fighting racial health disparities face threats, harassment

The demonstrators held a sign claiming the hospital “kills whites,” and passed out flyers with the names and faces of two doctors who designed a pilot program aimed at improving cardiology outcomes for Black and Latino patients.After WGBH reported that the protesters were linked to a neo-Nazi group, nearly 150 people participated in an emotional discussion held on Twitter’s Spaces platform, which was moderated by Dr. Brittani James, a primary care physician and anti-racism activist in Chicago. “Racism denial is like a black hole in our national landscape: It’s massive, powerful, you can’t see it, but it’s one of the huge barriers,” said Dr. Camara Jones, a physician and epidemiologist who has long called on public health scientists to confront racism in their work.Some doctors acknowledge racial health disparities but attribute them to larger societal forces, such as housing issues or employment conditions, saying it’s not up to medical professionals to tackle areas in which they lack expertise. More than 200 city and state governments and health agencies across the country followed the AMA’s lead with similar declarations against racism in medicine.“Not only were we talking about inequities, we were talking explicitly about racism and structural racism and its impact — words that had been so difficult for many Americans to even say,” Maybank said.The Association of American Medical Colleges urged its members to deploy training to dispel unconscious bias, and to partner with local governments and community groups to “dismantle structural racism and end police brutality.” The American Public Health Association hosted 61 racial equity sessions at its annual conference. Unlike K-12 school administrators, who have largely fought back against claims that they’re teaching critical race theory, a number of doctors and researchers are explicitly drawing on the concept to design new race-conscious policies they believe can rectify long-standing racial disparities in health outcomes.In 2019, Drs. Bram Wispelwey and Michelle Morse, physicians who teach at Harvard Medical School, found in a study with other colleagues that white patients with heart failure were more likely to be referred to cardiology specialists than Black patients. Wispelwey said they received hate mail and death threats, culminating in the neo-Nazi demonstration in January outside the hospital, where protesters called the doctors “anti-white.” Efforts to improve health equity have also faced lawsuits.