Chapters 6-10 Perception of Black Patients

This section of “Black Man in a White Coat” shows Tweedy’s opening to the racial biases all around him. The actions of fellow doctors, nurses, and superiors begin to irritate him as he realizes their racist comments, presumptions, and treatments that begin to greatly affect the black patients. One quote I have noted during my reading was following the psychiatric diagnosis and call for Gary. Tweedy writes “My suspicion that, if confronted, these doctors would have vociferously denied that Gary’s race influenced their psychiatric diagnosis is supported by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s 2002 national survey of physicians, published not long before our encounter with Gary. It found that an overwhelming 75 percent of white physicians said race and ethnicity do not affect the treatment of patients, while 77 percent of black doctors said that race and ethnicity do impact how patients are treated. Smart people from two groups were seeing entirely different realities.”1 
The numbers are astonishing in the high percentage denying on the white doctors end as well as the even higher number admitting that the presence of race in medicine treatments do exist. These numbers troubled me as the year it was surveyed was 2002. I decided to look further into this issue to see if the numbers had changed at all in the last 16 years. I found a study conducted by the California Health Board in surveying the patients themselves rather than the doctors: “African-Americans were more likely to report lower quality of care as compared to Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites . Furthermore, African Americans and Hispanics were more likely to feel discriminated against in health care because of their race/ethnicity, followed by Asian/Pacific Islanders and non-Hispanic whites.”2 This conclusion confirms my belief that the health care system is corrupt in the perception of non-white patients and their medical treatments. 


1 Sorkin, Dara H., Quyen Ngo-Metzger, and Israel De Alba. “Racial/Ethnic Discrimination in Health Care: Impact on Perceived Quality of Care.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 25.5 (2010): 390–396. PMC. Web. 12 Apr. 2018.2 Tweedy, Damon. Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine (p. 147). Picador. Kindle Edition.