Dismissing individual responsibility for health, MSNBC guest claims only 20% accountability, attributing the rest to dubious factors like systemic racism. The study’s reliance on subjective indicators raises skepticism.
A person is only about 20% responsible for their own relative healthiness, MSNBC guest Dr. Uché Blackstock told host Charles Coleman Jr. on Saturday’s Velshi. The rest of what affects an individual’s health is decided by systemic factors such as the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Dr. Blackstock joined Dr. L. Ebony Boulware on for a discussion Saturday on Boulware’s recently published study on the “strong link between racism and chronic poor health conditions for Black and Brown communities in America.”
“This study, it defines structural racism as the means by which societies perpetuate discrimination through interconnected systems,” said Coleman, who was filling in for show host Ali Velshi. He asked Blackstock, author of the book “Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine”, to explain how structural racism affects health outcomes.
“I think so often we think about health as individual choices that patients that patients make excuse me, that patients make. And instead, we really need to understand how practices and policies, you know, the legacy of slavery, the legacy of Jim Crow, current-day systemic racism impacts the health of our communities,” said Blackstock.
‘Health equity researcher’ is an actual thing.
A team of health equity researchers from several institutions has leveraged a complex web of data to test a hypothesis: That structural racism is associated with resources and structures at the neighborhood level that are closely associated with poor health. What they found in an analysis of highly localized, community level data illustrates how racism is deeply interrelated with poor health outcomes.
Dinushika Mohottige, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Population Science and Policy, and Medicine (Nephrology), at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, served as first author of a paper published today in the journal JAMA Network Open that details the study.
Dr. Mohottige and her senior author and long-time mentor, L. Ebony Boulware, MD, MPH, Dean of Wake Forest University School of Medicine, describe in detail how neighborhood prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD), diabetes, and hypertension are strongly associated with an increased burden of structural racism indicators.