MSNBC doctor claims systemic factors like racism determine 80% of a person’s health while people themselves are only ‘about 20%’ responsible
- Dr. Uche Blackstock and Dr. L.
Ebony Boulware appeared on MSNBC to discuss Boulware’s new study on racism and health conditions
- Blackstock said individuals are only about 20 percent responsible for their health and the other 80 percent is determined by racism
- Boulware’s study of 150 neighborhoods in Durham County, North Carolina found a connection between high levels of structural racism and poor health
By Rachel Bowman For Dailymail.Com[1]
Published: 05:08, 31 December 2023 | Updated: 07:26, 31 December 2023
A guest doctor on MSNBC has claimed people are only about 20 percent responsible for their own health and racism and systemic issues are to blame for the other 80 percent.
Charles Coleman Jr., filing in for Ali Velshi on MSNBC on Saturday, brought Dr. Uche Blackstock and Dr. L.
Ebony Boulware on the show to discuss Boulware’s recently published study on racism and health conditions.
Blackstock, who is set to a release a memoir called Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine next month, commented on how structural racism affects health outcomes.
‘Individuals are only responsible for about 20% of what makes them healthy. The other 80% are these systemic factors that Dr. Boulware and her colleagues studied in this very, very important research,’ Blackstock said.
‘I think so often we think about health as individual choices 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.’
Dr. Uche Blackstock (pictured) appeared on MSNBC and said, ‘Individuals are only responsible for about 20% of what makes them healthy.
The other 80% are these systemic factors’
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Dr. L.
Ebony Boulware (pictured) recently published a first-of-its-kind study looking at how structural racism is connected to poor health
Blackstock said, ‘Because of discriminatory housing policies and other racist practices, we are seeing what we’re seeing now in terms of these high burdens of chronic disease in our communities. Diabetes[2], high blood pressure, chronic kidney disease, essentially it’s killing us.’
Boulware’s study called Residential Structural Racism and Prevalence of Chronic Health Conditions[3], which published last week, is the first of its kind to look at how racism is related to poor health.
The study looked at 150 neighborhoods in Durham County, North Carolina and used public data from 2012-2018 and deidentified electronic health records from 2017-2018 to investigate of structural racism is associated with higher levels of chronic health conditions.
Some of the factors of structural racism looked at include the percent of white residents in a neighborhood, tree cover, crime rates, election participation, median income, poverty rates, unemployment and police shootings.
Boulware said, ‘We defined structural racism as factors which work together to create discriminatory conditions in neighborhoods that disadvantage ethic and racial minorities.’
The results found areas with higher structural racism indicators were associated with greater neighborhood prevalence of chronic kidney disease, diabetes and hypertension.
Blackstock said, ‘Because of discriminatory housing policies and other racist practices, we are seeing what we’re seeing now in terms of these high burdens of chronic disease in our communities’
Blackstock, who is set to a release a memoir called Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine next month, commented on how structural racism affects health outcomes
‘What we found, in short, was that if there was more structural racism in a neighborhood, the health of the neighborhood was worse,’ said Boulware.
Over the summer, the American Medical Association, the largest organization of doctors in the US, urged doctors to ditch body mass index[4] (BMI) as the primary measurement for a healthy bodyweight, citing its ‘racist’ roots.
The group said the metric has been used for ‘racist exclusion’ and fails to consider differences in body composition that vary based on race and sex.
Body mass index (BMI), devised by a white man considering white bodies, is measured by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms or pounds by the square of height in meters or feet, and it has been deeply ingrained in the medical system as a way to measure population health more broadly.
But on an individual level, BMI does not take into consideration relative body shape and how fat is stored.
For instance, Asian people who fall within a ‘healthy’ BMI range are still at a high risk of diabetes.
References
- ^ Rachel Bowman For Dailymail.Com (www.dailymail.co.uk)
- ^ Diabetes (www.dailymail.co.uk)
- ^ Residential Structural Racism and Prevalence of Chronic Health Conditions (jamanetwork.com)
- ^ urged doctors to ditch body mass index (www.dailymail.co.uk)
- ^ North Carolina (www.dailymail.co.uk)
- ^ Diabetes (www.dailymail.co.uk)