Imagine suffering from excruciating pain and a high fever. Nothing you've taken medicinally seems to work. You are admitted to the local hospital where you undergo procedures that maintain the illusion you are being treated for your ailment. It isn't until after your death years later that your family learns that the treatment and procedures you were subjected to were both ineffectual and bogus. “The Tuskegee Study” is often cited as the benchmark for using impoverished and unwitting African Americans for medical experiments.
This situation exemplifies and is at the heart of Harriet A. Washington's informative, poignant and painful book “Medical Apartheid.” However, it is not-- the worse--experimental abuse of African Americans. The “Tuskegee Study” has been eclipsed in both numbers and egregiousness by other abusive medical studies.
The use of African Americans as guinea pigs didn't end with the abolition of slavery and it was not restricted to the Southern U.S. only. From 1988 –2001 approximately 500 children some as young as 6 months old in foster care in New York were subjected to experimentation with the AIDS drug AZT and other toxic HIV drugs. Fifteen percent of those children died but the circumstances of the role the drugs played in their deaths are yet to be explained.
During the 1990's both African American and Latino youth in New York were diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and were subjected to treatment with fenfluramine (fen Phen) a now banned drug because of the high number of correlated/associated deaths. These youth of color were selected on the basis of anti-social behavior and the drugs purported ability to cure this behavior. The strange part is there were no white kids included in the study. Are we left to believe that white kids have no anti-social behavior? Please see skinheads, Aryan posse etc.
In a case that was broken by a local journalist here in Albuquerque it was noted that Americans, many of which were African American, lost the rights to their own bodies when many were surreptitiously placed, without their knowing consent, into a radiation experiment sponsored by the US Atomic Energy Commission. The African American Cabinet Secretary, who oversaw the agency during the Clinton Administration, initiated a tour of the US where these experiments were done and promised to provide care and compensation to those victims or families that were affected.
An even more controversial experiment occurred in 1991 when women, African American teens, were implanted with the now defunct birth control device Norplant in Baltimore, Maryland. This experiment was applauded by many observers who noted that it could be an effective way to reduce the so called “under-class” in America.
“Medical Apartheid” details the ways African slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some African American populations.
It also reveals how African Americans have been prey to grave robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the 20th Century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation of and shoddy medical treatment of African Americans, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities.
This book is a rallying call for change within the medical and African American communities. Ms. Washington very adroitly points out that African Americans cannot afford to be passive. Increased participation in ethically designed medical studies and an increase in the number of African American physicians and health care professionals would be a boon for African Americans suffering from serious diseases and potentially lead to better preventive care in general.
Understanding history as it pertains to the US medical establishment and African Americans is very important. In addition to Ms. Washington's book, African American students and parents should also be aware that although 13% of the US population is African American they comprise only 4% of US physicians. The reasons for this disparity are unclear.
A recent study of African American high school juniors in Wisconsin that was recently published in the Journal of the National Medical Association concluded that major barriers to becoming a physician include: financial constraints, lack of knowledge about medicine, little/no encouragement from home and school, racism in medicine, negative peer views on excelling academically, and lack of African American role models in the community and on television to name just a few.
Maybe this information about the dearth of African American physicians of color is getting out to our communities albeit better late than never. The 2007 entering class to medical schools is the largest ever and includes more male African Americans and Hispanics. The applicant pool in general includes more people of color. It is expected that the US will face a serious shortage of physicians in the future, and the increased interest in medicine by students of color is extremely encouraging.
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