African American Physicians Research Articles

Investigating the effects of a physician’s race and gender on user engagement with and perceived credibility of COVID-19 vaccine news

A quasi-experiment (N = 676) manipulated the gender and race of physician sources in news about COVID-19 vaccinations. Results suggest no differences in perceived credibility across genders, but news featuring an African American or Latinx physician predicted higher reader engagement than news featuring a White physician. These findings address the effects of a source’s gender or race in health news and lend support for equal representation of women and racial minorities as expert sources.

Physicians’ perception on using a multi-cancer early detection blood test to reduce disparities in cancer screening

IntroductionCancer causes significant morbidity and mortality in the United States. It is the second most common cause of death in the United States, after heart disease. African Americans are disproportionately affected by malignancy, with overall higher death rates compared to other racial and ethnic groups. Screening tests can identify early stage malignancy allowing for timely intervention. However, African Americans less frequently undergo cancer screening. Advancement in genomic technology has led to the identification of signals for cancer in the blood. This has resulted in the development of multi-cancer early detection (MCED) tests which evaluate for circulating cell-free DNA (cfDNA). This study evaluated physicians’ perception of the use of a multi-cancer early detection test (MCED). MethodsAn anonymous, 29 question survey was administered to African American / Black physicians and medical students. Survey participants were identified through the National Medical Association and other professional organizations that included primarily African American physicians. Surveys were excluded from analysis if respondent was non-African American / Black or was not a physician or medical student.The survey collected physician demographics, percentage of African American / Black patients in their practice, patient barriers to screening, potential use of MCED tests and factors influencing decision to recommend testing. Descriptive statistics were generated. Additional analysis was performed using Chi-Square with statistical significance set at p-value <0.05. The survey was pilot tested for reliability and validity. Results1196 (681 female, 515 male) physicians and medical students completed the survey. 95.8 % were physicians who were or had been in clinical practice. Fifty-three percent of physicians reported that >40 % of their patients were African American / Black. Barriers to cancer screening included lack of understanding of the importance (33.8 %), lack of or limited insurance coverage (23.5 %), socioeconomic factors unrelated to insurance coverage (16.2 %), fear of cancer (8.8 %), history of racism and bias in the health care system (7.4 %) with 8.8 % reporting ‘other’ and 1.5 % reporting no perceived barriers. There was a significant difference (p<0.03) in the rate that physicians’ perceived racism and bias in the health care system as barrier for cancer screening in African American / Black patients when compared to other patients.Most physicians and medical students indicated that a MCED test would benefit all patients (86.8 %), would encourage further cancer screening tests (83.8 %), and would be beneficial for minority and under-represented patients regardless of socioeconomics or health care access (83.8 %). Seventy-five percent of survey respondents indicated that a MCED test would be beneficial in promoting further cancer screening and early detection in African American / Black patients. Factors that would impact the ordering of an MCED test included scientific evidence and test validity (63.2 %), efficiency, accessibility, ease of ordering and ease of receiving results (11.8 %), insurance coverage (13.2 %) and ‘other factors’ (11.8 %). DiscussionThis is one of the largest surveys to assess physicians’ perceptions about MCED testing and is the first study to evaluate the perspectives of African American physicians. It offers insight about physician acceptance and potential incorporation of MCED into clinical practice. It is important that a multifaceted approach is employed to improve cancer outcomes and reduce disparities in survival. MCED tests, a relatively new advancement in genomic technology, have the potential to be an important component in cancer screening strategies.

Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream: The History of Homer G. Phillips Hospital By Candace O’Connor

Reviewed by: Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream: The History of Homer G. Phillips Hospital By Candace O’Connor Linda T. Wynn Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream: The History of Homer G. Phillips Hospital. By Candace O’Connor. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 314. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8262-2247-3.) Candace O’Connor’s Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream: The History of Homer G. Phillips Hospital is one of several books written about African American hospitals that came into existence because of de facto or de jure practices that decreed the separation of African Americans and whites in spaces that delivered health care and social services. When St. Louis’s Homer G. Phillips Hospital opened in 1937, it joined the ranks of other hospitals for African Americans founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Chicago’s Provident Hospital and Training School, established in 1891; Philadelphia’s Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School, established in 1895; Baltimore’s Provident Hospital and Free Dispensary, established in 1894; and Nashville’s Millie E. Hale Hospital, established in 1916. The number of these institutions peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, during a period when ambitious stratagems were developed for creating segregated medical training and practice facilities. These hospitals delivered a higher standard of medical care to African American patients and provided education and training for African American physicians and nurses. Like many African American medical institutions, Homer G. Phillips held a special place within its community’s collective memory. O’Connor’s book was prompted by an association of retired nurses who trained at Homer G. Phillips Hospital over the course of its four-decade existence. Through interviews [End Page 380] excavating the memories of those who studied and worked at “Homer G.,” O’Connor brings the narrative of a successful hospital and its attendant auxiliaries to life (p. xiii). However, Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream is more than a history of Homer G. It also provides significant perspectives on numerous themes including the Great Migration, the causes of systemic racism, the aftereffects of racial desegregation, and the overall spectrum of race relations in America from the late 1930s to the late 1970s. O’Connor has drawn on her extensive previous research into St. Louis’s medical institutions to explore the history of Homer G. Phillips Hospital. To bring its story to the printed page, she combed through “more than 40 years of stories from Black and white newspapers,” researched “stacks of scholarly books and articles,” and held “dozens of interviews” with former staff members and others associated directly or indirectly with the institution (p. xiii). To cover Homer G.’s impact on the community and beyond, O’Connor has divided the tome into chapters that chronicle the hospital’s forty-two-year history, tracing its events and vicissitudes through decades of operation. Yet Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream is also thematic and broaches wide-ranging topics such as the “Ville,” the thriving African American community that was home to “more than a third of the city’s Black leadership” (p. 5). Like many African American communities, the population of the Ville included “school-teachers and janitors; doctors and meat packers; lawyers and railroad men; hospital staff and domestics” (p. 5). Other major themes include hospital units and nursing life. Consisting of thirteen chapters, Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream begins with “The Mysterious Life and Death of Homer G. Phillips, 1878–1931” and ends with an account of the hospital’s closure on August 17, 1979. The chapter on the hospital’s namesake is one of the book’s more intriguing contributions. Homer G. Phillips was an influential Black attorney with a law degree from Howard University. During the 1920s, he passionately supported the establishment of a hospital for St. Louis’s African American community. But Phillips was murdered in 1931, six years before his dream came to fruition. O’Connor’s historical chronicle develops into a true-crime account as the author investigates Phillips’s mystifying murder in a tome already brimming with captivating local history and personal stories. For more than forty years, one of the country...

Post-Residency Life: How to Build a Successful Career

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article ProfessionalFull AccessPost-Residency Life: How to Build a Successful CareerDionne Hart, M.D., Eileen McGee, M.D.Dionne HartSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Eileen McGeeSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:25 Feb 2023https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2023.03.3.23AbstractGraduating residents face a plethora of decisions regarding their future, but taking the time to look inward at professional goals and connect with the right advisors will pay off.The psychiatry residents who are completing their residency this year face a number of colliding challenges: They are beginning their careers at a time of an unprecedented demand for mental health services in the wake of the global pandemic and a severe psychiatric workforce shortage. They also have what seems to be an endless number of career paths.Last December, the Area 4 Council of the APA Assembly hosted a virtual presentation titled “Residency Is Over, So What Now?” Residents and fellows throughout the nation listened to a panel of young physicians representing diverse practice types and an experienced attorney and financial planner who shared their wisdom and experience.The program began with a discussion of important financial matters including tax liability, retirement planning, and tools to finance personal priorities. Two key takeaways were to plan early for retirement and plan for emergencies. Our guest financial advisor recommended a familiar salary allocation known as the 50/30/20 rule: 50% is earmarked for necessities and obligations; 30% for discretionary purchases; and 20% for retirement planning, debt repayment, and savings.After a discussion of how to protect one’s hard-earned income, the discussion turned to recognizing the limits of one’s legal knowledge—it is imperative to seek professional advice prior to signing employment contracts and taking out personal, home, and practice loans; and to build an advisory team consisting of an attorney, accountant, tax advisor, banker, insurance agent, and consulting specialists such as an information technologist. A team of professional advisors will offer protection while new physicians focus on building a practice, interacting with patients, understanding legal obligations, and protecting assets.After discussing these fundamentals, a panel of early career physicians shared their practice and planning experiences, along with their successes and failures. Although their career pathways were different, the panelists agreed that networking and mentoring are important. Valuable takeaways included Dr. Kyle LeMasters’ advice to “know your value,” while Dr. Erica Steinbrenner advised residents to “create exactly the practice you want.” Dr. Matt Kruse urged participants to take a personal inventory of their interests and goals before accepting a position. Dr. Erika Larson echoed this advice when she counseled participants to build a practice that reflects their goals and needs. For example, those who enjoy traveling and new challenges might find that a locum tenens position is a good fit, but for structure and predictability, a government practice or employed position may be optimal.Many new physicians find that their first position is not an optimal fit. In fact, 47% of physicians change positions in the first five years of practice. The early career panelists agreed that practice preferences may change as priorities and life circumstances evolve, so it is important that newly practicing physicians give themselves the grace to explore or create new professional opportunities and maintain that openness throughout their professional life. In summary, as Dr. John Korpics advised, “Define your own future.” ■Dionne Hart, M.D., is a member of APA’s Council on Advocacy and Government Relations, an APA delegate to the AMA House of Delegates, a member of the Minnesota Medical Association Board of Trustees, president of the Minnesota Association of African American Physicians, chair of the National Medical Association’s Region IV, and the AMA liaison to the National Commission on Correctional Health Care Board of Representatives. She can be reached on Twitter at @lildocd.Eileen McGee, M.D., is a retired adult, child, and adolescent psychiatrist in the Cleveland area with experience as a private practitioner and community psychiatrist in a Federally Qualified Health Center. She is Area 4’s treasurer and head of the Program Committee. ISSUES NewArchived

We'll Fight It Out Here: A History of the Ongoing Struggle for Health Equity: How a coalition of Black health professions schools made health equity a national issue by David Chanoff and Louis W. Sullivan (review).

Reviewed by: We'll Fight It Out Here: A History of the Ongoing Struggle for Health Equity: How a coalition of Black health professions schools made health equity a national issue by David Chanoff and Louis W. Sullivan Rueben C. Warren, DDS, MPH, DrPH, MDiv (bio) We'll Fight It Out Here: A History of the Ongoing Struggle for Health Equity: How a coalition of Black health professions schools made health equity a national issue. David Chanoff and Louis W. Sullivan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. We'll Fight It Out Here: A History of the Ongoing Struggle for Health Equity by David Chanoff and Louis W. Sullivan, MD is an extraordinary story of women and men who worked to improve the health and human condition of Black and other underserved or unserved populations. They established and sustained academic health professions institutions and provided health care, including health services and health education, to targeted populations. The Association of Minority Health Professions Schools has served all segments of society dating back to the 1800. The book chronicles instances where member schools engaged in human subjects research and educated a diverse population including racial/ethnic minority, sex/gender minoritized, low-income, rural, and urban students. They sustained a social agenda that extended across the globe. Minority health professions schools have historically targeted and educated African American students and students from other parts of the African Diaspora and the African continent. As a result, their impact extends beyond the U.S. Because of their common missions and the need to build a sustained collation, in 1976, the Association of Minority Health Professions Schools (AMHPS) was founded for the modern era. The Association of Minority Health Professions Schools' work dates to the middle 1800s. Historically, minority health professions schools provided formal education and training in medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, pharmacy, nursing, biomedical science, and various allied health programs. Due to limited resources, perceived need and demand, the schools modified or closed some of their education and training offerings. As they do to the present day, graduates participated in human subjects research; were among the pillars in educating health care professionals of minority health professions schools; engaged in direct patient care in the public and private sectors; assumed federal, state, and local government positions; and provided leadership in a plethora of public health areas. As global health communities strive for health equity, these Black health professions schools banded together to form the Association of Minority Health Professions Schools (AMHPS) to "fight" for health equity before the term health equity was popularized by health professionals, educators, and public health officials. The hallmark of AMHPS's major achievements begins with its founding in 1976, continues with the 2010 elevation of the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities to an Institute within the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. Department of Health [End Page 513] and Human Services. The AMHPS member schools continue to press the United States towards a framework of equity in both health and health care. Chanoff and Sullivan's book chronicles the AMHPS story in 11 chapters, starting with an unnamed, enslaved Black man owned by a White doctor. The Black man assisted the doctor in his medical practice in Windsor, Connecticut. After "working" with the White physician for many years, the enslaved man was granted his freedom, adopted the name Prius Manumit, and established his own medical practice. According Chanofff and Sullivan, Manumit was the first African American physician accepted by White society. Better-known African American physicians include James Derham (Durham), who was born in 1762, in Philadelphia, and practiced medicine there, and Martin Robinson Delany and James McCune Smith who were in medical school, but who were forced to withdraw due to racist objections from their Harvard classmates. Harriet Kezia Hunt, an African American woman, also was forced to withdraw from Harvard because of racism and patriarchy. Interestingly, in 1869, Robert Tanner Freeman, an African American man, graduated in the first class of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. After their forced withdrawal from Harvard, Delany and Smith completed medical school abroad, returning to the U.S. to practice medicine. Both became involved in civil rights...

The Association of Minority Health Professions Schools.

The Association of Minority Health Professions Schools David Chanoff, PhD (bio), Louis Wade Sullivan, MD (bio), and Ronny Lancaster, JD, MBA (bio) Disparities in health care between minority and mainstream Americans go back well beyond the beginning of formal record-keeping on race differences in morbidity and mortality. One reason that stands out historically for the still disconcerting state of Black health is the relative paucity of Black physicians and other health professionals. A hundred plus years ago there were shockingly few Black doctors attempting to care for a large, mostly rural Black population, and though the country's Black community today is far different from what it was at the turn of the 20th century, there is still a marked lack of African American physicians, dentists, and pharmacists and still alarming disparities. Another reason is that as recently as the 1980s the mainstream health establishment turned a blind eye to the whole subject of disparate care, which precluded the development of ameliorative policies and practices. In the late 1970s four predominantly Black health professions schools (Meharry Medical College, Morehouse School of Medicine, Xavier College of Pharmacy, and Tuskegee School of Veterinary Science) banded together as the Association of Minority Health Professions Schools (AMHPS) in order to find desperately needed resources to keep themselves alive and grow their capacity to train Black health professionals. For a tiny lobbying group composed of financially precarious institutions they were, over time, astonishingly successful at creating and bringing to fruition legislation that strengthened themselves, the sister minority schools that joined them along the way, as well as traditionally White health institutions that served impoverished and medically neglected populations. In the process AMHPS brought the existence of health inequities to national attention and precipitated the creation of NIH's Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. This commentary highlights the story of this obscure association, how it brought essential resources to the development of minority medicine, and how it triggered a nation's engagement with the devastating consequences of inequitable health care. ________ [End Page 1] Three quarters of a century before the creation of AMHPS the national conversation was not about the problem of health disparities and how to ameliorate them, it was on the coming extinction of the Black race. "Black people have a race proclivity to disaster and death," wrote Frederick Hoffman, the leading statistician of the early 20th century, an irrefutable conclusion he believed, based on objective and exhaustive research and analysis of the available data. African Americans were, simply put, biologically inferior to Whites, and their inferiority was leading them inevitably down the road of racial collapse. "The Indian is on the verge of extinction," he wrote, "… the African will surely follow him."1 That was the conclusion of Hoffman's comprehensive study, The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, published in 1896 by the authoritative Journal of the American Economic Association, which gave his words credibility as an accurate scientific determination. Hoffman's extinction argument dominated the racial discussion of his day and propelled him to international prominence. Hoffman had his critics, including famed Black sociologist and historian W.E.B Du Bois, who pointed to the flaws in Hoffman's study: his lack of data on similarly impoverished White groups who were clearly not in a state of racial collapse and his failure to account for the ravages occasioned by social determinants such as poor nutrition, inadequate housing, subpar education, and the absence of medical care, which caused the disastrous morbidity and mortality numbers—though even numbers so appalling did not indicate an inevitable slide into extinction.2 Hoffman responded to Du Bois with certainty: "It is not in the conditions of life," he wrote, "but in the race traits and tendencies that we find the cause of excessive mortality."3 Time proved Hoffman's extinction thesis a myth. African Americans did not die out. The 1910 census found that the 8.8 million African Americans counted in 1900 had grown in 10 years to 9.8 million, an increase of 11%. But although African Americans were not doomed to extinction, the numbers Hoffman had based his calculations on were not by themselves misleading. It was...

Blake Hill-Saya, Aaron McDuffie Moore: An African American Physician, Educator, and Founder of Durham’s Black Wall Street

Blake Hill-Saya, Aaron McDuffie Moore: An African American Physician, Educator, and Founder of Durham’s Black Wall Street

Abstract B035: Addressing African American physician engagement in decentralized clinical trial by clinical trials and translation science consortium focus group participation

Abstract BACKGROUND: Despite decades of effort and proposed solutions to increase diversity in clinical trial participation, African Americans remain underrepresented. Race-specific review of clinical trial participation challenges suggests that engagement with African American physicians influence successful recruitment and appropriate enrollment of underrepresented groups in clinical research. Tailoring best-practices for minoritized populations cannot be sustainably facilitated without trusted community-academic partnerships. Engagement with African American community physicians creates capacity for leveraging resources critical to participation of African Americans in decentralized clinical trials (DCT). The Northeast Florida Clinical Trials and Translational Science (NEF-CTaTS) Consortium was formed in 2022 to address cancer health disparities experienced by minoritized, marginalized and underserved communities in NE Florida. AIM:The NEF-CTaTS Consortium convened a Focus Group with 22 African American community physicians who care for minoritized patients to solicit their input in fostering active research, research training, community outreach and engagement, and to address advantages of and barriers to forming a research network of minority physicians to conduct decentralized clinical trials and translational research. METHODS: Practicing community primary care physician members of the Northeast Florida Medical Society, a chapter of the National Medical Association where invited to participate. Physician demographic and practice information was collected from physicians who consented to participate prior to the Focus Group discussion. A Clinical Trial Needs Assessment was completed by each participating physician. The Physician Focus Group discussion was moderated by a skilled African American community physician member of the NEF-CTaTS consortium with extensive experience in conducting clinical trials. The discussion was recorded and transcribed for data analysis. IRB approval was obtained prior to informed consent, data collection and Focus Group Discussion. RESULTS: Qualitative analysis of the raw data is currently ongoing at the time of this submission. Transcribed discussion details and the observational notes identified thematic framework for descriptive statements, indexing, and sifting data. Mapping and interpretation of data is being analyzed for relationships, internal consistency, intensity of comments and specificity of responses. Analysis is scheduled to be complete within 4 weeks of abstract submission. CONCLUSIONS: Efforts to appropriately address disparities in clinical trial participation and DCT participation of African Americans require distinct and deliberate efforts to engage African American physician stakeholders. Addressing issues of trust and the impact of social-determinants of health on minoritized populations can be culturally and appropriately addressed by community-academic partnerships. Citation Format: Floyd Willis, Folakemi Odedina, Kim Barbel Johnson, Rogers Cain, Jennifer Crook. Addressing African American physician engagement in decentralized clinical trial by clinical trials and translation science consortium focus group participation [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 15th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2022 Sep 16-19; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2022;31(1 Suppl):Abstract nr B035.

CHRONIC CONDITION SELF-MANAGEMENT FOR OLDER AFRICAN AMERICANS: THE CHALLENGE OF COMPLEXITY

Abstract Older African Americans have higher rates of comorbidity and face substantive challenges with chronic condition self-management (CCSM), including less effective and supportive CCSM care than their white counterparts. Such disparities in care stem, in part, from physicians’ lack of understanding about challenges older African Americans face as they engage in CCSM. Yet little is known about the CCSM experiences of older African Americans with comorbidity. In this study, we aimed to determine the central dynamics of those experiences. As part of a larger study on African American CCSM and physician empathy, we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 30 older African Americans living in Detroit aged 65 years and older with comorbidity. We used grounded theory analysis to distill findings into a core conceptual category as well as component domains and dimensions. “Complexity” emerged as the core category to describe CCSM in our sample. Complexity resides often at the intersection of race, age, and social position making the older African American CCSM experience inherently difficult for those of different races, ages, and social positions to understand. Data illustrate that domains of complexity include "care time", "care roles", "social context", "logistics", "learning", and "pain management". Each domain is composed of 2 to 4 dimensions, further fleshing out the nature of CCSM complexity for older African Americans with comorbidity. Findings provide a basis to enhance understanding and empathy for older African Americans with comorbidity. We discuss how the model will be used to test understanding of older African American CCSM by medical students.

Racial differences in transfusion practices: Time to address structural racism

See article on page 1519–1526, in this issue

Assessment of Bias in Patient Safety Reporting Systems Categorized by Physician Gender, Race and Ethnicity, and Faculty Rank

Patient safety reporting systems (PSRSs) are designed to decrease the risk of harm to patients due to medical errors. Owing to the voluntary nature of PSRSs, implicit bias of the reporter may affect the management of safety events reported. Stanford Alert For Events (SAFE) is the PSRS used at Stanford Health Care. To examine whether variation exists in the content of SAFE reports based on demographic characteristics of physicians who are the subject of the event report. This retrospective qualitative analysis from a single academic medical center evaluated SAFE reports from March 2011 to February 2020. Event reports were coded by theme and categorized by severity (scale of 1 to 3, with 1 being the lowest and 3 the highest). The reports were then analyzed from October 2020 to February 2022 and categorized by physician gender, race and ethnicity, and faculty rank. A total of 501 patient safety events were collected from the adult hospital during the study period, and 100 were excluded owing to incompleteness of information. This qualitative study had no planned outcome. A qualitative analysis was performed on 401 reports representing 187 physicians (138 [73.8%] male and 49 [26.2%] female). In terms of race and ethnicity, 4 physicians (2.1%) were African American, 49 (26.2%) were Asian; 7 (3.7%), Hispanic or Latinx; 108 (57.7%), White; and 19 (10.2%), declined to state. Female physicians had disproportionate representation among reports referencing communication and conversational issues and the lowest severity level. Male physicians had disproportionate representation for ignoring or omitting procedures, process issues, and physical intimidation. African American physicians had disproportionate representation for lack of communication and process issues. Asian physicians had disproportionate representation for lack of communication, process issues, conversational conduct, and the lowest severity level. Latinx physicians had disproportionate representation for conversational conduct. White physicians had disproportionate representation for ignoring or omitting procedures, verbal abuse, physical intimidation, and the highest severity level. In this qualitative study, female physicians and physicians who were members of racial and ethnic minority groups were more likely to be reported for low-severity communication issues compared with their male and White counterparts, respectively. These findings suggest that there may be a lower threshold for reporting events when the subject of the report is female and/or a member of a racial or ethnic minority group. Restructuring the reporting and management of patient safety events may be needed to facilitate conflict resolution in a manner that reduces implicit bias and fosters team cohesion.

Contemporary Representation of African American Female Physicians in Vascular Neurology Clinical Leadership Positions (P11-7.002)

Contemporary Representation of African American Female Physicians in Vascular Neurology Clinical Leadership Positions (P11-7.002)

Moderators of the effects of perceived racism and discrimination on cancer-related health behaviors among two samples of African Americans

BackgroundAssumptions regarding within-race variation in the associations between measures of discrimination racism and health-related behaviors among African Americans have been largely unexplored. MethodsWe conducted secondary analyses of two studies to examine support for a model which describes several theoretical moderators of the effects of discrimination and racism on health behaviors. The first study examined the effects of group-based behavioral information and racial identity on the association between perceived racism and requests for at home colorectal cancer screening tests among a sample of 205 geographically diverse African Americans who participated in an online experiment from 2019 to 2020. ResultsGroup-based behavioral information attenuated the association between perceived racism and requests for at-home screening kit. In the absence of group-based behavioral information, perceived racism was positively associated with screening kit requests for African Americans with weaker racial identity and negatively associated with requests for African Americans with stronger racial identity. The second study examined the influence of personal and group-based perceived discrimination, and behavior-relevant affective information related to a breast cancer risk notification, on 89 Michigan dwelling African American women's self-reported physician communication from 2015 to 2016. Results showed that perceived group-based discrimination was positively associated with physician communication in the absence of negative affective information, and perceived personal discrimination was negatively associated with physician communication as positive affective information increased. ConclusionsTogether, these results support our theoretical model highlighting variation in the effects of discrimination and racism on health behaviors among African Americans, and indicates group-relevant behavioral information, racial identity, behavior relevant affective information, and target of discrimination as moderators of the effect. Implications for conceptualizing the effects of racism and discrimination and for examining racially targeted interventions are discussed.

When Black Lives Really Do Matter: Subverting Medical Racism through African-Diasporic Healing Rituals in Toni Morrison’s Fiction

Toni Morrison spent much of her career detailing the unpredictability of African American existence within a racist society, with a special focus on patriarchal violence and medical apartheid against women’s bodies. Yet Morrison also limns out alternative modes of healing within a Black metacultural framework that moves between Nigeria, Brazil, and Egypt. As we move forward from the COVID-19 crisis, research has suggested that training more African American doctors, nurses, and physician assistants might curtail medical racism. Morrison’s fiction looks to a more basic level in which love of the bodies of African American people is at the center of healing. This article therefore discusses medical racism and applies Morrison’s lessons to the COVID-19 moment that her writing trenchantly foreshadows. It focuses on three healers who elide the medical establishment to embody a metacultural ethics of healing: Baby Suggs (in Beloved [1987]), Consolata Sosa (in Paradise [1997]), and Ethel Fordham (in Home [2012]). Morrison fuses an African-diasporic framework with embodied new knowledge that allows individuals to gain insight and agency in a white-dominant medical world that still refuses to endorse the idea that Black people’s bodies and psyches really do matter. An examination of these healers’ practices therefore sheds light on the COVID-19 moment by suggesting ways that African American people can stay “woke” and have agency when encountering and navigating traditional health care systems, which even today view the bodies of African Americans as fodder for medical experiments, immune to disease, and not in need of ethical and humane medical care.

Blake Hill-Saya, Aaron McDuffie Moore: An African American Physician, Educator, and Founder of Durham’s Black Wall Street. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 258. $26.95 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBlake Hill-Saya, Aaron McDuffie Moore: An African American Physician, Educator, and Founder of Durham’s Black Wall Street. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 258. $26.95 (cloth).Thomas J. Ward Jr.Thomas J. Ward Jr.Farmingdale State College–SUNY (USA) Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 107, Number 1Winter 2022 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/717490 Views: 46Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

31.6 Burnout and Depression Among Residents and Faculty in a Single Academic Medical Institution: A Pilot Study

Burnout is defined as a long-term, unresolvable job stress leading to feelings of exhaustion, overwhelm, cynicism, detachment from job, and a lack of sense of personal accomplishment. Medscape Physician Burnout surveys have shown that over 40% of physicians report burnout. There is a scarcity of studies that investigated the association between physician burnout and depression. Our study aimed to investigate this association and to compare this association's changes by groups of interest. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology–Self Report (QIDS-SR) were used to assess burnout (N = 168) and depression (N = 167) among faculty and trainees (residents and fellows) in Psychiatry and Pediatrics at a large academic medical institution in the Southeast. The 3 subscale scores of MBI (emotional exhaustion [EE], depersonalization [DP], and personal accomplishment [PA]) and QIDS-SR scores were analyzed between trainees vs faculty, race, gender, and specialty. χ2 and Fischer’s exact tests were used to determine statistical significance of categorical association. Approximately 28% of faculty and trainees had high EE, and trainees reported nearly twice as much moderate EE than faculty (18.75% vs 39.29%). Trainees had high DP compared to faculty (41.07% vs 12.5%), and more psychiatrists reported high DP than pediatricians (35.81% vs 12.87). Notably, African American physicians reported a higher rate of depression than White physicians and physicians of other races (14.29% vs 11.11% and 11.9%, respectively) with no difference in depression rates between faculty and residents, by specialty, or by gender. Eleven percent of trainees and 14% of faculty reported clinically significant depression. There was significant correlation between burnout and depression (p < 0.0001). Physicians in training were twice as likely to experience burnout. High burnout is a predictor of clinically significant depression. Although this is a pilot study with only 2 specialties, the rate of depression is found to be higher (11%-14%) than the general population (7.1%). Creating a better understanding of the interrelationships among these measures can increase awareness among the physician community, which may help identify burnout early, seek help, and prevent serious downstream effects such as anxiety, depression, and suicide.

“So, Sue Me:” Medical Professionals Should Support Title VI Civil Rights Law Improvements as Part of their Anti-racism Work

“So, Sue Me:” Medical Professionals Should Support Title VI Civil Rights Law Improvements as Part of their Anti-racism Work

"Shouldn't You Spend Your Time Curing Cancer or Something?" Why an African American Female Physician Chose a Career in Palliative Care.

"Shouldn't You Spend Your Time Curing Cancer or Something?" Why an African American Female Physician Chose a Career in Palliative Care.

The road to equality for African American Physicians: Civil war union army physicians paving the way

The road to equality for African American Physicians: Civil war union army physicians paving the way

Diabetes And Race

Diabetes And Race