Tag Archive | disparities
The Organizational Clout to Fight Health Disparities
When it comes to the hard work of narrowing health disparities in the United States, the heavy lifting is most often done by those at the front lines of medicine. Clinics that treat underserved populations, researchers with ideas about how to improve health care access, or hospitals that support such programs are the primary forces […]
Sexual Taboos, Racial Disparities and the HPV Vaccine
By Matt Wood The human papillomavirus (HPV) is a strikingly common sexually transmitted disease associated with cervical cancer. More than 25 percent of women ages 14-59 are infected with HPV, but it gained greater attention in the United States in 2006 when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first vaccine for it. African […]
Better Neighborhood, Better Health
Location, location, location. The three most important words in real estate turn out to be significant for health as well. In today’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a research team based at the University of Chicago show that low-income women with children who moved from high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhoods experienced notable long-term […]
Finding the Muslim View on Medicine
Muslims are the fastest-growing religious minority in the United States, with over 7 million Americans declaring themselves as followers of Islam and more than 2,000 mosques nationwide. But in spite of the numbers, little data has been collected about American Muslims’ beliefs about health and disease, or their experience in the U.S. health care system. […]
Medical Ethics Summer School
It has been a couple months since the end of the spring quarter, and the with it the end of many of the Medical Center’s weekly lecture series. But a recent batch of videos posted to the website of the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics brought a whiff of the school year to the dog […]
Stimulating the Hunt for Asthma Genes
In the recent kerfuffle over the national debt, one of the rhetorical flashpoints was the $800 billion “stimulus package” pushed by the Obama administration in 2009 to fight the economic slowdown. Though the benefits of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on unemployment and the economy are fiercely debated, the impact upon the scientific world […]
The Stressful Truth Hidden Inside a Reverse Disparity
Over the year-long discussion of health disparities in the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics seminar series, the health gaps presented between American whites and blacks have been predominantly a one-way street. On nearly every health measure – from infant mortality to diabetes to cardiovascular disease – higher rates are observed for African-Americans. But there’s […]
Fighting Disparities During Segregation
Reducing health disparities in the United States has been a top priority for our health care system in these early years of the 21st century. But efforts to narrow the health gap between black and white patients go much farther back, to the start of the previous century when the first African-Americans were graduating from […]
Health Care Reform & Hospitals: A Tightrope
The fickle attention of political pundits has shifted of late from health care reform to budget cuts and labor union protests. But as the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (known as “Puh-Paca” or the ACA in medical circles) nears its first birthday, much of the real drama is just beginning. Because its changes were designed […]
Public Health Epidemics Without Diseases
The leading cause of death for American black men between the ages of 15 and 34 isn’t cancer, AIDS, heart disease, or even accidents. It’s homicide, which accounted for more than half of the deaths of black 15 to 24-year-olds and more than a third of those aged 25 to 34. In Chicago, African-American males […]
