The World ’s Leading Medical Journals Don’t Write About Racism. That’s a Problem

Over the past year, rising deaths from COVID-19, police brutality, anti-Asian hate crimes, and the inequitable damage of climate breakdown, have made the manifold harms of racism easier for everyone to see. Harms that were once shielded from public consumption by segregation or shrouded from public scrutiny by stories depicting the U.S. as a nation of fairness and freedoms, are now the center of an ongoing national confrontation with racism and its impacts on health, safety, and justice. Yet amid growing calls for anti-racism and health equity, troubling reports have emerged highlighting the ways the U.S. health care industry avoids even talking about, let alone addressing, racism. Few know just how extensive this problem is. Our new report published in Health Affairs examined the top four medical journals in the world and found that they almost never publish scientific articles that name racism as a driver of poor health outcomes. Of the more than 200,000 total articles published over the past 30 years in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and British Medical Journal (BMJ), less than 1% included the word “racism” anywhere in the text. And among the few articles that did, upwards of 90% were predominantly opinion pieces, not scientific investigations. Just think about that. In a field that maligns anecdotal evidence as the least rigorous and most untrustworthy, our examination found that...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news