Mitch
Your skin color may affect the care you receive at the doctor's office, a new study has found, showing evidence of racial basis in medical care. Researchers found unintentional racism, feelings physicians are unaware of, can affect how doctors diagnose and treat patients. The study, is the first to deal with unconscious racial bias and how it can lead to inferior care for African-American patients.. The doctors in the study were told two men, one white and one African-American, were each 50 years old and complained of chest pain. Each showed other symptoms of a heart attack. The result was most of the doctors were more likely to prescribe a potentially life-saving, clot-busting treatment for the white patients than for the African-American patient. According to the study, those biases affected the treatment the doctors would have given the two patients. The patients were not actually real people, but rather computer-generated images seen by the doctors only on a monitor. This isn't the first study to find that whites get better medical care than blacks.