Obesity Study – Big Impact, Little Coverage

Last year, the Pew Research Center published the results of a year-long study of African Americans in U.S. news coverage. According to this study, mainstream news largely ignored African Americans. And when African Americans were in the news, the focus tended to be on more specific events rather than broader issues.
When I heard about that study, I thought back to two stories that made news in 1999. The first story made headlines. James Byrd Jr., a black man, was chained to a pick-up truck and dragged to his death by a couple of white supremacists. The second bit of news, which surprisingly came out that same week, received far less attention. A study, headed up by Dr. Schulman of Georgetown University, appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine. In that study, a video created by Schulman was shown to 720 doctors. Actors – Black and White, male and female, in plain white hospital gowns recited identical scripts describing heart pain. The findings? Doctors were much less likely to recommend appropriate treatment for the black and female patients. After subjecting data to statistical tests to insure the accuracy of the results, the study’s authors concluded that the disparity in what are potentially life-and-death decisions about medical care most likely were due to unconscious biases about gender and race.
Fast forward to 2011.  A recently released study by Johns Hopkins researchers that up till now has received scant attention reveals that primary-care doctors are less likely to counsel black patients on how to lose weight, even though Blacks have a higher rate of obesity than Whites. And this is true regardless of the physician’s race. Why does this disparity exist? Theories range from doctors’ assumptions about whether a patient will listen and follow through on a proscribed treatment, to the sensitivity of the topic. How many doctors even want to broach this difficult topic? But why the racial disparity?
It could certainly be argued that with regard to these news items spanning more than a decade, the two stories concerning the health establishment are symptomatic of those trends and issues that receive little attention in the mainstream media. Nevertheless, they are likely to have a tremendous impact on the African-American community.