The Tuskegee Report: Why Does Being Black Affect The Way Patients

Why does being black affect the way doctors see you and treat you as a patient The Tuskegee Report is a perfect example, yes the patients were informed with some things but not everything. African Americans were informed that they will get free healthcare, free meals,and free burial insurance. The patients were told that the experiment would only last for six months but it lasted for 40 years instead. The Tuskegee Report goes back to my question which is how far has the treatment African Americans has improved from today than to how they got treated back in the 20’s when Henrietta Lacks was born. In the book it describes how a hospital was built for African Americans who couldn’t afford to go to the general hospital or for those who wouldn’t …show more content…
Yes things have changed over the past 40 years but how much of a change has happened. Which leads to this question why does being black affect the way patients are treated and/or helped. “If you are African-American and you present to the emergency room with a broken leg or a kidney stone, for example, you’re less likely to be given analgesics at the recommended level”. Not only do patients have to wait longer in emergency rooms, but they also don’t get everything they need to get at a high level like other patience would get. For example being recommended for a specialist some patients would get the low end doctor rather than getting the top notch doctor for that specific category. We found that doctors, when they went in to see the black versus other patients, they made the same treatment decisions, they said the same things with their voices but would do small gestures that were different. “For example, they would use more closed posture and they had their arms crossed, or had their hands in their pockets. They would stand further away from the bed,” Barnato says. “They would spend more time looking at the nurse or the monitor and less time looking at the patient. Black and latino patients have noticed that some doctors are afraid to be in the same room with them. This results has to do with how American history has described how “violent” blacks have been known to be or that they …show more content…
The Tuskegee report would have changed the way Henrietta lacks was treated after her death because of how much change we as whole ( America) have done to treat every patient the same it may not be turned around 100 percent but having a certain percentage change than having nothing change is a big of an improvement. The lacks family had gone through so much because of their race which happened to be black, they were also judged because of the community they live in and the education henrietta had gotten. Going back to the book there was a reason why that hospital was built because back in the 30’s, 40’s etc… black patients couldn’t either afford to go to that certain hospital or the hospital employees wouldn’t treat the black patients and tell them to leave. The hospital that was built for that community was huge because even though at that time period the people in that community didn’t know but that hospital was a new chapter for a black community like there’s it wasn’t the best chapter but it was a start to something new for them. The prisoners that were injected with the deadly disease had no idea of everything else they were being injected because the doctors chose not to tel them and lie to them to not make them worry. This situation is similar to the tuskegee report because both patients and inmates were injected with deadly diseases and they both weren’t informed with situations