NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T he Left has long viewed any kind of inequality as an automatic justification for government intervention. As early as 1964, Ronald Reagan was noting that “we have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”
Today, the Left applies similar logic to race. Any disparity in outcomes between, for example, white people and black people is now attributable to “systemic racism,” and a racial animus supposedly pervades society at all levels. In this perspective, it is virtually impossible to view any interaction between a white person and a black person and not see confirming evidence.
These days, not even the medical profession is immune to this type of attack. The latest example comes via Amanda Joy Calhoun, a psychiatric resident at the Yale School of Medicine. She purports to be “an expert in the mental health effects of anti-Black racism.” She is also the author of a recent Boston Globe op-ed titled “What if doctors wore body cameras?” Subhead: “Black people face racism and worse health outcomes in hospitals. It’s time to document it.”
As an expert in anti-black racism, Calhoun has a keen ability to find racism in almost all situations. I am sure that if one of Calhoun’s colleagues were to administer a Rorschach test on her, she would be able to identify the racist in each ink blot and explain how Hermann Rorschach himself must have been a racist because he kept painting pictures of them.
In her op-ed, Calhoun employs this less-than-unique ability to find racism in the institution from which she hopes to achieve her psychiatry certificate (assuming it is the focus of her complaints), and also in hospital co-workers at whom she levels her deepest contempt. Karen-esque “White nurses” are the villains in at least two of her examples of racism, including one childhood claim that her sister “could have died from delays in care”:
Despite my mom’s insistence that my 9-year-old sister could be suffering from a deadly allergic reaction and seemed to be wheezing, White nurses refused to treat her with urgency, leaving them sitting in the waiting room. Without even properly examining my sister, the nurses informed my mother she would have detected a nut allergy earlier in my sister’s life if it was serious.
We can perhaps, for the sake of argument, stipulate that the patients in Calhoun’s op-ed did not receive proper care in a timely mater. But she cannot demonstrate that race was the reason. A rude nurse does not need to be motivated by racism, and a cantankerous nurse is probably not belligerent to only a single group. A more likely explanation is that many nurses, doctors, and other health-care workers in an emergency department are working long hours in a stressful environment.
Calhoun attempts to bolster her argument with the same flawed scientific research article that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson used in her dissenting opinion for the pair of cases Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The study that both Jackson and Calhoun cite claims that black children were more likely to survive after birth if the doctor caring for them was also black. But there are serious problems with the study. For one, it was a retrospective chart-review study. Such studies are notoriously limited because of information critical to the study that might not be in the chart. In this case, the missing information was the race of the treating physician — hardly an insignificant problem. The researchers overcame this problem by examining publicly available photos of the physicians that they found on the internet, so problem solved. But the data still fail to account for whether the attending physician was the primary caregiver, or whether on-call physicians or nurses were. Finally, the study failed to show any difference in maternal mortality related to childbirth.
As a member of the Yale–New Haven Hospital Medical Staff, I have never observed the kind of racism that Calhoun describes in her op-ed. Her accusations against our mutual colleagues are outrageous and unfounded. We all go out of our way to provide outstanding care to all of our patients, without regard of race or any other difference. I wonder how her attitude will evolve as she continues in a career where she has to work with people she deems racists.
More outrageous than her allegations, however, are her proposed solutions. Doctors wearing body cameras would have a chilling effect on the doctor-patient relationship. Privacy is at the center of every encounter. If everything is being filmed, patients will be much less likely to discuss sensitive health concerns. Most patients would also rather not have their more intimate exams filmed. A camera would have a chilling effect on some of the most important conversations that any of us may ever have. The privacy concerns and the legal issues of filming every patient encounter make this suggestion absurd.
The notion that what the study cited above calls “physician-patient racial concordance” is important in outcomes is very problematic. The suggestion that there should be a medical apartheid system is counter to everything we as a profession believe, and it would undermine the foundation of our society. This is especially true when one considers that one explanation for health-care disparities may be a lack of trust. If a particular group tends to distrust the medical profession, those who belong to it are less likely to follow medical advice. Studies designed to demonstrate racism in the medical profession and people who push this narrative are doing their best to destroy faith in the profession.
Calhoun’s race-baiting will solve no problems. Indeed, by encouraging black people to mistrust white doctors and nurses, and by advocating pigmentation-based health care, Calhoun would cause harm — at times serious, perhaps even fatal — to the very people she claims to champion. To say she does not care, though, is wrong, because she does care. To modify Reagan: Her argument isn’t ignorant, it’s just full of things that aren’t so.