From The New Republic:
Tolerance for medical risk is mediated by a variety of factors, all of which entwine with systemic erasures and biases: Women’s health concerns are dismissed more and studied less; Black women have an exponentially greater risk of dying in childbirth and of having their self-reported health concerns ignored (even if they’re as powerful as, say, Serena Williams); implicit bias has been shown in studies to result in objectively worse care, with doctors spending less time with Black patients....Tech has been no help: The health care system’s turn to algorithms to determine allocation of care was assumed to be a neutral effort, but a 2019 study found that a widely used algorithm’s racial bias was so severe, correcting it would increase the proportion of Black patients prioritized for care from 17 percent to 46 percent. Algorithms that determine allocation of health services used patients’ history of health care costs. Unsurprisingly, a profit-focused health care system that sees patients as wallets rather than people misses quite a bit.
Risks are tolerated in other ways: Poverty increases risk of mental illness, chronic disease, and death and is correlated to lower life expectancy. “Cyclically, poverty leads to poor health and poor health leads to poverty,” Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, director of the University of California, San Francisco’s Center for Vulnerable Populations, observed in 2016. “If that cycle happens across generations, then you are talking about major, seemingly intractable effects on communities living in poverty.” Yet we don’t treat poverty as a public health crisis. Instead, the wealthy biohacker boys of Silicon Valley play with “young blood” to see if they can attain immortality. (Read more.)
Another medical controversy. From Wired:
Up until the 1980s, psychiatry in the United States was still a quasi-Freudian undertaking. If a child developed tics or obsessive-compulsive disorder, the thinking went, it must be because her parents were emotionally frigid or had punished her during toilet training. (Mothers were also blamed for a number of other conditions, including autism.) So when a pediatrician named Susan Swedo joined the National Institute of Mental Health in 1986, she was delighted to be part of a new vanguard. Her mentor there, Judith Rapoport, was challenging the prevailing theories and seeking a medical explanation for OCD.
A few old papers in the literature had piqued Rapoport’s interest. They concerned a childhood illness that causes tics in the face, hands, and feet. Patients jerk their limbs in a strange and uncontrollable dance; their tongues flicker; their fingers seem to hammer the keys of an invisible piano. Thomas Sydenham, the 17th-century English physician who first described the condition, called it Saint Vitus’ dance, after the dancing manias that emerged in continental Europe during the Black Death, when large groups of people, sometimes thousands at a time, would cavort in the streets until they collapsed from exhaustion. He attributed the cause to “some humor falling on the nerves.” (Read more.)
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